DIS 2020 (Virtual)

July 1, 2020July 1, 2020 by alexandrakitson In Uncategorized Leave a comment

This year, due to COVID-19, the ACM Designing Interactive Systems 2020 conference will be completely virtual! All the proceedings will be freely available online from July 6-20, 2020. So, it’s definitely worth it to check out some very interesting papers. Here’s a pre-print of our paper entitled “Designing (Mind)set and Setting for Profound Emotional Experiences in Virtual Reality“.

The jist is that it’s really important to take the physical environment and headspace of the participant when designing for a VR experience that aims to support profound emotional experiences, such as awe, wonder, and compassion (to name a few). There’s already some great design suggestions out there in other non-VR fields, but we thought those same suggestions could apply here to VR. Some of the results seem like a no-brainer, but then again we still see again and again both researchers and industry professionals giving people VR experiences in very non-supportive environments (like labs, showrooms, or malls) and expecting them to have a great time. We hope this work sparks some conversation around not only what we design for VR, but also what we design around it.

Authors were asked to create 10-minute videos of their paper presentations, so here’s ours.

Kitson, A. J., Stepanova, E. R., Aguilar, I. A., Wainwright, N., & Riecke, B. E. (2020). Designing Mind(set) and Setting for Profound Emotional Experiences in Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems (ACM DIS) Conference. Eindhoven, Netherlands: ACM.