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Viktorija Paneva, Verena Winterhalter, Naga Sai Surya Vamsy Malladi, Evgeniia Maltseva, Marvin Strauss, Stefan Schneegass, Florian Alt
Designing Privacy Interfaces for Informed Consent in Virtual Reality: Challenges and Design Implications
In Proceedings of the Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference (NordiCHI '26). October 5, 2026. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. (bib)

Virtual Reality (VR) headsets rely on arrays of sensors that continuously collect fine-grained user and contextual data, which is often undisclosed or poorly explained in privacy policies. We investigate how VR's spatial and embodied affordances can support data collection awareness and control through interactive privacy interfaces. Using a mixed-methods, design-led approach, combining participatory design sessions, expert feedback, and an exploratory user evaluation, we generate and refine a set of VR privacy interface concepts, identify key design tensions, and derive design implications highlighting privacy-preserving defaults, granular and revisable consent options, continuous feedback, and thoughtful gamification. We operationalize these implications in a high-fidelity VR prototype (the Sticker Book) and explore how users experience granular control options, contextual permission prompts, and ambient indicators during interaction. Our findings show how these mechanisms work together when embedded in a functional VR application, revealing practical trade-offs between transparency, user control, and presence, and providing practical guidance for designing for informed consent in sensor-rich immersive environments.