augmented reality

Immersive Ethics: Anticipating Risks and Harms in Virtual and Augmented Reality

Immersive ethics
Moderator: JILLIAN POWERS, Cognizant Panelists: JORDAN KRAEMER, Anti-Defamation League; ARWA MICHELLE MBOYA, Magic Leap; JESSICA OUTLAW, The Extended Mind LLC As new technologies, from AI to immersive experiences, are developed at scale, they raise ethical concerns for research and design. Data-driven systems have repeatedly been shown to entrench social biases along lines of race, gender, and class, from racist algorithms in the criminal justice system to misgendering trans and nonbinary people. Immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), however, raise separate and thorny questions for ethical design. Immersive technologies create novel experiences of embodiment and reality, not to mention new sources of personal data. These facets create distinctive challenges for ethics, equity, and inclusion, intensifying the potential harms of misinformation, harassment, privacy violations, surveillance, or unequal access. How can ethnographic research anticipate emergent ethical questions specific...

Building for the Future, Together: A Model for Bringing Emerging Products to Market, Using Anticipatory Ethnography and Mixed Methods Research

Adobe Inc. Applied ethnography practitioners are often charged with learning from existing or potential customers, for a product that is either familiar to them or close in nature to what they have used before. There are particular challenges for emerging technologies, where the market is much less defined. Applied ethnography has the potential to help…

Hands Are People Too: Reflections on the Value of Hands (and How to Study Them)

MARIA CURY ReD Associates KAHYUN SOPHIE KIM Facebook Reality Labs PechaKucha Presentation—Did you know that hands have bodies, relationships, and minds of their own? In the coming years as a new wave of technologies focused on our hands is under development, and as AR/VR may include haptics as a key mode of interaction, we need to design for hands as we would for people – keeping the technology in the background to ensure hands can learn, collaborate, and shine. We conducted a study in 2020 about what gives hands unique value to people. The ambition was to understand hand-based skills across contexts and domains of practical expertise. We asked practitioners to record themselves using their hands, analyzed the video footage, and watched the recordings together with each practitioner. We asked practitioners to reflect on their hands and compare how their skills might apply to other contexts. Through this process, we uncovered that the hands have bodies, relationships, and minds of their own. These fundamental observations...

Pepper’s Ghost to Mixed Reality: How Sarah Ellis Anticipates Futures at the Royal Shakespeare Company

"play with technology. Challenge that technology. Imagine it in different ways." Sarah Ellis, director of digital development, Royal Shakespeare Company
Welcome to EPISODE ONE in a series of conversations with some of the makers and speakers of EPIC2021—a global, virtual conference and community promoting ethnography for impact in business, organizations and communities. In this episode, Luc Aractingi talks with Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Keynote Speaker at EPIC2021. Find out why artists are the consummate innovators and Shakespeare is on the cutting edge of mixed reality and emerging technologies! TRANSCRIPT LUC: Hello and welcome to EPIC interviews, a series where we get to know the makers and hosts of the conference EPIC 2021. Today we are interviewing Sarah Ellis, who is the Director of Digital Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hello, thank you for coming. SARAH: Hello, nice to be here. LUC: I was wondering if you could tell us more about your role. SARAH: I work for the Royal Shakespeare Company and my job is the first job of its kind where I'm the Director of Digital Development. What that means is...