Safe and Secure Virtual Spaces – Protecting Users in Social and Immersive Extended Reality

Extended reality (XR) is evolving from isolated experiences into persistent, social virtual spaces where people meet, work, learn, and play. As these environments grow more immersive and populated, ensuring that they are safe and secure for everyone becomes a central challenge. Social XR introduces risks with no clear analogue in earlier media: real-time embodied harassment, uneven access and representation, and the pervasive capture of behavioural and spatial data that can identify users and infer sensitive traits. Building safe and secure virtual spaces therefore requires bringing together diverse perspectives from interaction design and content moderation to security, privacy, ethics, and law, ensuring ethical foresight keep pace with the rapid technological development.This Research Topic aims to advance the design of safe and secure virtual spaces and to establish principled, human-centered foundations for immersive environments that people can inhabit safely. It invites work on protecting users from harassment and abuse in social XR, on fostering inclusivity and equitable access across ages, abilities, cultures, and identities, on safeguarding user safety and personal boundaries, and on preserving privacy in the face of pervasive behavioural and spatial sensing. We are equally interested in the technical dimension – moderation, authentication, data governance, and resistance to manipulation – and in the ethical, legal, and social dimension, including consent, accountability, and the protection of vulnerable users. Many of these themes were the focus of discussions at the VR Summit 2026 (VRS’26) in Bochum, and this collection extends that conversation.The Topic collects insights that enable safe, secure, and ethically grounded participation in extended reality and immersive virtual worlds. The following topics will be discussed:- Ethical frameworks for XR design and governance (e.g., Value-Sensitive Design, Responsible Research and Innovation) to preserve moral agency and user autonomy - Harassment, abuse, and toxic behaviour in social XR, and mechanisms for personal boundaries, consent, and safe zones- Inclusivity, accessibility, and equitable representation across ages, abilities, cultures, and identities- User safety and wellbeing, including protection of minors and safeguards against psychological harm- Privacy in immersive environments, including bystander privacy - Biosignal fingerprinting (the identification of users from motion, gaze, and other behavioural signals)- Content moderation and governance in real-time immersive settings- Avatar identity, authentication, and resistance to impersonation- Manipulation, dark patterns, and coercive design in virtual worlds- Trust, transparency, and accountability in shared virtual spacesThe proposed Research Topic accepts all types of manuscripts, embracing a list of research areas not limited to the ones listed above. Topic editors: Artur Pilacinski, Michael Wiesing, Xinyun Che Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83952/safe-and-secure-virtual-spaces---protecting-users-in-social-and-immersive-extended-reality