Personalized Reality: Challenges of Responsible Ubiquitous Personalization

The expanding capabilities of Mixed Reality and Ubiquitous Computing technologies enable personalization to be increasingly integrated with physical reality in all areas of people's lives. While such ubiquitous personalization promises more inclusive, efficient, pleasurable, and safer everyday interaction, it may also entail serious societal consequences such as isolated perceptions of reality or a loss of control and agency. We present this paper to initiate a discussion towards the responsible creation of ubiquitous personalization experiences that mitigate these harmful implications while retaining the benefits of personalization. To this end, we present the concept of Personalized Reality (PR) to describe a perceived reality that has been adapted in response to personal user data. We provide avenues for future work, and list open questions and challenges towards the creation of responsible PR experiences.