[Commlist] CFP - Multisensory XR: From ‘Tech for Good’ to Ethical Immersive Experience

*Call for Papers*

**

*Multisensory XR:*

*From ‘Tech for Good’ to Ethical Immersive Experience*

**

*An international interdisciplinary conference*

*6-7 January 2027*

*Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception*

*King’s College London, London, UK*

**

**

*KEYNOTES*

**

·*Sarah Ticho <https://hatsumi.co.uk/about>*

Multidisciplinary artist and maker operating at the intersection of 
health, wellbeing and embodied storytelling, using immersive technologies

·*Alan Warburton <https://alanwarburton.co.uk/>*

Media theorist working across synthetic imaging techniques, known for 
his groundbreaking video essays

**

·*Plenary panel on Open XR: Beyond Platform Economies*

**

***

AI now dominates public and scholarly attention, overshadowing many 
other areas of technology. Yet there have been some prominent recent 
developments around Extended Reality (XR) – a blurring of actual and 
virtual worlds encompassing Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed 
Reality – that deserve equal scrutiny. Often supported by AI, XR is 
transforming the way we interact with digital and physical spaces. Our 
conference will explore the growing importance of this technology. Its 
primary aim is to gather scholars and practitioners working on and with 
XR to jointly establish *an interdisciplinary research field of 
Multisensory XR*, with a focus on critical enquiry into its *social, 
cultural and ethical dimensions*. Current XR designs are often driven by 
industry ambitions for total immersion, seeking to captivate users so 
that they ‘never want to leave’. This approach remains overly focused on 
commercial needs at the expense of social and personal gains. It also 
exhibits ocular-centric bias, overlooking the multiple ways people 
experience the world while restricting access for diverse groups. With 
this, we propose an approach to XR that *places ‘the non-average’ user 
at the very centre of all design and practice *(Alexander 2025)*/./*

**

We also want to move beyond the language of ‘Tech for Good’. That phrase 
can imply that the ethical value of a technology is self-evident, or 
that technical innovation will resolve complex social problems. Drawing 
on the framework of minimal ethics (Zylinska 2009, 2014), we approach 
responsibility as something that must be worked out in specific 
situations. Rather than assuming that more immersive technology is 
inherently better, we ask what makes an XR experience worth having, for 
whom and under what conditions. Here ethics connects with wider 
socio-political issues, leading to the creation of not just better 
technology but also more responsible sociotechnical imaginaries (Preece 
et al., 2022). Challenging the colonising idea of VR/XR as an ‘empathy 
machine’ (Nakamura 2020), we position XR beyond simplistic 
techno-solutionism.

*We invite 20-minute papers and project-led presentations *from across 
the arts, humanities, social sciences, design, creative practice, health 
sciences, computing and industry research.**Submissions may address 
artistic work, design processes, social and cultural analysis, 
education, healthcare, accessibility, platform politics or emerging 
forms of multisensory interaction. We are particularly interested in 
work that challenges ocularcentrism, questions established ideas of 
immersion or proposes alternatives to proprietary platform models. The 
key goal of the conference is to explore XR that not only /works/ but 
that /works for diverse users and in different configurations of sensory 
experience/. In other words, we want to showcase XR that not only 
succeeds technically and artistically but also delivers ethical and 
social value.

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

  * Multisensory XR experiences that may include, but also move beyond,
    screen-based and headset-led models of immersion.
  * The design and evaluation of XR applications involving haptics,
    spatial sound, smell or taste.
  * Critical approaches to ocularcentrism and the visual bias built into
    immersive technologies.
  * Accessibility in XR, especially work that begins with the needs of
    users who fall outside the dominant assumptions about age,
    embodiment or sensory perception.
  * Disability-led perspectives on immersive technology, including the
    productive role of friction, adaptation and non-standard use.
  * Ethical frameworks for assessing what makes an immersive experience
    worthwhile, rather than merely effective or engaging.
  * The effects of XR on attention, body image and mental wellbeing,
    including sensory overload, dissociation and forms of cognitive 
capture.
  * Critical examinations of immersion and the industry ambition to keep
    users inside an experience for as long as possible.
  * XR beyond the ‘empathy machine’: critiques of simulation as a
    substitute for political understanding or social responsibility.
  * Open XR infrastructures and alternatives to platform dependency,
    proprietary ecosystems and extractive business models.
  * The use of multisensory XR in creative practice, cultural heritage,
    education or healthcare.
  * Speculative design and other practice-based methods for developing
    more responsible XR futures.

Please submit an abstract, bio and any relevant technical requirements 
using this form <https://forms.office.com/e/UxhQi6LfJ8>

Submission deadline: 1 September 2026

Notifications of acceptance: 1 October 2026

Should you have any questions, please email Joanna Zylinska: 
(joanna.zylinska /at/ kcl.ac.uk) <mailto:(joanna.zylinska /at/ kcl.ac.uk)>

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