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

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