Immersive pedagogy and embodied data: IP and privacy risks in European educational metaverses

Immersive and metaverse-like learning environments are increasingly discussed as emerging infrastructures for higher education, particularly in relation to virtual laboratories, simulations, collaborative learning, and avatar-mediated interaction. Yet their pedagogical potential is accompanied by a complex legal and governance landscape. On the one hand, these environments operate as persistent spaces of content production, modification, and circulation, where students, teachers, institutions, and platform providers may all become implicated in questions of authorship, co-authorship, licensing, attribution, portability, and downstream reuse. On the other hand, immersive systems intensify privacy concerns because they enable the collection of dense streams of behavioural and potentially biometric data, including gaze, posture, voice, gesture, and interaction traces, from which highly sensitive inferences may be drawn. This paper argues that, in European educational metaverses, intellectual property and privacy should not be treated as distinct regulatory domains, but as interdependent dimensions of the same socio-technical infrastructure. To develop this argument, the paper proposes an analytical matrix structured around four stages of immersive learning activity: creation and remix of artefacts, platform hosting and moderation, recording and reuse for teaching and assessment, and data extraction for analytics. The framework is then applied to two scenarios: a virtual laboratory based on collaborative 3D creation and an avatar-mediated learning environment with monitoring functions. The analysis shows that the same contractual and technical affordances that organise authorship and reuse also facilitate persistent tracking, data retention, and secondary processing. The paper concludes that European educational institutions should assess immersive learning environments not only as pedagogical tools, but also as infrastructures that simultaneously distribute creative control and intensify data capture.