In April, Facebook invited university faculty to respond to the Explorations of Trust in AR, VR, and Smart Devices request for proposals (RFP) to help accelerate research in security, privacy, integrity, and ethics for mixed-reality and smart device products. We were interested in a broad range of topics relating to applications like AR glasses, VR headsets, other AR or VR form-factors, smart home products, and more. Today, we are announcing the recipients and finalists of these research awards.

The mixed-reality and smart device industries are continuing to evolve, with unique products, use cases, and devices coming to bear in this new space. With an entirely new category of technologies come entirely new security, privacy, and integrity challenges. But this new category also presents entirely new possibilities and models for considering trust.

The first round of awardees’ research will explore the following:

• Secure and usable authentication methods in AR and VR devices
• Unravelling privacy risks of 3D spatial mixed reality data
• User impacts of novel attacks in AR
• Building multi-layer defensive frameworks for next-gen intelligent systems
• Deepfake Detection Methods in 3D mixed reality

Funding these ongoing research efforts will help Facebook Reality Labs and the XR industry better understand and address these nascent risk areas in our efforts to build trustworthy products.

For more information about this RFP, such as topics of interest, eligibility, requirements, and more, visit the application page.

Research award recipients

Principal investigators are listed first unless otherwise noted.

Deepfakes and virtual conferences: Facial motion analysis for ID verification
Ronald Fedkiw (Stanford University)

Experimental analysis of user impacts of novel attacks in augmented reality
Franziska Roesner, Tadayashi Kohno (University of Washington)

Secure and usable authentication for augmented and virtual reality devices
Melanie Volkamer, Peter Mayer, Reyhan Duzgun (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Sanchari Das (University of Denver)

SmartShield: Building next generation trustworthy intelligent systems
Sara Rampazzi (University of Florida), Daniel Genkin (University of Michigan)

Unravelling the nascent privacy risks of 3D spatial mixed reality data
Kanchana Thilakarathna, Albert Zomaya (University of Sydney)

Research award finalists

Enforcing spatial content-mediation constraints for augmented reality
Carlos Ernesto Rubio-Medrano (Texas A&M University), Ziming Zhao (University at Buffalo)

Exploring authentication mechanisms for augmented reality glasses
Rahul Chatterjee, Earlence Fernandez (University of Wisconsin – Madison), Yuhang Zhao (Cornell University)

Exploring the design space of trust-worthy voice user interfaces
Yuan Tian (University of Virginia), Sauvik Das (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Intelligent and Interactive Design Fictions to Study and Shape Trust
Elizabeth Murnane (Dartmouth College)

Robust and Efficient Adversarial Machine Learning for Mobile AR
Maria Gorlatova, Neil Gong (Duke University)

Secure Hardware for Trust in AR/VR
G. Edward Suh (Cornell University)

Securing AR/VR and Smart Devices via Cross-domain Low-effort Authentication
Yingying Chen (Rutgers University), Nitesh Saxena (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

Understanding Side-channel Attack Surfaces of AR Devices
Yinqian Zhang (Ohio State University)