Safety and Privacy in Immersive Extended Reality: An Analysis and Policy Recommendations

Abstract

Extended reality (XR) technologies have experienced cycles of development - “summers” and “winters” - for decades, but their overall trajectory is one of increasing uptake. In recent years, immersive extended reality (IXR) applications, a kind of XR that encompasses immersive virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) environments, have become especially prevalent. The European Union (EU) is exploring regulating this type of technology, and this article seeks to support this endeavor. It outlines safety and privacy harms associated with IXR, analyzes to what extent the existing EU framework for digital governance - including the General Data Protection Regulation, relevant product safety legislation, ePrivacy Directive, Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, and AI Act - addresses these harms, and offers some recommendations to EU legislators on how to fill regulatory gaps and improve current approaches to the governance of IXR.

Keywords: Digital ethics, extended reality, virtual reality, metaverse, governance, EU law