Online Seminar Series - Striving for Social Harmony in XR
25th May - 6th July 2022
By now we are likely to have come across horror stories from ‘the metaverse‘ about how it is easy to encounter abuse, racism, misogyny, an overall unpleasant experience. On the other hand, social virtual environments have been studied for many years, and there is evidence about how people behave in virtual meetings. GuestXR is carrying out research towards how to make immersive virtual meetings realise the goals of the participants. Normally virtual meetings have a purpose, even if that is entertainment, and GuestXR has the ambitious aim of intervening in such meetings to make them fit for their purpose.
In this seminar series, partners from the GuestXR project will speak about their early work on these issues, covering a review of virtual meetings (‘collaborative virtual environments’), the utility of agent based models for social modeling, what we can learn from the neuroscience of interpersonal interaction, the role of deep learning for virtual humans, and reflections on the ethical aspects.
Scheduled seminars
Title
Speaker
Date
Time
Register
The affordances and problems of meeting in virtual reality
Mel Slater, Investigator and Co-director of the Event Lab, University of Barcelona
25th of May
17:00 CEST
Neuroscience of Interpersonal Interaction
Beatrice de Gelder, Professor and Director of the Brain and Emotion Laboratory, University of Maastricht
8th of June
17:00 CEST
Getting Real about Ethics in Virtual Environments
Darian Meacham, Associate Professor, University of Maastricht
22nd of June
17:00 CEST
Social modeling
Andrzej Nowak, Professor, University of Warsaw
29th of June
17:00 CEST
Deep neural networks for virtual humans in XR: Beyond photorealism
Doron Friedman, Professor and Head of the Advanced Reality Lab, Reichman University
6th of July
17:00 CEST
