Rethinking Privacy Indicators in Extended Reality: Multimodal Design for Situationally Impaired Bystanders

TL;DR

This paper investigates privacy indicator designs for XR devices, emphasizing multimodal, adaptable cues to improve privacy awareness among situationally impaired bystanders who may overlook traditional visual signals.

Contribution

It introduces novel multimodal privacy indicators tailored for XR devices and demonstrates their effectiveness over traditional visual cues in privacy-sensitive scenarios.

Findings

Multimodal indicators are preferred in privacy-sensitive situations.

Visual-only indicators received low usefulness ratings.

Adaptive, multimodal designs better support bystander privacy.

Abstract

As Extended Reality (XR) devices become increasingly prevalent in everyday settings, they raise significant privacy concerns for bystanders: individuals in the vicinity of an XR device during its use, whom the device sensors may accidentally capture. Current privacy indicators, such as small LEDs, often presume that bystanders are attentive enough to interpret the privacy signals. However, these cues can be easily overlooked when bystanders are distracted or have limited vision. We define such individuals as situationally impaired bystanders. This study explores XR privacy indicator designs that are effective for situationally impaired bystanders. A focus group with eight participants was conducted to design five novel privacy indicators. We evaluated these designs through a user study with seven additional participants. Our results show that visual-only indicators, typical in commercial XR devices, received low ratings for perceived usefulness in impairment scenarios. In contrast, multimodal indicators were preferred in privacy-sensitive scenarios with situationally impaired bystanders. Ultimately, our results highlight the need to move toward adaptable, multimodal, and situationally aware designs that effectively support bystander privacy in everyday XR environments.