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
Multidisciplinary artist and maker operating at the intersection of health, wellbeing and embodied storytelling, using immersive technologies
Media theorist working across synthetic imaging techniques, known for his groundbreaking video essays
- Plenary panel on Open XR: Beyond Platform Economies
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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 using this form
Submission deadline: 1 September 2026
Notifications of acceptance: 1 October 2026
Should you have any questions, please email Joanna Zylinska: joanna.zylinska@kcl.ac.uk
The conference is supported with funding from the AHRC Curiosity Grant. There will be no conference fee for speakers and attendees.