School of Computing Science

The University of Glasgow is world-leading in its examination of how immersive (XR: VR/AR/MR) and ubiquitous (wearables, everyday sensing) technologies shape human experience—technically, socially, and ethically. From Extended Reality (VR/AR/MR), to AI-enabled “smart” wearables, to the personal and distributed multimodal sensing and multimodal models that underpin these technologies, we examine these technologies across a number of pillars: 

• Multimodal Interaction Techniques – designing and evaluating novel interactions and experiences leveraging haptics, audio, gaze, gestures, thermal and olfactory feedback and more, advancing usability, performance, accessibility and ergonomics; 
• Social Signals, Interactions and Identity –  understanding how people co-experience and communicate in virtual and mixed reality environments, and what frictions/tensions exist; 
• Emergent Harms & Safety – mapping, assessing, and mitigating emergent threats around privacy, security, harassment, and deceptive design so we can make everyday sensing,  wearables, and immersive platforms safe and privacy-respecting, especially for vulnerable groups such as bystanders and child users.  
• Seamful design – Understanding how the infrastructure of ubiquitous systems shapes legibility/agency in system use, and how to leverage or appropriate seams - infrastructural gaps, problems or errors - to support interaction design. 
• Across all pillars, we move from foundational concepts to deployable systems, progressing through TRLs with partners in academia, public sector and industry to maximise real‑world impact.