Where do we stand on Ethics, Privacy, and Security for Scenarios of Remote Collaboration supported by eXtended Reality?

Scenarios of remote collaboration using eXtended Reality (XR) have seen significant growth in recent years, allowing distributed team members to overlay digital information into the physical world, making it an ideal platform for certain activities. As more organizations look for XR to maintain productivity and efficiency while collaborating remotely, aspects like ethics, privacy, and security, which have not been explored in detail, become paramount. In this paper, the state of these topics is described and discussed. This is important given that the success of XR-remote collaboration depends on collaborators’ trust in the technology, which must be developed and used in a way that protects user privacy and security while complying with regulations and mitigating risks. Therefore, ethics, privacy, and security play an important role in building and maintaining confidence. With this, we hope to mobilize the community to start questioning their works in search for how these matters impact and should inform their research.

1 Introduction

With the increasing complexity that some individuals face when confronted with multidisciplinary problems, there is an urge for reaching out to off-site expertise as a means to overcome constraints that cannot be mastered otherwise. These are usually defined as scenarios of remote collaboration, in which an on-site team member shares the context of a given problem with a remote expert to establish a common ground in need of understanding the problem at hand and generating a proper resolution [12], [13], [20]. To help address the limitations of such scenarios, in particular, the fact that remote team members do not share the same common space, technologies using eXtended Reality (xR) have been explored in multiple areas of application [22], [23], [32]. Such solutions serve as a basis for situation mapping, superimposing digital content on top of the real-world environment [9], [20], [21], e.g., situated instructions [24], [25].