Project overview

Immersive virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used to support the mental health and wellbeing of people experiencing trauma symptoms, yet multi-user VR spaces carry distinct safety risks — particularly for vulnerable users such as women with PTSD symptoms originating from gendered violence.

Led by Boglarka Meggyesfalvi at the University of East London (UEL), in partnership with Empress Immersive LTD, this project will explore how developers can design safer multi-user immersive environments. Through focus groups with VR developers and experts, and a review of existing safety guidance and protocols, the project team will co-produce a proof-of-concept scoping the risks, barriers and opportunities for creating safer multi-user immersive spaces.

Objectives and deliverables

This project sits at the heart of the SPRITE+ XR-TIPSS agenda, directly addressing challenges around Trust, Identity, Privacy, Safety and Security (TIPSS) in multi-user immersive environments. It strongly aligns with the themes of

• Digital Vulnerabilities: examining how susceptibility to harm should be understood, identified and mitigated in social VR spaces for women experiencing trauma symptoms.

• Digital Technologies, Power and Control: foregrounding marginalised voices in the design of emerging immersive technologies and addressing the risk that VR environments may reproduce or deepen existing harms against women and girls.

Multi-user immersive environments are rapidly developing, yet developers — particularly those working with vulnerable audiences — still lack clear and consolidated guidance on how to design, moderate and respond to harm in these spaces. The result is often either inaction, where developers avoid or scale back multiplayer features because of concerns around safety and liability, or unsafe deployment that risks exposing already vulnerable users to further harm.

Key barriers to safe adoption include: design for inclusive experiences (GolfPapez et al., 2026), the absence of consolidated, developer-facing safety guidance; unresolved identity/anonymity (WEC, 2024) and safeguarding tradeoffs; gaps in moderation, reporting and incident-response practice (Davidson et al., 2024); and liability concerns that lead developers either to avoid multi-user features altogether or to deploy them unsafely. The opportunity — anonymity, social presence and accessibility for people who face barriers to face-to-face services — is significant, but only if safety is designed in from the start.

This project provides the proof of concept for how that can be done.

This research project will include:

• A rapid evidence and landscape review, addressing whether and how multi-user VR is used in therapeutic and support contexts, and mapping the regulatory landscape, platform protocols and existing safety, identity-verification and reporting tools against the specific risks faced by vulnerable female users in social VR.

• Developing a proof-of-concept. Working with industry stakeholders and victim support specialists testing new ideas — a prototype safety-by-design framework for multi-user immersive spaces for vulnerable women — through a new collaboration between an academic and a non-academic partner, and generating the evidence needed to scale it.

• A dissemination and knowledge exchange phase in which partners will disseminate the findings openly via Empress Immersive LTD, UEL channels, partner networks and SPRITE+ community routes to build trust in immersive technology and reduce harm to vulnerable female users at scale.

The project has three main research questions/themes:

• Are multi-user VR spaces currently used in therapeutic or support based contexts, and what are the key risks, barriers and opportunities of this approach for vulnerable female users, including those with PTSD symptoms?

• What concerns and knowledge gaps do VR/XR developers report when designing multi-user spaces inclusive of vulnerable female users?

• What should a practical, developer-facing safety-by-design framework contain to bridge developer practice, regulation and user safety needs?

Methods:

A mixed-methods qualitative design combines a rapid evidence and landscape review with two online focus groups with VR developers, safety specialists, and victim support professionals. It will be analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and triangulated across the two sources.

Outputs:

• A short rapid evidence and landscape review of relevant regulation, platform protocols and existing safety/identity tools.

• Two industry blog posts on Empress Immersive LTD and UEL channels.

• A public project summary for the SPRITE+ webpage.

• An in-person launch and knowledge exchange event with XR developers and designers, victim-support specialists and policy stakeholders, showcasing the proof of concept.

• A project closure report capturing findings, lessons and recommended next steps for SPRITE+ and the wider TIPSS community.

• A presentation at the SPRITE+ annual online showcase, sharing findings with the wider TIPSS community.

An academic output drawing on the findings remains a longer-term ambition, to be delivered within a future, follow-on phase.