GuestXR partners took part at an event on AI technologies enabling social interaction “Emerging Technologies for Social Interaction”, celebrated on January 26th, 2023, and targeted to researchers and students interested in the most promising emerging technologies for improving social interaction.
Representatives from the five projects making up the SECTG Cluster (GuestXR, SONICOM, EXPERIENCE, CAROUSEL and TOUCHLESS) participated in a panel discussion about how social interaction and Artificial Intelligence are intersecting thanks to novel technologies.
In particular, the round table was constituted by Prof. Doron Friedman (GuestXR), Dr. Lorenzo Picinali (SONICOM), Dr. Yuri De Pra (EXPERIENCE), Pieter van der Linden (CAROUSEL), and Orestes Georgiou (TOUCHLESS). The moderator was Dr. Asier Marzo, from the Public University of Navarra.
After that panel, the event continued with a keynote on VR and social interaction by Mel Slater, GuestXR Technical Coordinator and Investigator and Co-director of the EventLAB of the University of Barcelona. During this intervention, he introduced the GuestXR project and its aim to create a machine learning agent designed to unlock interaction between participants in extended reality environments.
Moreover, he presented a Virtual Reality demo developed within the framework of GuestXR that recreates meetings between remotely located participants in a 3D Sushi restaurant environment, where the participants are represented by avatars that closely resemble themselves, based on single frontal photographs in each case.
Other topics discussed at the webinar were the ethical considerations that need to be considered on the use of new technologies, or how haptics can be adapted to elder people.
This event was organised by Crowdhelix as part of the Haptics Helix, an international Open Innovation community of specialists in the fields of haptics technology, affective touch and human-computer interaction created to support the TOUCHLESS project in close collaboration of SECTG cluster projects.
