Hosted by the Bristol Vision Institute (BVI)
Abstract: Among other things, extended reality technologies, such as virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR), afford experiences related to arts, entertainment, health, sports, and free-time activities. By participating in such activities, users engage with digital representations of people and objects in digitally created or modified spaces. Thus, in VR and AR, users can interact with each other through digital bodies, such as customisable full-body avatars or AR filters that change one’s appearance captured by a smartphone’s camera. While many of these applications are now part of everyday life—over a billion people use VR or AR regularly worldwide—we know fairly little of how digital bodies affect social activities. This paper presents a series of completed and proposed empirical studies on how VR and AR mediate social interactions through digital bodies, what implications these interactions hold in terms of social dynamics, and what are the methodological challenges for designing human-centred studies of extended reality experiences.
Biography: Kata is based in the Trinity Longroom Hub and her work is focused on questions that consider technological developments from the humanistic perspective. She will work closely with her academic mentors Prof. Jennifer O’Meara (School of Creative Arts) and Prof. Aljosa Smolic (School of Computer Science and Statistics) to study the effects of augmented reality on user behaviour.
Kata’s project builds on her previous cross-disciplinary research in cognitive media studies focusing on audiovisual experiences on smartphones and in virtual environments in terms of comprehension, attention, and emotions. Augmented reality (AR) offers interactive content that integrates real-world and digital objects and bodies. Kata’s work focuses on AR experiences in which users interact with digitally created or modified human bodies on mobile devices. Reflecting on the relocation of social experiences into digital spheres, she explores social behaviour and identity. First, by analysing the effects of AR on the sense of social belonging and mental well-being and by measuring users’ reactions to AR experiences that display human bodies besides their own. Second, by studying how AR experiences that display modified self-images impact social identity, behaviour, and prejudices towards digital avatars with different body types and demographic characteristics, such as gender or ethnicity.
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