College of Arts & Humanities Research

IELab XR Research Ethics Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Rachel Opitz, UoG / IELab

Thursday, May 27, 2021 15:00 BST 

On Zoom.

This seminar will introduce research ethics challenges specific to work with XR technologies (VR/AR/immersives). We will discuss these in the context of approaches to research ethics review at the University of Glasgow and in relation to the wider XR community’s discourse around the ethical use of these technologies in society. To make these reflections concrete, we will undertake a design critique exercise, assessing the research ethics implications and wider ethical implications of the design of specific XR projects.  

Immersives in cultural heritage research and practice

Tuesday 20th April 2021, 10:00 AM BST 

Cultural & Museum Studies SGSAH Discipline+ Catalyst one-day online training event  

IELab co-sponsored event 

This free event is offered by the SGSAH Cultural and Museum studies Discipline+ Catalyst. It is aimed at PhD students in arts and humanities disciplines registered at Scottish universities and who are in the early stages of their research (normally first or early second year). 

The use of immersive technologies (such as Virtual Reality–VR, Augmented Reality–AR, Extended or Cross Reality–XR) in the cultural sector has expanded in the last few years, impacting the way various users are engaging with collections, exhibitions and related themes, stories, and ideas. Immersives are affecting how visitors are experiencing cultural heritage in public venues as well as in other settings like home and work. New research is examining not only the technological issues and challenges that these technologies raise, but also those related to the arts, humanities, and social sciences, such as creativity, accessibility, materiality, learning, and social interaction. 

This one-day event will offer the opportunity to hear about and discuss the potentials offered by a range of immersive technologies in cultural heritage. The event will include an introduction to the range of immersives that can be used in cultural heritage and their areas of application, with a discussion of the potential and challenges of these new technological affordances for the cultural heritage sector. Invited experts and practitioners will deliver presentations on their experiences of immersives and will take part in a round-table discussion. PhD students will deliver short presentations on their own research as part of a PhD showcase. 

The event is organised for the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities Cultural and Museum Studies Discipline+ Catalyst by Prof. Maria Economou (University of Glasgow) with Prof. Ian Ruthven (University of Strathclyde) and Dr Thea Stevens (Glasgow School of Art). It is supported by the Immersive Experiences Arts Lab of the University of Glasgow. 

The Lament (talk and Q&A)

Speaker: Eleni Ikon, Senior Tutor (Research), Visual Communication, Royal College of Art.

Wednesday 16th March, 1-2pm.

On Zoom.

For many voices.

The voice can assume almost any shape, sculpted both by human body and technology but reducible to neither. This talk will follow the voice in its capacity to channel the alien and open up a door to the otherworldly.

This event is part of the RMA Colloquium in Music Research series at the University of Glasgow, in association with the Immersive Experiences Lab.

Speakers: Adriana Minu, Elisa Jockyman Roithmann and more

10th December 2020, 15:00-17:00 

on zoom.

Detailed Schedule:

15:00 Welcome

15:10 Adriana Minu - Ecstasies of Rooms - Process, technology and participation

The participatory piece Ecstasies of Rooms is a pandemic-baby, born after months of artistic sharing and exploration on Zoom between composer-performers Adriana Minu (PhD researcher in UoG's music department) and Christine Cornwell. In the 45-minute audio journey participants are invited to use their voices to establish a different relationship with their living space, the rooms the pandemic has limited us to for months. Ecstasies of Rooms uses an app that collects participant's recorded voices and a 3D virtual 'common' room to re-house these vocal utterances. In this short overview of the process and final piece, we retrace the steps that led us to develop the concept and discuss the technological implementation of the work, all under the umbrella of research through artistic practice.

15:40 Elisa Jockyman Roithmann - Immersive Spectatorship and Environmental Video Art in Brazil

Since the 1960s, when artist Helio Oiticica experimented with multimedia installations launching the Tropicalia movement, Brazilian moving image artists have set out to create sensory and immersive experiences for their audiences. In the height of the climate emergency, these artists have used immersive techniques and new technologies in environmental narratives that open dialogues about modern audiences and accountability.

15:50 Siobhan Healy - Performance Art at the Hunterian Art Gallery with augmented reality

I am an Mlitt student interested in discussing the possibility of a collaboration between my group curatorial project at the Hunterian Gallery and people working with augmented reality. The project is essentially a performance artwork that echoes the theme of the exhibition which will be on Jan-April, which relates to Scottish landscape. The details of the performance are to be confirmed. The performance will take place in Feburary. I would like to discuss the possibility of including an augmented reality element to this project and see if any students working with augmented Reality would be interested in getting involved.

16:00 Joseph O'Hagan - Reality aware VR headsets: Increasing VR user awareness of bystanders

As VR headsets become more common in everyday life interactions between VR users and bystanders will occur more often. Recent research has begun to consider the concept of a 'reality aware VR headset' - one that is capable of automatically detecting a bystander and notifying a VR user of their existence. This talk will highlight some of the work done here at Glasgow which has investigated this topic.

16:10 break

16:20 Luca Ottonello - Emotional Immersion in Palmyra

The virtual talk will involve a guided tour through the stages of construction and exploration of a full area in the town of Palmyra in a videogame environment. The reconstruction of the area is not based on purely technical requirements as it would be of practice in archaeology, but it is built in a way which allows immersion in exploration, guiding the user through a linear series of events triggered by the user’s investigative interest. The town area includes a temple, a garden, a villa and several characters which interact through time by solving very simple puzzles, which enhance the immersion. The project has not been focussed on VR which would imply a first person view, but in point & click 3rd person view, which is another method of immersion that focusses on artistic style as opposed to hyperrealism, more reminiscing of reading a book and following the character through the adventures, this method which follows the main character through different camera angles allows more intrinsic interaction between the user and the character, giving a base story to follow and get emotionally lost into, as the experiences of the character are developed and investigated through a series of life events. This technique should allow for a better emotive immersion, walking among the people who lived in the past where there are now excavation sites, and at the same time give an interactive emotional connection between such characters, the architecture and potentially the users.

16:40 Elliot Millington - Sensorily Stressed: Using Virtual Reality to examine the relationship between anxiety and the senses.

Anxiety is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in the western world, with lifetime incidence estimates of up to 25%. Anxiety acts as a barrier to educational, vocational, and societal engagement and is estimated to cost the US economy $38 billion annually. One of the most consistent causal factors of anxiety are sensory sensitivities, usually over- and/or under-responsivity to everyday sensory stimulation such as noises, lights, and smells. Whilst there is a robust empirical and theoretical literature looking at the interaction between sensory sensitivities and anxiety, unfortunately it is largely questionnaire-based and correlational. The aim of my PhD project is to use the methodological advantages of Virtual Reality technologies to experimentally test the key relationships of the theoretical frameworks and then apply these findings in the form of environmental accommodations.

16:50 Yiheng Ding - Manipulation and VR

In ethics and moral philosophy, our minds are traditionally portrayed as an internal citadel which is undetectable and intractable. For this reason, the gravity of traditional ethical concerns falls on the physical dimension, focusing on bodily harm, violence, and coercion. However, in recent decades, the rules of the game have changed. Individuals have become vulnerable in ways that could not be conceived by ethicists and philosophers in the past. We now know that human mind and behaviour are plastic. We can change individuals’ desires, behaviours, and decisions in predictable ways through the arrangement of the factors in their external environment. In a relavant sense, users of VR are put into a virtual world which is entirely determined by the service provider, and their external virtual environment can be much more conveniently modified than the physical environment. This means that VR could enable powerful forms of mental and behavioral manipulation. Thus, it is the time to think of the moral hazard of manipulating people through techniques like VR — but firstly, what does it mean to manipulate a person? Why is manipulation morally wrong?

VR Environment Creation Seminar

Speaker: Alex Harvey, RiVR

19th November 2020, 15:00 - 16:30. 

On Zoom.

Alex Harvey, Co-Founder and CEO of RiVR will present on how he and his team create their hyper-realistic environments for clients across a diverse range of industries. 

Virtual Auditory Reality (Research Colloquium)

Speaker: Iain Findlay-Walsh, UofG

22nd October 2020, 15:00 - 16:30.

On Zoom.

Iain Findlay-Walsh (University of Glasgow) will be giving a talk on "Virtual Auditory Reality: Inhabiting pop as virtual environment". Event organised jointly with the Royal Music Association Research Colloquia series.

Speakers: Francis Butterworth-Parr, Monica Vazquez and more, UofG

30 April 2020, 15:00-17:00

On Zoom.

Presentations from our speakers are posted below, linked from under the title of each talk. Join us on zoom for a roundtable discussion of everyone's research. We'll talk about the challenges and opportunities of using immersive technologies and media, and of thinking about immersive experiences, as part of PhD research. 

Virtual Reality Experiences as Intimate Performance

Speaker: Harry Wilson, UofG

21 November 2019, 15:00-17:00

Sir Charles Wilson Building, Room 101AB

Using VR technology to understand the inner world of autism

Speaker: Sarune Savickaite, UofG

3rd October 2019, 15:00-17:00

253, Main Building, University of Glasgow

Sarune's research addresses the intersection of VR and research on autism. 

Global and local processing is part of human perceptual organisation, where global processing enables us to extract the ‘gist’ of the visual information and local processing helps us to perceive the details. Individual differences in these two types of visual processing have been found in autism (ASD) and ADHD. Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF) test was selected for this study. Virtual Reality (VR) has become a more available method of research in the last few decades. No previous research has investigated perceptual differences using this technology. In this study, we investigated individual differences in local and global processing as a function of autistic and ADHD traits. ROCF was presented in the virtual environment and a standard protocol for using the figure was followed. A novel method of quantitative data extraction was used. Differences have been found in the standard scores of ROCF, however, no differences were observed between the conditions and participants scoring higher on ASD and ADHD questionnaires. Limitations of the study and implications of the novel methodology are discussed. 

You can read more about Sarune's work on her website: https://www.sarune.info/. 

Let us know you're coming by reserving a spot at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/74320954977

Sarune Savickaite

Group VR and Immersive Theatre

Speaker: Dr Julie Williamson, UofG

Wolfson Medical School - Gannochy Seminar Room 3

Thursday 18 April, 2019, 15:00-17:00

Co-Located VR Experiences

Current VR research often focuses on maximising immersion and personalising experiences, but an alternative approach could focus on social VR and co-located group experiences.  During this hands-on talk and workshop, we will explore the current capabilities of group VR experiences using mobile VR headsets and tracked objects to create a shared physical and virtual experience.  This has interesting application areas for entertainment, arts and theatre, education, and productivity.  The workshop will involve experiencing a prototype of such an application and developing design fictions that might use this configuration of hardware to create new kinds of immersive experiences.

Gesturing the landscape in VR

Speaker: Dr Rachel Opitz, UofG/IELab

Thursday 14 February, 2019, 15:00-17:00pm

Wolfson Medical School - Gannochy Seminar Room 3

Narratives in VR/AR

Speaker: Dr Gareth Beale, UofG

Thursday 6 December, 2018, 15:00-17:00

The Value of Virtual Objects

Speaker: Neil McDonnell, UofG, IELab

Thursday 18 October, 2018, 15:00-17:00