POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1645330
This article is part of the Research TopicUnlocking the potential of XR: Shaping a pro-social metaverseView all 4 articles
Shaping The Future: Principles for Policy Recommendations for Responsible Innovation in Virtual Worlds
Provisionally accepted
Alicia Cork1
Mike Richardson1*
Heide Karen Lukosch2
Mohamed Khamis3
Christopher Katins4Veronika Krauβ5Lauren Ruffin6Sarah Papazoglakis7Victoria Sanchez8
Xueni Pan9
Michael J Proulx1
Danae Stanton Fraser1- 1University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom
- 2University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
- 3University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom
- 4Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- 5Hochschule fur angewandte Wissenschaften Ansbach, Ansbach, Germany
- 6Arizona State University, Tempe, United States
- 7Independent Contributor, San Francisco, United States
- 8Women in Games, Online First, United States
- 9Goldsmiths University of London, London, United Kingdom
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Extended Reality (XR) technologies are beginning to enter the mainstream and have the potential to change the way humans interact with computers on a global scale. As with all powerful tools, XR not only has the potential for enormous good, but also brings in a new set of challenges for policy to guide its innovation and development. This paper draws on a wide range of expertise from academia, research and development, and industry to collectively provide guiding principles for XR policy. The authors began discussions and developed a framework at a workshop at ACM SIGCHI 2024 and the ideas presented here are the result of debate, discussion, refinement, and offer next steps for the development of pervasive XR. We present three main principles for XR policy: Trust, Agency, and Inclusivity, along with a cross-cutting theme of Future-Proofing. Each principle is broken down and we offer example implementations. This paper aims to build upon previous work and efforts for fair and equitable XR for all, and further dialogue towards tangible changes in policy to help guide responsible innovation in virtual worlds.
Keywords: Extended Reality, Principles for Policy, Policy recommendations, ImmersiveTechnology, virtual reality
Received: 11 Jun 2025; Accepted: 05 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cork, Richardson, Lukosch, Khamis, Katins, Krauβ, Ruffin, Papazoglakis, Sanchez, Pan, Proulx and Stanton Fraser. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mike Richardson, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom
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