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Personalization of online realities is today ubiquitous to support decision making or reduce information overload. Recently, through the expanding capabilities and pervasiveness of Mixed Reality and Ubiquitous Computing technologies, we observe increasing personalization also of physical reality. This might yield more convenient, efficient and inclusive everyday interactions. However, it may readily lead to serious societal consequences such as the loss of shared worlds and the emergence of perceptual filter bubbles. To mitigate such harms while retaining the benefits of personalization, it is important to understand how ubiquitous personalization systems may operate responsibly. Responding to this need, we propose a conceptual model that overcomes the limitations of established personalization models and expands their applicable scope to physical, virtual, and hybrid environments. We validated our model in relation to existing literature and show how it provides a conceptual foundation for the analysis and study of responsible personalization systems that create individually and societally beneficial Personalized Realities.

Jannis Strecker, Simon Mayer, and Kenan Bektaş. 2025. Towards Societally Beneficial Personalized Realities: A Conceptual Foundation for Responsible Ubiquitous Personalization Systems. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25), July 5–9, 2025, Funchal, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735709

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.

Jannis Strecker, Luka Bekavac, Kenan Bektaş, and Simon Mayer. 2025. Change Your Perspective, Widen Your Worldview! Societally Beneficial Perceptual Filter Bubbles in Personalized Reality. In Proceedings of Purposeful XR: Affordances, Challenges, and Speculations for an Ethical Future at CHI 2025 (Purposeful XR ’25). 6 pages. https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/122376

Inspired by the concepts of diminishing reality and ad-blocking in browsers, this study investigates the perceived benefits and concerns of blocking physical, real-world content, particularly ads, through Extended Reality (XR). To understand how users perceive this concept, we first conducted a user study (N=18) with an ad-blocking prototype to gather initial insights. The results revealed a mixed willingness to adopt XR blockers, with participants appreciating aspects such as customizability, convenience, and privacy. Expected benefits included enhanced focus and reduced stress, while concerns centered on missing important information and increased feelings of isolation. Hence, we investigated the user acceptance of different ad-blocking visualizations through a follow-up online survey (N=120), comparing six concepts based on related work. The results indicated that the XR ad-blocker visualizations play a significant role in how and for what kinds of advertisements such a concept might be used, paving the path for future feedback-driven prototyping.

Christopher Katins, Jannis Strecker, Jan Hinrichs, Pascal Knierim, Bastian Pfleging, and Thomas Kosch. 2025. Ad-Blocked Reality: Evaluating User Perceptions of Content Blocking Concepts Using Extended Reality. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25), April 26–May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713230

@inproceedings{10.1145/3706598.3713230,
author = {Katins, Christopher and Strecker, Jannis and Hinrichs, Jan and Knierim, Pascal and Pfleging, Bastian and Kosch, Thomas},
title = {Ad-Blocked Reality: Evaluating User Perceptions of Content Blocking Concepts Using Extended Reality},
year = {2025},
isbn = {9798400713941},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713230},
doi = {10.1145/3706598.3713230},
abstract = {Inspired by the concepts of diminishing reality and ad-blocking in browsers, this study investigates the perceived benefits and concerns of blocking physical, real-world content, particularly ads, through Extended Reality (XR). To understand how users perceive this concept, we first conducted a user study (N = 18) with an ad-blocking prototype to gather initial insights. The results revealed a mixed willingness to adopt XR blockers, with participants appreciating aspects such as customizability, convenience, and privacy. Expected benefits included enhanced focus and reduced stress, while concerns centered on missing important information and increased feelings of isolation. Hence, we investigated the user acceptance of different ad-blocking visualizations through a follow-up online survey (N = 120), comparing six concepts based on related work. The results indicated that the XR ad-blocker visualizations play a significant role in how and for what kinds of advertisements such a concept might be used, paving the path for future feedback-driven prototyping.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {626},
numpages = {18},
keywords = {Extended Reality, Content Curation, Visualization, Physical Ad Blocker},
location = {Yokhama, Japan},
series = {CHI '25}
}