Change Your Perspective, Widen Your Worldview! Societally Beneficial Perceptual Filter Bubbles in Personalized Reality

TL;DR

This paper discusses how XR technologies create personalized realities that can lead to perceptual filter bubbles, and proposes methods to increase awareness and promote diverse perspectives to mitigate societal polarization.

Contribution

It introduces strategies for applying awareness and serendipity in XR to counteract filter bubbles and enhance societal well-being.

Findings

Awareness of perspective can reduce filter bubble effects.

Engineered serendipity promotes exposure to diverse content.

Tools for transparency in XR can foster self-actualization.

Abstract

Extended Reality (XR) technologies enable the personalized mediation of an individual's perceivable reality across modalities, thereby creating a Personalized Reality (PR). While this may lead to individually beneficial effects in the form of more efficient, more fun, and safer experiences, it may also lead to perceptual filter bubbles since individuals are exposed predominantly or exclusively to content that is congruent with their existing beliefs and opinions. This undermining of a shared basis for interaction and discussion through constrained perceptual worldviews may impact society through increased polarization and other well-documented negative effects of filter bubbles. In this paper, we argue that this issue can be mitigated by increasing individuals' awareness of their current perspective and providing avenues for development, including through support for engineered serendipity and fostering of self-actualization that already show promise for traditional recommender systems. We discuss how these methods may be transferred to XR to yield valuable tools to give people transparency and agency over their perceptual worldviews in a responsible manner.