Since November 2023, the SNSF-funded project Probing XR’s Futures: Design Fiction, Bodily Experience and Critical Inquiry has brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Immersive Arts Space (IAS). The project has informed complementary lines of inquiry in and across perceptual experiments, design fiction, and interaction analysis, as well as transversal interest in breaching experiments and engagement with critical disability. In the process, the research team has probed form, fiction, and interaction in various configurations of collaboration and across contrasting settings (the studio lab, street corners, bars, and more). On this basis, many conference presentations and publication projects have seen the light of day, including a several CHI papers, a forthcoming special issue of New Media & Society, and a coedited volume entitled Sensing XR: Bodies, Technology, Interaction (Salter, Mondada & Sormani, in preparation).
The two-day midterm meeting took stock of the running project, its empirical results and multiple insights, while identifying next moves and promising crossovers for project finalization (until 31 October 2027, the scheduled closing date of Probing XR’s Futures). The meeting program may thus be summarized in three familiar questions: “What have we done? What have we learned? And what’s next?”. In answer to these questions, Day I invites its participants, and the research team members in particular, to assemble and revisit their principal results, insights, and pending questions, be it in terms of form [1], fiction [2], and/or interaction [3], if not breaching experiments, critical disability, and more [4]. On this basis, Day II invited discussion on epistemic implications, aesthetic possibilities, and crossover experimentation – that is, in and across form, fiction, and interaction, the project’s main strands of interdisciplinary inquiry so far.