# The XR Guild® Principle Resources
These resources, including the official principles are sourced from and approved by XR Guild® members annually.
This work is offered openly to the professional community to help guide development for anyone who cares about learning from past mistakes and achieving best results for humanity (and also themselves).
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[The XR Guild® Principles](/principles)
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[What is Ethics? Why do we need Principles?](/readme)
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[Why the Metaverse Needs Ethics](/why-the-metaverse-needs-ethics)
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The XR Guild is a registered trademark of the XR Guild, Inc. A non-profit 501c3 membership organiation created to foster ethical development in XR/AR/Metaverse and Spatial Computing. All rights reserved.
# The XR Guild® Principles
Version 3.0, adopted Feb 4 2025
*WHEREAS we have seen multiple waves of technology \[ Artificial Intelligence (AI), eXtended Reality (XR), the Metaverse and Spatial Computing ] all proclaiming to be the future of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); and where well-researched ethical principles may help guide development of HCI for the benefit of consumers and makers alike, we, the domain experts, propose these core principles to help guide our field:*
## 1. Every Person Matters
HCI should be designed to work for everyone. That means it should be:
* **Accessible** — providing equitable access to everyone, regardless of physical or cognitive abilities; or social or economic challenges
* **Fair** — unbiased, non-discriminatory, non-exploitive, and has equal opportunity
* **Integrated** — representation across ability, age, gender, identity, race, religion, nationality
* Special attention should be given to inclusivity for disabled and at-risk individuals (e.g., cognitively impaired or developing minds)
* **Mutual respect** enables safer participation for everyone — the quietest voices are often the most important to hear
* The Guild and its members will neither discriminate nor retaliate against anyone on the basis of any jurisdictionally protected category
* **No person** should ever be left behind, sacrificed, scapegoated, or undermined in the pursuit of our goals
## **2. HCI should prioritize the well-being of humans & communities**
Reflecting the broader principles of human rights throughout their design and lifecycle. That means:
* Cognitive liberty is a human right to be free from external manipulation, and to decide for ourselves what to think and do
* Privacy is a necessary condition to protect our cognitive liberty
* Consumers should have ultimate control over their HCI interactions for their collective benefit
* All mainstream Hardware (HW) and Software (SW) should ultimately move towards being interoperable, open, and extensible for maximum consumer benefit
* Shared virtual spaces should be governed by community standards that are derived from the participants. Companies should support a diversity of such community standards.
* These standards should be made clear prior to someone joining a space; and before holding individuals accountable for their compliance
* Individuals have a right to present their identity as they decide. Notwithstanding, services may legitimately (if internally) verify a person’s full legal identity for purposes of accountability.
## **3. Design and Interaction patterns that trick, confuse or exploit should be exposed and redesigned for safety**
That means:
* interaction where the AI has inordinately more power and humans have far fewer defenses, and is therefore unethical.
* Presuming end-user "consent" based on coercive contracts of adhesion does not respect individual rights or safety. Long and confusing “Terms of Service” (TOS) or “End User Licence Agreements” (EULAs) are neither informed nor give our true consent.
* We must avoid and dismantle harmful interaction patterns affecting social development, including grooming, exploitation, harassment, and psychological addiction enabled by our products
* We should fight misinformation with better informed facts and reasoning, and avoid supporting systems that promote misinformation.
## 4. **People have the right to know and control how their personal information is collected and used.**
e.g., surveillance, sousveillance, egocentric, biometric data. That means:
* Companies, services and applications have an obligation to minimize personal data collection and to protect any collected information, subject to informed consent, authentication, authorization, and accounting
* This includes the right to inspect or revoke access at any time
* All uses of personal data, including by third parties, should be clearly documented and explained for all participants
* Still, we believe that some uses of this personal information and metadata are too complex for consumers to give their truly informed consent
* Given personal data about our identity or appearance, no one has the right to augment or impersonate anyone else without their consent
* Advertising is a form of speech with many protections. Some of us will opt-in to targeted, experiential and immersive ads. Some won’t. We should each be given a clear choice in the matter.
## 5. **We should support a thriving ecosystem of creatorship**
including artists, writers, designers, musicians, programmers, etc… That means:
* We must ensure creators have appropriate rights to how their work is reproduced, modified, or monetized across XR, AI, and spatial computing platforms.
* We recognize that today, everything is essentially a remix and that sufficient transformation of any creative work allows for its free and fair use by others.
* We should ideally move towards an open, transparent and sustainable system where new ideas, creations, and expressions are recorded, such that creators and improvers are eligible for compensation and/or credit for any added value.
* However, we should balance creator rights with the goal of all creations eventually becoming part of the Creative Commons, of mutual benefit to all, and so constrain intermediate owners (“IP landlords”) who may only monetize other people’s IP without necessarily adding value.
* The Guild will not solicit or accept any privileged or proprietary information
* We commit to disclosing when AI or external resources are used in our work.
* IP arising from work or ideas within the Guild will be made openly available.
* The Guild will not facilitate exclusive agreements among companies. We will advocate for broadly pro-consumer policies.
## 6. **We are responsible for our decisions, individually and collectively**
That means:
* We have a duty to help mitigate serious problems wherever possible
* We must make conscientious decisions about what will be best for consumers, including anticipating potential ethical dilemmas and addressing them proactively
* We should seek out and make best use of their feedback and aspirations
* Over time, we strive to empower more socially and individually beneficial and eliminate all harmful aspects of our collective work through empathy, curiosity and diligence
* We have a duty to alert authorities, companies, and the public of serious health issues, violations of law, privacy or other human or civil rights
* When we see opportunities to address inequities—whether geographic, economic, or cultural—we commit to taking meaningful action to close those gaps and foster a more inclusive future.
* We are responsible for any agents (entities acting on our behalf) that we may create or invoke.
* We commit to future-proofing our technologies, practices, and principles by anticipating and addressing emerging ethical challenges in XR, AI, and spatial computing.
* We commit to designing technologies that are resilient, adaptable, sustainable, and aligned with evolving user needs and societal expectations.
## 7. **We strive to share knowledge, foster dialogue and learning, and actively address serious challenges to create a more informed and responsible community**
That means
* We realize that not all employers, companies or co-workers will follow our ethical principles. Our job is to educate and patiently encourage change.
* We seek to support our members who espouse ethical principles inside their companies even when they are few in number.
* We will avoid publicly shaming companies for their practices, unless the facts are well-established in legal, governmental and/or public domains
* We will never ask our members to strike, quit or take direct action that puts any members in jeopardy
* We favor speaking with a unified voice, which we understand may require more patience and perseverance than direct action
***BE IT RESOLVED**: All XR Guild*® *members adhere to the above principles both in their professional work and in their interactions with others, including and among XR Guild*® *members and our agents (any entity acting on our behalf). To the extent that these principles ever come into conflict with each other, we will choose the path of greatest good while also minimizing harm.*
*We hereby adopt the W3C code of conduct:* [*https://www.w3.org/Consortium/cepc/*](https://www.w3.org/Consortium/cepc/) *and, to the extent possible, adhere to the W3C evolving accessibility guidelines:* [*https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/*](https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/)
The XR Guild is a registered trademark of the XR Guild, Inc. A non-profit 501c3 membership organiation created to foster ethical development in XR/AR/Metaverse and Spatial Computing. All rights reserved.
These Principles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, free to use for commercial purposes with attribution (e.g., you might wish to say "adhering to" or "adapted from" XR Guild® principles, and ideally a link back to this page).
# What is Ethics? Why do we need Principles?
It's worth asking: what is ethics?
Some people see **ethics** through the lens of **morality**, of *right* and *wrong* and perhaps include the ultimate reward or punishment. Some see ethics more concretely as **our duty to each other**, a social construct that we expect and expend on behalf of others. But the simplest definition is this:
***Ethics is the set of rules we adopt to get the most positive reuslts we intend and avoid the negative outcomes.***
If someone's goal is to *never harm others*, their ethical framework should include clear definitions of 'harm' and 'others" and the best approaches to avoid doing harm to others. If someone's goal is to be *trusted*, then their ethical framework should prohibit actions which cause distrust (e.g., always tell the truth, identify any conflicts of interest) and encourage ones that build trust.
But even sociopaths can choose to be ethical — if they understand that it's in their own best interests to build products that consumers love vs. hate and to help their customers instead of harming them.
The ethical principles for the USA are laid our in our **Declaration of Independence** and our **Constitution**. The **Statue of Liberty** lays out some of our common ethical principles, in poetic form, around how this country is built from refugees fleeing oppression elsewhere. The **Hippocratic Oath** for medicine lays out clear ethical principles to avoid harming people.
So ethics helps us form a set of rules or guidelines for how to proceed into the unknown future, only knowing for sure where we came from. We can consult our principles whenever something new occurs. We can imagine how our current rules can help resolve the novel question, or add new rules to adapt. But by thinking things through more carefully, we can be more confident of a steady course to the end results we hoped for. Is there any better way?
In the case of the **Metaverse** and the XR Guild's adopted principles, our goal is to benefit society with helpful technology, like AR, VR, and the Metaverse, and minimize harm. We know that technology is never neutral, because it's applied by people who have diverging ethics and agendas -- and even one critical omission due to expedience can be devastating to safety. But if we can coordinate and better stick to our common ethical principles, designed around the most beneficial uses and to help limit the bad ones, we will more likely achieve the best outcomes together.
The XR Guild is a registered trademark of the XR Guild, Inc. A non-profit 501c3 membership organiation created to foster ethical development in XR/AR/Metaverse and Spatial Computing. All rights reserved.
# Why the Metaverse Needs Ethics
There are many different ideas about what the **Metaverse** is or will someday become and even what we might call it. But there’s one thing all professionals in XR can agree on:
**We want to build things that customers love, that clearly help them and never harm them.**
The practical challenge is determining what that means. The easy path is to ignore deep questions, racing headlong into the unknown, break it, sometimes fix it, and then make excuses for our repeated and embarrassing failures. Like:
> “How could we know that kids would wind up using our headsets not designed for them?”
>
> “How could we know that our computer vision code doesn't work for minorities?”
>
> "How can we possibly know any novel problems before we launch a product?"
It turns out, the process of building the best products for customers is nearly identical to the process of building them to be most **Ethical, Responsible, and Trustworthy,** because these are all part of **what makes products good.** We can't find all problems up front, but we can always do better.
Enter the [XR Guild](https://www.xrguild.org/)®. We’re a collection of professionals in XR, Metaverse, and Spatial Computing who have been around the block a few hundred times. Our mission statement is simple:
> The **XR Guild** provides the **resources**, **organization**, **mentorship**, and a common set of **ethical principles** to professional members to help us all achieve **the most ethical outcomes** for our products and services — benefiting **consumers**, **companies**, and **makers** alike.
The **XR Guild**® includes *Designers, Developers, Artists, Researchers, PMs, Producers, Writers, Directors, Creatives, Lawyers, even CEO*s. Some of us have over 30 years in the field. The XR Guild is **not a labor union**, but we all agree to a common set of **ethical principles** up front. Like the skilled trade **Guilds** of the past, we can teach **professionals** to spend more time on **ethics** in their everyday product decisions and back each other up when bad decisions can be reversed up front.
The XR Guild is a registered trademark of the XR Guild, Inc. A non-profit 501c3 membership organiation created to foster ethical development in XR/AR/Metaverse and Spatial Computing. All rights reserved.
# Ethical, Responsible and Trustworthy
What's the difference in these concepts?
What does it mean to be **Ethical**, **Responsible** and/or **Trustworthy**? And aren’t those all really just the same thing anyway? Is Responsible AI also ethical and trustworthy?
Yes, and no.
Here’s an early take at a process that we’re learning how to explain and teach:
1. **Ethical.** State your values and your principles clearly up front. The goal is to be specific and comprehensive enough in your principles that when you later encounter the really hard-to-solve problems, your principles can serve as guides vs. roadblocks.
2. **Responsible**. Once you have your principles, will you stick to them? Or do you make arbitrary decisions based on expedience or fear? Responsibility is about owning up to our own choices and not passing the buck. Each mistake is a learning experience, that should make at most once.
3. **Trustworthy**. Even if we’re Ethical and Responsible, we still need to evaluate how it went. Being Trustworthy means taking the feedback, good and bad, and factoring that back into the process. Did we get some principles wrong? Hopefully not, but let’s be honest and fix them. Did we leave some people out of the solution? Let’s own up and address it. Trust comes from customers seeing us take **responsibility** for making the most **ethical** choices and sticking to it, even when it's hard. It’s their window into our process, in reverse.
These three steps, collectively **ERT**, form a repeatable cycle from early planning to development, go-to-market, and evaluation from the field, feeding back to next steps and improvements. The earlier in the cycle we get it right, the better the wheel spins. But reality always wins.
