Chris Salter
This interdisciplinary project brings together two internationally recognized labs working at the intersection of arts and sciences - the Immersive Arts Space (IAS) at the Zurich University of the Arts and Ikegami lab at the University of Tokyo. The project aims to study social co-presence (the sense of being with others) in a shared mixed reality (MR) environment where participants interact through head mounted displays with computer-generated images/sound embedded in a real space. Here, MR is achieved via a recent technology called “video passthrough” – a technique which delivers live video images through tiny cameras in the head mounted display which approximates what one would see if directly looking into the real surrounding world. The project’s aim is to measure how self-organization in this MR space, characterized by changes in information richness (the massiveness of information) and concurrency (the simultaneous flow of information) could affect the sense of co-presence of others inhabiting the same MR space. Self-organization, here defined as emergent structures that evolve without central control and in response to environmental stimuli, will be achieved by creating audio-visual environments in the MR space through generative AI processes (LLMs). Given that studies of co-present interaction in VR/AR have overwhelmingly focused on fixed and designed virtual environments with avatars and virtual agents, this project thus takes a novel and innovative approach to exploring self-organization as a vital characteristic for the next generation of MR applications.