Collecting and Implementing Ethical Guidelines for Emotion Recognition in an Educational Metaverse

The metaverse represents a persistent, online 3D universe where people can interact, socialize, and work toward common goals. Education represents a key application domain, as it has the potential to enhance experiential learning and collaboration between learners and between learners and educators. However, challenges to the widespread adoption of educational metaverses persist. This paper focuses on emotional isolation, i.e., the feeling of emotional disconnection or loneliness, which can hinder learners' motivation and participation. Machine learning-enabled emotional recognition systems have the potential to address this challenge, offering educators with feedback on the emotional states of learners within the metaverse. Yet, the integration of emotion recognition systems raises ethical concerns regarding consent, privacy, and algorithmic bias. In this short paper, we conduct a first step toward extracting ethical considerations from the literature on the use of emotion recognition in the educational metaverse. Then, we report these guidelines and finally implement one of the most critical —i.e., protection of privacy— within SENEM, an educational metaverse platform available in the literature. Through this research, we aim to raise awareness within the research community and promote responsible deployment of emotion recognition technology in educational metaverses, aiming to create a supportive and inclusive learning environment for all students.