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Enabled by advances in XR and AI, personalized services are increasingly affecting how individuals perceive, interact with, and navigate their realities. The resulting Personalized Realities (PR) may help people to interact more effectively with their surroundings, and allow more equitable access to information. However, PRs may also disconnect them from a collective understanding through isolated perceptions and perceptual filter bubbles. As democratic societies strive for social cohesion and shared knowledge and experiences, individual PRs may thus further add to existing social fragmentation. Yet, as PRs are framed as a concern that adapts experiences for a single user, they do not capture the full societal implications of a world where personalized mediation of reality is ubiquitous. In this paper, we therefore introduce the term Personalized Society (PSoc) to describe societies in which people predominantly access information and interact with others through a personalized mediation of reality. We discuss the duality of a PSoc, where personalization should be beneficial to the individual but at the same time connect people rather than isolate them. We identify key tensions arising in a PSoc and propose initial design considerations for fostering social cohesion alongside individual PRs, illustrating these through selected scenarios. Finally, we discuss the extent to which regulatory frameworks, such as the Digital Services Act, can be applied to protect individual and societal rights in a PSoc.

Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Luka Bekavac, Simon Mayer and Kenan Bektaş. 2026. Connecting Personalized Realities: Challenges and Opportunities in a Personalized Society. In Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Shaping Future Human Connection: Social Augmentation through XR Technologies, co-colocated with the ACM CHI 2026 Conference (SAXR ’26). 15 pages

Driven by advances in Extended Reality, Ubiquitous Computing, and AI, personalized services are increasingly interwoven into people’s everyday lives. Such Ubiquitous Personalization (UP) may enable more efficient interaction and equitable information access. However, the Personalized Realities (PR) such UP creates may also diminish shared experiences and isolate individuals in fragmented realities. Additionally, by potentially mediating people’s full reality, UP grants unprecedented control to system designers, enabling both beneficial and manipulative practices. In my dissertation, I thus investigate how responsible UP systems in single- and multiuser contexts may create beneficial PRs while mitigating harmful implications. Through mixed-methods research combining conceptual frameworks, technical prototypes, and controlled user studies, I systematically study responsible UP systems and provide concrete examples for their implementation. My research aims to provide theoretical and practical foundations enabling researchers and practitioners to design, evaluate, and deploy useful PR experiences that connect people’s realities instead of isolating them.

Jannis Strecker-Bischoff. 2026. Creating Personalized Realities That Connect People’s Perceptions of Reality. In Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26), April 13–17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3799183

Board games often involve strategic decision making and procedural planning tasks. Such tasks require learners to make decisions based on dynamically evolving game state and changing information that is situated in a physical environment. Recommender systems can filter available information and provide learners with personalized and actionable suggestions that simplify their decision making while playing board games. Such recommendations can further be spatially aligned with relevant physical elements through Mixed Reality (MR). We present an MR system called GLAMRec for an engine-building strategy board game. GLAMRec provides personalized, transparent recommendations by integrating user data, real-time game state tracking, and ontology-based reasoning during a complex board game, which we use as a proxy environment for procedural learning tasks. We interviewed six board game designers to improve the GLAMRec and conducted a within-subjects design user study (N=32) to investigate how personalized explanations affect explanation satisfaction, user experience, and trust. We found that personalized recommendations significantly improve explanation satisfaction and hedonic user experience without affecting trust ratings, recommendation compliance, and game performance. These findings suggest that personalization primarily shaped perception of enjoyment rather than measurable learning outcomes or trust.

Sandra Dojcinovic, Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Simon Mayer, and Kenan Bektaş. 2026. Personalized Recommendations in Mixed Reality Enhance Explanation Satisfaction and Hedonic User Experience in Board Game Learning. In 31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI ’26), March 23–26, 2026, Paphos, Cyprus. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3742413.3789129

@inproceedings{10.1145/3742413.3789129,
author = {Dojcinovic, Sandra and Strecker-Bischoff, Jannis and Mayer, Simon and Bekta\c{s}, Kenan},
title = {Personalized Recommendations in Mixed Reality Enhance Explanation Satisfaction and Hedonic User Experience in Board Game Learning},
year = {2026},
isbn = {9798400719844},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3742413.3789129},
doi = {10.1145/3742413.3789129},
abstract = {Board games often involve strategic decision making and procedural planning tasks. Such tasks require learners to make decisions based on dynamically evolving game state and changing information that is situated in a physical environment. Recommender systems can filter available information and provide learners with personalized and actionable suggestions that simplify their decision making while playing board games. Such recommendations can further be spatially aligned with relevant physical elements through Mixed Reality (MR). We present an MR system called GLAMRec for an engine-building strategy board game. GLAMRec provides personalized, transparent recommendations by integrating user data, real-time game state tracking, and ontology-based reasoning during a complex board game, which we use as a proxy environment for procedural learning tasks. We interviewed six board game designers to improve the GLAMRec and conducted a within-subjects design user study (N=32) to investigate how personalized explanations affect explanation satisfaction, user experience, and trust. We found that personalized recommendations significantly improve explanation satisfaction and hedonic user experience without affecting trust ratings, recommendation compliance, and game performance. These findings suggest that personalization primarily shaped perception of enjoyment rather than measurable learning outcomes or trust.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces},
pages = {1263–1282},
numpages = {20},
keywords = {personalized learning, immersive learning, decision-support systems, board games},
location = {
},
series = {IUI '26}
}