Project overview

This project investigates why XR-augmented accessibility products such as VIKA Books’ humanised British Sign Language (BSL) book are not reaching mainstream UK adoption. The humanised book brings a human BSL signer to life on the printed page through smartphone XR, and is published in three editions for different ages and developmental stages.

Drawing on our prior TIPS-framework work (Vasudevan et al., 2025), we examine how Trust forms across the adoption network as a chain of gatekeeping judgements involving parents, Deaf community members, teachers, and children themselves, while distinguishing trust-based barriers from product efficacy and wider market factors, using Greenwich's XR-AI Behavioural Lab.

Objectives and deliverables

TIPSS challenge:

The project addresses Trust as the primary TIPSS dimension, with Safety as the directly relevant secondary dimension. Trust is primary because adoption of children's XR-BSL products depends on a chain of gatekeeping trust judgements: parents assessing safety and appropriateness for their child, Deaf community members assessing cultural credibility of BSL representation, teachers and schools assessing pedagogical and safeguarding requirements, and children themselves assessing whether they trust the experience enough to engage (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). Each gatekeeper's trust judgement is a precondition for adoption; failure at any point in the chain limits uptake. Efficacy and market factors also shape adoption, but they operate through trust rather than around it (Gefen et al., 2003) – a proposition this project examines rather than assumes, allowing for market factors such as price, awareness to act directly on adoption. A pedagogically effective book still fails if the Deaf community does not trust its BSL representation. Trust can be viewed as a mediating variable (Dias and Brito, 2020) through which efficacy and market factors affect adoption.

VIKA Books’ humanised BSL book augments the printed page through a phone camera and collects no user data, so Identity and Privacy are architecturally absent from the trust architecture defined in our prior work (Vasudevan et al., 2025). What remains operative is the Trust–Safety relationship: adoption decisions for XR products aimed at children turn on safety-related trust judgements (screentime, age-appropriateness, attention and reading effects, developmental considerations). The project extends the TIPS framework from organisational metaverse adoption to consumer and educational adoption, and tests how that framework behaves when Identity and Privacy are removed.

Widening participation and co-learning:

Because the book is read by a child and an adult together, adoption is shaped by a parent–child co-learning dyad. The study widens participation across both deaf and hearing communities and tests for variations in how different participants perceive the book and the experience (deaf versus hearing; child versus adult; across the three age editions). This is grounded in sociocultural accounts of family learning, in which learning is social, distributed and frequently bidirectional, and in which parents act as collaborators, brokers, guides and co-learners through joint media engagement (Barron et al., 2009; Barron et al., 2021).

Perceiving the book, generating trust and increasing engagement are interconnected. How the parent–child dyad perceives the book - its value, age-appropriateness and whether it is felt to be safe and secure — is co-constructed through shared, bidirectional engagement (Barron et al., 2021). Perception is the proximal determinant of trust; trust is the gateway to engagement; and Trust and Safety remain interconnected throughout (Vasudevan et al., 2025). This matters most for the hearing community, where BSL is unfamiliar and engagement is lowest: we ask how hearing families come to perceive, trust and then engage with the book, and which determinants - perceived security and data handling, screentime and age-appropriateness, pedagogical credibility, and the co-learning experience itself - put that trust in place.

Objectives:

• Map the trust architecture across the adoption network: parents, children, teachers, librarians, and deaf-community representatives.

• Identify barriers and enablers to mainstream adoption at each node, with attention to safety concerns about XR for children.

• Examine parent–child co-learning, comparing how deaf and hearing families (and children versus parents) perceive and use the experience across the three age editions.

• Trace the chain from perception to trust to engagement: identify the determinants of trust (including whether the product is perceived as safe and secure) and test how they operate to increase engagement of the hearing community in particular.

• Observe trust formation and engagement under controlled conditions in the XR-AI Behavioural Lab.

• Distinguish trust-based adoption barriers from product efficacy factors (pedagogical effectiveness, BSL representation quality, usability) through a targeted focus group with target families and Deaf community members, integrated into the lab phase. Distinguish trust-based barriers from wider market factors through a brief structural analysis of the UK BSL education context (competitor products, distribution channels, pricing, BSL Act 2022 implementation, SEND provision, and school procurement dynamics). Map the mediating relationships identifying where trust translates other factors into adoption outcomes.

• Generate an evidence base for VIKA Books on adoption strategy, with broader sector implications.

Deliverables:

• A research report for VIKA Books with adoption recommendations.

• An open-access academic paper on the trust architecture and its TIPSS application.

• A policy-facing brief aligned with the BSL Act 2022 and DfE guidance, addressing widening participation across deaf and hearing communities.

• A dissemination workshop at Greenwich’s XR-AI Behavioural Lab.

References list:

Barron, B., 2009. Parents as learning partners in the development of technological fluency.

Barron, B., Martin, C.K., Lin, V., Lam, C.K., Pozos, R.K., Ngyuen, J., Garcia, S. and Levy, Z., 2021. New views, new roles: How parents supported learning during the transition to remote learning. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2021.. International Society of the Learning Sciences.

Dias, P., & Brito, R. (2020). How families with young children are solving the dilemma between privacy and protection by building trust-A portrait from Portugal. Journal of Children and Media, 14(1), 56-73.

Gefen, D., Karahanna, E., & Straub, D. W. (2003). Trust and tam in online shopping: An integrated model1. MIS quarterly, 27(1), 51-90.

Livingstone, S. M., & Blum-Ross, A. (2020). Parenting for a digital future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children's lives. Oxford University Press.

Vasudevan, S., Piazza, A., Rajendran, L. and Duraivel, S., 2025. Mapping the metaverse minefield: a TIPS framework for security-conscious business adoption. Computers & Security, p.104710.