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Abstract

Among other things, extended reality technologies, such as virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR), afford experiences related to arts, entertainment, health, sports, and free-time activities. By participating in such activities, users engage with digital representations of people and objects in digitally created or modified spaces. Thus, in VR and AR, users can interact with each other through digital bodies, such as customisable full-body avatars or AR filters that change one’s appearance captured by a smartphone’s camera. While many of these applications are now part of everyday life—over a billion people use VR or AR regularly worldwide—we know fairly little of how digital bodies affect social activities. This paper presents a series of completed and proposed empirical studies on how VR and AR mediate social interactions through digital bodies, what implications these interactions hold in terms of social dynamics, and what are the methodological challenges for designing human-centred studies of extended reality experiences.

Biography

Dr. Kata Szita is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and ADAPT Centre of Excellence for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her research involves the cognitive studies of immersive digital media technologies and she has authored a wide range of publications on attention, recollection, narrative engagement, and social behaviour in terms of smartphone spectatorship, augmented reality, cinematic virtual reality, social virtual reality, and the Metaverse. Currently, she leads interdisciplinary and cross-sector research projects on user experiences in social virtual reality and augmented reality and, as a collaborator, is involved in studies of the cognitive processing of fictional information, virtual youth behaviour, and digital personas. Szita is guest editor for PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality (MIT Press).