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

TL;DR

The paper addresses how Extended Reality (XR) enables Personalized Reality (PR) that can create perceptual filter bubbles, potentially fragmenting social interaction. It argues for increasing awareness of one’s perspective and introducing mechanisms like engineered serendipity and self-actualization-oriented recommendations to mitigate these effects, with a focus on transferring these ideas to XR. Key contributions include a conceptual framing of PR-related filter bubbles, a survey of mitigation strategies from recommender system research (serendipity, RSSA, scrutable personalization), and concrete XR-era design guidelines and example applications. The work highlights the importance of responsible PR design to preserve shared ground while enhancing user agency, with implications for individual well-being and societal cohesion.

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.