Interdisciplinary Frameworks for Protecting Children in Immersive Digital Worlds

Elena Moreau

Interdisciplinary Frameworks for Protecting Children in Immersive Digital Worlds

Author(s)	Dr. Elena Moreau
Country	United States
Abstract	Immersive digital worlds are expanding the ways children learn, play, socialize, create, and communicate. Social virtual reality, extended-reality games, mixed-reality environments, avatar-based communities, spatial computing systems, and emerging metaverse-like platforms can provide meaningful opportunities for creativity, education, social connection, and collaborative participation. Their embodied and persistent characteristics, however, also create child-protection challenges that cannot be addressed adequately through conventional content moderation alone. Risks may involve harassment, grooming, age-inappropriate interaction, manipulative engagement, biometric and behavioral data collection, privacy loss, unsafe physical movement, harmful commercial practices, developmental mismatch, and difficulties obtaining timely assistance during immersive incidents. Current policy developments increasingly support safety-by-design, privacy-protective defaults, age-appropriate experiences, accessible reporting, risk assessment, and stronger governance for services used by minors. This study develops an interdisciplinary Child-Centered Immersive Protection Framework (CCIPF) integrating developmental psychology, human–computer interaction, cybersecurity, privacy engineering, content governance, age assurance, parental mediation, digital literacy, and children's rights. Because no original participant dataset was available, the study employs an explicitly simulation-based comparative methodology. Four hypothetical protection architectures are assessed across six dimensions: developmental appropriateness, safety-by-design, privacy and data minimization, age assurance, moderation and reporting, and child–parent empowerment. The simulated Composite Protection Score rises from 39 for fragmented reactive protection to 89 for the integrated child-centered framework. A weighted protective-capacity model further illustrates the complementary contribution of six safeguard domains. The study concludes that immersive child safety should be designed as a layered ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated controls. Effective protection requires upstream risk reduction, age-sensitive defaults, privacy-preserving safeguards, real-time intervention capabilities, accountable governance, meaningful parental support, and direct participation by children in the design and evaluation of immersive environments.
Keywords	immersive digital worlds, child online safety, virtual reality, extended reality, metaverse, safety-by-design, children's privacy, age assurance, digital safeguarding
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 2, Issue 6, November-December 2021
Published On	2021-11-17

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Interdisciplinary Frameworks for Protecting Children in Immersive Digital Worlds

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