Augmenting People, Places & Media: The Societal Harms Posed by Everyday Augmented Reality, and the Case for Perceptual Human Rights

O'Hagan, J., Gugenheimer, J., Bonner, J., Mathis, F. and McGill, M. (2023) Augmenting People, Places & Media: The Societal Harms Posed by Everyday Augmented Reality, and the Case for Perceptual Human Rights. In: 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2023), Vienna, Austria, 3-6 December 2023, pp. 219-229. ISBN 9798400709210 (doi: 10.1145/3626705.3627782)

Abstract

Everyday Augmented Reality (AR) displays, with wearable, fashionable, all-day form factors, may one day supplant our reliance on physical displays, heralding new capabilities in augmented intelligence and perception, communication, productivity, and more. Such technology has the potential to become as fundamental to our daily lives as smartphones are today, empowering users, communities, business, governments, and others to alter, augment, diminish or otherwise mediate our perception of reality. For social good, this technology can enable augmenting expression of social identity to better represent our ‘authentic’ self, and virtually enhancing real-world social spaces to encourage greater community ownership and social cohesion. For social harm however, everyday AR could facilitate and amplify manipulation, information disorder (e.g. dis-information), censorship and coercion in our day-to-day experience of reality. In this essay, we consider some of the key societal changes (and ethical challenges) posed by the adoption of everyday AR, and argue that everyday AR will provoke the need for new human rights to be considered alongside proposed neurorights and existing and envisaged digital human rights, around: who can mediate reality (perceptual autonomy); what elements of reality are permissible to alter/augment (perceptual agency); and governing permissible intent regarding why we augment the user’s perception of reality, in particular considering tensions in cognitive autonomy (e.g. manipulation) and perceptual integrity (e.g. information disorder).

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Keywords: Augmented reality, perceptual manipulation, human rights, manipulation, censorship, identity.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Bonner, Ms Jolie and O'Hagan, Mr Joseph and McGill, Dr Mark
• Authors: O'Hagan, J., Gugenheimer, J., Bonner, J., Mathis, F., and McGill, M.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISBN: 9798400709210
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2023), pp.219-229
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher

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