[AISWorld] CFP HICSS-58: The Dark and Bright Sides of the Metaverse Minitrack

[paul.lowry.phd at gmail.com]

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-58)
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Big Island | January 7-10, 2025
http://www.hicss.org/
Track Title: Internet and the Digital Economy Track
Minitrack Title: The Dark and Bright Sides of the Metaverse Minitrack
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-58/internet-and-the-digital-economy/#the-dar
k-and-bright-sides-of-the-metaverse-minitrack/
Fast-track submission opportunity (at the discretion of minitrack chairs) in
the Journal of Intellectual Capital:
https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jic
===============================================

== Minitrack Description: ==
Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and pizza delivery driver, fought to neutralize a
deadly virus in the Metaverse in the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (Stephenson,
1992). Almost coincidentally, as Snow Crash turned 30, one of the biggest
companies in the world, Facebook, changed its name to Meta to reflect its
focus on the Metaverse. Despite its infancy, the Metaverse has generated
significant interest from users, practitioners, and researchers. Given its
potential to transform the future of work and the consumer landscape by
creating immersive experiences, Big Tech companies are investing not only in
the underlying technology to enable the Metaverse but also in accompanying
virtual products and services to create immersive experiences for users and
help build intellectual capital within and between organizations. 

The Metaverse is a decentralized, shared, immersive, and persistent virtual
environment. It is afforded by socially constructed and materially enabled
IT artifacts that allow users to have unique identities represented by their
avatars and authentic interactions with other users, human-like AI agents,
and virtual assets (Davis, 2009; Seymour et al., 2021; Shin, 2022). In other
words, the Metaverse is a connection between the real and virtual world
where one can work, study, play, shop, travel, socialize, and accomplish
many other daily activities similar to the physical world. (Owens et al.,
2011). The Metaverse offers various opportunities, from creating new revenue
streams for businesses to reducing operational costs (Wang et al., 2022),
enabling distributed training, and fostering intellectual capital
(Bhagwatwar et al., 2018). The Metaverse is also an extension of the
physical world, with opportunities beyond what the physical world offers to
individuals (Steffen et al., 2019). Especially with the immersion
capabilities of the current powerful standalone head-mounted extended
reality (XR) displays (Dincelli & Yayla, 2022), one can experience what is
not usually possible, such as spending a day in ancient Greece, walking on
Mars, or exploring the mysteries of Kīlauea, in the Metaverse. 

While many opportunities exist for the Metaverse, it also has diverse
challenges that may prevent successful adoption, such as surveillance, user
tracking, deviant behavior such as bullying and stalking (Lowry et al.,
2017), design issues, unintended consequences (e.g., addiction,
technostress, anxiety), and the new security and privacy threats (Vondrek et
al., 2022). Our experiences from e-commerce, social media, and the Internet
during the past decades necessitate a proactive approach to governance,
regulations, design principles, data collection, physical-virtual world
connection, and similar issues during the inception of the Metaverse.
Consequently, the focus of this mini track is the dark side, bright side,
and governance of the Metaverse. The minitrack welcomes theoretical and
empirical studies that use a variety of methodological approaches. Topics of
interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

*The Dark Side of the Metaverse:*
- Cybersecurity and privacy risks
- Emerging attack vectors and surfaces
- The Darkverse – illegal and criminal activities in the Metaverse 
- New anti-forensics techniques hackers can employ in the Metaverse
- Deception and deep fakes
- Deviant behaviors such as harassment, bullying, stalking, and trolling
- User surveillance, tracking, and censorship issues
- Adverse physical, mental, and emotional effects (e.g., addiction,
technostress, psychoses, misuse, etc.)
- Ethical considerations and dilemmas in the Metaverse

*The Bright Side of the Metaverse:*
- Innovative and sustainable business models (e.g., meta-tourism)
- User-centric monetization strategies
- Cost reduction, operational effectiveness, and enhanced firm performance
- Corporate training, distributed learning, collaboration, and team
performance improvements
- Knowledge creation, retention, and dissemination strategies
- Metaverse applications (meta-apps) for healthcare
- Mental and physical health benefits (e.g., meta-fitness)
- Opportunities for vulnerable populations (e.g., elderly, people with
disabilities)

*Governing the Metaverse:*
- Intellectual property, copyright, and ownership
- Data privacy, transparency, anonymity, and virtual identities
- Establishment of new standards, regulations, compliance, and governance
mechanisms
- Evolving hardware (e.g., haptics, trackers) and software (e.g., talent,
asset management) ecosystems
- Organizational implications of spatial computing
- Complementary and enabling technologies (e.g., Blockchain, AI, NFT, XR,
VR, AR, IoT, wearables)
- Digital divide, accessibility, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
- Managing digital personas, avatars, and virtual assets
- Safeguarding and promoting the well-being of vulnerable populations
- The convergence of AI and the Metaverse

The minitrack aims to provide IS scholars with a venue to share their
research that rigorously addresses the abovementioned points. We hope to
attract scholars from a range of disciplines and high-quality papers to form
two sessions. Selected papers are going to have a fast-track submission
opportunity at the Journal of Intellectual Capital:
https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jic 

== Important Dates: ==
- April 15, 2024: Manuscript submission system reopened for HICSS-58
- June 15, 2024, 11:59 pm (HST): Manuscript submission deadline
- August 17, 2024, 11:59 pm (HST): Notification of acceptance/rejection
- September 22, 2024, 11:59 pm (HST): Submission of final manuscript for
proceeding publication
- October 1, 2024, 11:59 pm (HST): Registration deadline (at least one
author must register)
- January 7-10, 2025: HICSS-58 conference dates

Please see the HICSS website for more information: https://hicss.hawaii.edu/

Submit full manuscripts for review:
http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-and-minitracks/authors/ 

== Minitrack Co-chairs: ==
- Ersin Dincelli (primary contact), University of Colorado Denver,
ersin.dincelli at ucdenver.edu
- Merrill Warkentin, Mississippi State University, m.warkentin at msstate.edu
- Paul Benjamin Lowry, Virginia Tech, pblowry at vt.edu

== References: ==
- Bhagwatwar, A., Massey, A., & Dennis, A. (2018). Contextual priming and
the design of 3D virtual environments to improve group ideation. Information
Systems Research, 29(1), 169-185.
- Davis, A., Murphy, J., Owens, D., Khazanchi, D., & Zigurs, I. (2009).
Avatars, people, and virtual worlds: Foundations for research in metaverses.
Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 10(2), 1.
- Dincelli, E., & Yayla, A. (2022). Immersive virtual reality in the age of
the Metaverse: A hybrid-narrative review based on the technology affordance
perspective. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 31(2), 101717.
- Lowry, P. B., Moody, G. D., & Chatterjee, S. (2017). Using IT design to
prevent cyberbullying. Journal of Management Information Systems, 34(3),
863-901.
- Seymour, M., Yuan, L. I., Dennis, A., & Riemer, K. (2021). Have we crossed
the uncanny valley? Understanding affinity, trustworthiness, and preference
for realistic digital humans in immersive environments. Journal of the
Association for Information Systems, 22(3), 9.
- Shin, D. (2022). The actualization of meta affordances: Conceptualizing
affordance actualization in the metaverse games. Computers in Human
Behavior, 133, 107292.
- Steffen, J. H., Gaskin, J. E., Meservy, T. O., Jenkins, J. L., & Wolman,
I. (2019). Framework of affordances for virtual reality and augmented
reality. Journal of Management Information Systems, 36(3), 683-729.
- Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books.
- Owens, D., Mitchell, A., Khazanchi, D., & Zigurs, I. (2011). An empirical
investigation of virtual world projects and metaverse technology
capabilities. ACM SIGMIS Database, 42(1), 74-101.
- Vondrek, M., Baggili, I., Casey, P., & Mekni, M. (2022). Rise of the
Metaverse’s immersive virtual reality malware and the man-in-the-room attack
& defenses. Computers & Security, 102923.
- Wang, L., Lowry, P. B., Luo, X., & Li, H. (2022). Moving consumers from
free to fee in platform-based markets: An empirical study of multiplayer
online battle arena games. Information Systems Research. 1-22.