virtual reality

Intelligences

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

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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...

Intelligences

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

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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...

Intelligences

Designing for Interactions with Automated Vehicles: Ethnography at the Boundary of Quantitative-Data-Driven Disciplines

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MARKUS ROTHMÜLLER School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark and Shift Insights & Innovation Consulting PERNILLE HOLM RASMUSSEN School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark SIGNE ALEXANDRA VENDELBO-LARSEN School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark Case Study—This case study presents ethnographic work in the midst of two fields of technological innovation: automated vehicles (AV) and virtual reality (VR). It showcases the work of three MSc. Techno-Anthropology students and their collaboration with the EU H2020 project ‘interACT’, sharing the goal to develop external human-machine interfaces (e-HMI) for AVs to cooperate with human road users in urban traffic in the future. The authors reflect on their collaboration with human factor researchers, data scientists, engineers, experimental researchers, VR-developers and HMI-designers, and on experienced challenges between the paradigms of qualitative...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Virtual Reality and Ethnographic Research

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KARL MENDONCA Amazon Music ADELE RAY Filmmaker; Berkeley City College OverviewWith growing interest across domains and industries in Virtual Reality (VR), this seminar style and hands-on tutorial gives participants essential skills for producing and incorporating virtual reality 360 video into ethnographic research. Participants will: Develop a critical understanding of VR by understanding it within a longer history of visuality and media studies. Learn about different workflows covering capture (cameras, rigs), editing (software) and distribution (viewing platforms) as well as technical elements behind successful VR (frame rates, camera movement, avoiding motion sickness). Review examples of VR based research methodologies such as diary studies, walk-throughs, contextual interviews, etc. Work hands-on with a VR camera to complete a short project based on a theme or set of research questions. This video includes only the presentation portion of the tutorial. Assigned Readings: Remediation...