Frontiers in Virtual Reality Seminar Series 2: striving for social harmony in XR

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Online Seminar Series

25th May - 22nd June 2022

This seminar series is presented by field chief editor of the Frontiers in Virtual Reality journal, Prof Mel Slater and members of the GuestXR European Project. 

By now we are likely to have come across horror stories from ‘the metaverse‘ about how easy it is to encounter abuse, racism, misogyny, and have 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 realize 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

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The Affordances and Problems of Meeting in Virtual Reality

Mel Slater, Investigator and Co-director of the Event Lab, 

University of Barcelona

25 May 2022

17:00 CEST

 

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Neuroscience of Interpersonal Interaction

Beatrice de Gelder, Professor and Director of the Brain and Emotion Laboratory, 

University of Maastricht

8 June 2022

17:00 CEST

 

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Getting Real about Ethics in Virtual Environments

Darian Meacham, Associate Professor, 

University of Maastricht

22 June 2022

17:00 CEST

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Social Modeling

Andrzej Nowak, Professor, 

University of Warsaw

29 June 2022

17:00 CEST

 

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Deep Learning for Virtual Humans in XR: Beyond Photorealism

Doron Friedman, Professor and Head of Institute, The Advanced Reality Lab, 

University of Reichman

6 July 2022

| 17:00 CEST| REGISTER |

Launched in December 2019, Frontiers in Virtual Reality offers a dedicated open-access platform for the latest work in the field of virtual reality. If you would like to be involved or have an idea for a new article collection, please email us at virtualreality@frontiersin.org