Principal Investigator:
Chris Salter, Zurich University for the Arts

Co-investigators:
David Howes, Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia university
Sabine Himmelsbach,  HeK (Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel)
Lorenza Mondada, Literature, University of Basel
Pilar Orero, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Andreas Uebelbacher, Access for All (Spain)

Project Description:
Developing a critically-historically informed, practice-based design approach, this
research project examines how new technologies of “extended reality” (XR) reimagine
bodily subjectivity, interaction and experience, on the one hand, and how bodily
experience could reimagine XR, on the other. XR is an umbrella term for
computer-generated environments accessed and experienced through worn headsets
and body interfaces. These environments are either simulated (virtual reality-VR) or
overlay and mix real scenes with digital 3D images and sounds (augmented reality-AR).

The four-year project’s key aim is to use critical, creative, conceptual and empirical
approaches to examine how XR as a social-technical object reshapes bodily subjectivity
and experience, and in turn how differently-abled bodies can reshape XR’s
predominantly normative design. The rationale for this inquiry is the lack of critical,
practice-based design work exploring the recent dramatic acceleration of technical
research, technological promises, and corporate and public imaginaries in XR.
Therefore, the project will turn the recurring claim that such technologies will “change
human interaction as we know it” into a research topic, addressing questions such as
the following: How is everyday interaction in XR routinely achieved? How exactly will
XR change interaction and what social reciprocity and mutual access will be enabled?
What concrete effects and forms of discipline will be enacted on disabled bodies
interacting in XR? By bringing different bodily experience to bear on critical inquiry,
the project will probe XR’s futures in the present.

The research will be situated at the Immersive Arts Space (IAS) at the ZHdK, part of the
Digitalization Initiative of the Zurich Higher Education Institutions (DIZH) research
cluster.

The objective is to use design fiction, a design
research method that prototypes objects and scenarios to provoke new ways of
thinking about the future, as a form of critical inquiry to probe the present and future
of social interaction in XR in three different settings (subprojects or SPs). SP1 will
explore science-fiction scenarios of social interaction in XR staged using theatrical
means (light, sound, space, props) in the IAS. The scenarios will involve small user
groups (n=10) wearing new headsets with embedded cameras that enable the virtual
and real world to be mixed. Consisting of a series of experimental scenarios
constructed by the design fiction method and complemented by artist-designer
residencies, the research studies how social interaction and “co-presence” (being
physically and sensorially with others) is mediated by XR devices in these future
scenarios.

SP2 examines social interaction “in the wild” with participants wearing the
same VR/AR technologies. We will examine interaction behaviors in public space in
which embodied practices can be studied as temporal sequences of situated,
multisensory interactions, paying attention to how such interactions are supplemented
or altered by XR.

SP3 explores how disabled users can transform the ableist
conception of bodies that current XR systems foster. Design fiction and “criptastic
hacking” (playful but critical modification) will be used to hack and tinker with existing
VR headsets and controllers to create scenarios in the IAS where an imaginary VR
world adapts to disabled bodies rather than disabled bodies adapting to VR.
The research will employ a hybrid methodological approach using video analysis,
sensory ethnography and iterative design research to tackle the larger entanglements
among sense, affect, machines and different bodies taking place in XR.

The project is informed
by theoretical work in Critical VR studies, technological futures as probed in Science
and Technology Studies (STS), historical research on presence in VR/AR and
experimental media design. It will constitute one of the first in the context of Swiss and
German speaking design research combining social science and humanities methods
to analyze the staged scenarios and experiments together with artistic-aesthetic
practices to investigate XR’s future imaginaries. The impact will be to develop
alternative thinking and experimental aesthetic-design analysis, reflection and critique
of XR directly in situated action and use.

This project is generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) for the period 2023-2027