While Extended Reality (XR) technologies offer potential for supporting autistic children through sensory-tailored environments, the extent to which XR design can constructively addresses the heterogeneity of autistic experiences and promotes inclusivity for this intersectionally marginalized population remains underexplored. This literature review systematically analyzes 15 years of empirical research (n = 73) to identify research trends, gaps, and opportunities for designing XR tools for autistic children. By examining the evolution of technical affordances and design rationales of XR applications for autistic children, we map the shift from traditional interventionalist goals toward a prioritization of children’s sensory comfort, strengths and agency. Our findings identify participatory design as a dominant methodology and highlight personalization, collaborative interaction, and sensory-friendliness as key elements to create meaningful XR experiences. However, a critical gap remains in the representation of varied autistic profiles and voices. We conclude by discussing design implications that move beyond symptom reduction, advocating for neurodiversity-affirming XR designs that prioritize autonomy and long-term well-being of this heterogeneous population.

Civic technologies such as participatory budgeting and crowdsourced policymaking increasingly provide spaces for crowdsourced deliberation, an asynchronous, distributed, and self-selected form of deliberation. To understand the dynamics of crowdsourced deliberation, we examined deliberative quality, dis/agreement, and elaboration (rationale-sharing), and their association with idea generation in crowdsourced deliberation within a crowdsourced policymaking process led by a national government. The deliberative quality of the crowdsourced deliberation was high and positively associated with idea generation. Elaboration of perspectives was a key feature contributing to idea generation. We present considerations for the design of processes and platforms used in civic technologies to foster high deliberative quality, elaboration, and a balance of disagreement and agreement, which in turn can support idea generation in crowdsourced deliberation.

Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR), or 360° video, engages users in immersive viewing experiences. However, as users watch one part of the 360° view, they will necessarily miss out on events happening in other parts of the sphere. Consequently, fear of missing out (FOMO) is unavoidable. However, users can also experience the joy of missing out (JOMO). In a repeated measures, mixed methods design, we examined the fear and joy of missing out (FOMO and JOMO) and sense of presence in two repeat viewings of a 360° film using a head-mounted display. We found that users experienced both FOMO and JOMO. FOMO was caused by the users’ awareness of parallel events in the spherical view, but users also experienced JOMO. FOMO did not compromise viewers’ sense of presence, and FOMO also decreased in the second viewing session, while JOMO remained constant. The findings suggest that FOMO and JOMO can be two integral qualities in an immersive video viewing experience and that FOMO may not be as negative a factor as previously thought.

This paper examines the effects of participants' preferred point of view of two protagonists, and their motivation for this preference, on two viewings of a cinematic 360-degree video filmed from the first person perspective. Before watching the film, which dramatized gender bias in a STEM workplace, participants were asked to state whether they preferred to view the film from the point of view (POV) of a male protagonist, a female protagonist, or make no selection. They were then asked why they held this preference. Their answers were predictive. Participants' tracked head movements, and the events participants recalled from the film, differed according to their pre-stated preference and motivation.

This paper examines the sense of presence, attitude change, perspective-taking, and usability of a split-sphere, first-person perspective 360 degree video about gender inequality, in which people can choose to watch the narrative from the male or female character's perspective. Sixty-seven participants were randomly assigned to watch (1) the video in 360 degree split-view in a head-mounted display, (2) the same film as 180 degree in a HMD, or (3) a flat control version of the video on a laptop. The 360 degree split-sphere increased the viewers' feeling of personal responsibility for resolving gender inequality, desire to rewatch the video, fear of missing out, and feeling of missing the full story. The 180 degree video created the strongest sense of presence, embodiment, and understanding of the character. However, people with greater egocentric projection onto the male character felt less responsible for resolving gender inequality, particularly in the 360 degree split-view.

In this paper, we examine the changes in motivation factors in crowdsourced policymaking. By drawing on longitudinal data from a crowdsourced law reform, we show that people participated because they wanted to improve the law, learn, and solve problems. When crowdsourcing reached a saturation point, the motivation factors weakened and the crowd disengaged. Learning was the only factor that did not weaken. The participants learned while interacting with others, and the more actively the participants commented, the more likely they stayed engaged. Crowdsourced policymaking should thus be designed to support both epistemic and interactive aspects. While the crowd's motives were rooted in self-interest, their knowledge perspective showed common-good orientation, implying that rather than being dichotomous, motivation factors move on a continuum. The design of crowdsourced policymaking should support the dynamic nature of the process and the motivation factors driving it.

This paper examines participants' motivation factors and identity in crowdsourced policy-making, in which citizens collaboratively participate in online ideation and knowledge creation for policy reforms. Drawing on data from a crowdsourced law reform in Finland, this paper examines the drivers of the participants and their demographic profile. The findings show that the participants typically are male, educated, full-time working professionals with a strong interest in the off-road traffic issue. The motivations to contribute to crowdsourced policy-making are a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Intrinsic drivers include the desire to do what is one's "civic duty," that is, to participate constructively in a political process, and the desire to deliberate with peers and learn from them. Extrinsic motivations include the desire to have an impact on an issue of importance to participants. The drivers are, in part, similar to those that drive participation in traditional democratic processes like voting, and to those that motivate other volunteer-based large-scale online collaborations, like Wikipedia creation.

We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of social choice functions in crowdsourcing for participatory democracies. First, we demonstrate the scalability of social choice functions by defining a natural notion of epsilon-approximation, and giving algorithms which efficiently elicit such approximations for two prominent social choice functions: the Borda rule and the Condorcet winner. This result circumvents previous prohibitive lower bounds and is surprisingly strong: even if the number of ideas is as large as the number of participants, each participant will only have to make a logarithmic number of comparisons, an exponential improvement over the linear number of comparisons previously needed. Second, we apply these ideas to Finland's recent off-road traffic law reform, an experiment on participatory democracy in real life. This allows us to verify the scaling predicted in our theory and show that the constant involved is also not large. In addition, by collecting data on the time that users take to complete rankings of varying sizes, we observe that eliciting partial rankings can further decrease elicitation time as compared to the common method of eliciting pairwise comparisons.