Workshop at IEEE ISMAR 2026 · Bari, Italy

DDXR: International Workshop on Deceptive Design in Extended Reality

Deceptive design patterns are already widespread on the web, on mobile, and across social media, but Extended Reality raises the stakes even higher. XR can alter perception, redirect physical movement, and shape choices in real time, all while drawing on rich sensing data about people and their surroundings. DDXR brings researchers, designers, policy experts, and industry together to chart how such harms can be identified, evaluated, prevented, and mitigated.

Co-located with IEEE ISMAR 2026 Bari, Italy · 5/6 October 2026 · half-day, in person

01 Abstract

Deceptive design, the practice of engineering interfaces and interactions that steer people toward choices serving someone else's interests, is well studied on the web, on mobile, and in e-commerce and social media. Extended Reality (XR), spanning augmented, mixed, and virtual reality, raises the stakes considerably: it can alter how people perceive their surroundings, redirect their physical movement through space, and shape their choices in real time, all while relying on rich sensing data about users' bodies, behaviors, environments, and even bystanders. Properties unique to XR, such as immersive perception, virtual barriers, spatial framing, and pervasive device sensing, can give rise to entirely new deceptive patterns or amplify familiar ones, including manipulated attention, spatial detours, disguised data collection, imbalanced choice architectures, and scenarios in which a user's own body or surroundings become part of the manipulation.

This problem is becoming more urgent as generative AI threatens to accelerate it: AI can reproduce, adapt, and scale manipulative design patterns during prototyping and content generation, and, when paired with XR's sensing capabilities, can personalize deceptive experiences to individual users based on their behavior, context, preferences, vulnerabilities, or physical surroundings. DDXR brings together researchers, practitioners, designers, policy experts, and industry stakeholders to examine how deceptive design manifests in XR, how it affects user autonomy, comfort, trust, safety, and privacy, and how the community can evaluate, detect, prevent, and mitigate such harms. As XR moves from lab prototypes toward consumer platforms, ISMAR, with its focus on human factors and perception in XR, is a fitting venue to discuss both the opportunities these systems create and the risks of their misuse. Together, we aim to build a shared research agenda for responsible XR and to translate emerging insights into design guidelines, detection strategies, and safeguards before deceptive patterns become normalized across XR ecosystems.

02 Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline: July 5, 2026 (Sun), AoE
Acceptance Notification: July 17, 2026 (Fri), AoE
Camera-Ready Deadline: July 31, 2026 (Fri), AoE
Workshop: 5/6 October 2026 · Bari, Italy

Read the call for participation → Submit your contribution →

03 Call for Participation

Deceptive design patterns, meaning interface and interaction techniques that steer people toward choices against their own interests, are widespread in web, mobile, e-commerce, and social media interfaces. Extended Reality introduces new risks because it can alter perception, manipulate physical movement, and shape user choices while relying on rich sensing data from users and their environments.

This workshop invites researchers, practitioners, designers, policy experts, and industry stakeholders to examine how deceptive design manifests in XR and how we can identify, evaluate, prevent, and mitigate such harms. DDXR addresses the critical challenge of how generative AI may accelerate deceptive XR design by reproducing manipulative patterns, generating persuasive content, and tailoring deceptive experiences to individual users, contexts, preferences, vulnerabilities, and physical surroundings.

The workshop combines short lightning talks, paper and demo presentations, and an interactive design session. We will bring together experts to build a shared research agenda for responsible XR before deceptive design patterns become normalized in XR ecosystems.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

deceptive design patterns in augmented, mixed, virtual, and extended reality;
manipulation of human perception within XR;
AI-generated or AI-personalized deceptive designs;
privacy, security, and safety in deceptive XR systems;
social deception and interpersonal manipulation in XR;
empirical methods for measuring the impact of deceptive XR designs;
factors affecting user susceptibility and resilience in deceptive XR;
detection tools, transparency mechanisms, and mitigation strategies;
ethical, legal, and regulatory perspectives on deceptive XR;
best practices for responsible XR design; and
demonstrations and prototypes of deceptive XR.

Submission Types

We welcome three types of contributions, formatted using the IEEE Computer Society VGTC template :

Research and position papers: 2–4 pages, excluding references;
Critical reflections and provocations: 2–4 pages, excluding references; and
Demos: up to 2 pages, excluding references, optionally including a short video.

Contributions are selected based on relevance to the workshop, originality, length, and potential to stimulate discussion. All submissions must be original work that is not under review by any other journal or conference, written in English, and will undergo a single-blind review process in which reviewers remain anonymous while authors disclose their names and affiliations.

Submit your contribution →

Please make sure to use the aforementioned template .

Publication and Attendance

Accepted contributions will be published in the ISMAR 2026 adjunct proceedings and archived on IEEE Xplore, and are therefore subject to ISMAR's registration and publication processing policy. At least one author of each accepted submission must register for and attend the workshop. Ahead of the workshop, accepted position papers, research statements, and demo descriptions will be shared on this website to support preparation and discussion.

04 Preliminary Schedule

The preliminary schedule below is subject to change based on the number of submissions and participants. All times are local to Bari, Italy.

09:00 – 09:20	Introduction and icebreaker: organizers introduce themselves, the workshop goals, and a short icebreaker activity.
09:20 – 10:30	Lightning talks: presentations of accepted papers, demo pitches, and hands-on exploration where possible.
10:30 – 11:00	Coffee break: coffee, informal exchange, and demo continuation.
11:00 – 11:05	Interactive session briefing: introduction of the group task, materials, and expected outcomes.
11:05 – 11:45	Interactive group work: small groups develop and exchange deceptive XR scenarios and countermeasures.
11:45 – 12:05	Group presentations: each group presents its scenarios, insights, and countermeasures.
12:05 – 12:25	Discussion: moderated discussion and synthesis of recurring, AI-accelerated deceptive design patterns.
12:25 – 12:30	Closing: summary of outcomes, next steps, post-workshop collaboration, and an invitation to contribute to a joint publication.