Deceived by Immersion: A Systematic Analysis of Deceptive Design in Extended Reality

TL;DR

This paper conducts a PRISMA-guided systematic review of deceptive design in extended reality (XR) to understand how immersion alters manipulation risks. Using thematic synthesis on 13 XR-focused studies, it identifies eight analytical themes that describe XR-specific deception definitions, amplification mechanisms, strategies, and risks, along with proposed prevention techniques. The authors show XR’s immersive, data-rich nature enables nuanced and persistent manipulation, including memory manipulation, reality distortion, and perception hacking, with privacy and security as central concerns. They offer actionable guidance for designers and policymakers, including transparency in data practices, user education, and auditing mechanisms, to mitigate harms as XR technologies scale. The work establishes a foundational framework for studying XR deception, highlighting urgent research directions around unintentional design, data governance, and ethics in XR-environment design and regulation.

Abstract

The well-established deceptive design literature has focused on conventional user interfaces. With the rise of extended reality (XR), understanding deceptive design's unique manifestations in this immersive domain is crucial. However, existing research lacks a full, cross-disciplinary analysis that analyzes how XR technologies enable new forms of deceptive design. Our study reviews the literature on deceptive design in XR environments. We use thematic synthesis to identify key themes. We found that XR's immersive capabilities and extensive data collection enable subtle and powerful manipulation strategies. We identified eight themes outlining these strategies and discussed existing countermeasures. Our findings show the unique risks of deceptive design in XR, highlighting implications for researchers, designers, and policymakers. We propose future research directions that explore unintentional deceptive design, data-driven manipulation solutions, user education, and the link between ethical design and policy regulations.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: This PRISMA flow diagram page2021prisma presents all the phases of our systematic analysis of the literature, from the identification of articles to the final articles we included.
• Figure 2: Example of our line-by-line coding process on a snippet from bonnail2022exploring. From left to right: the original snippet, and the respective thematic coding. The colour of the codes correspond to the respective themes in \ref{['tab:paper-themes']}.