Talks by Joe Marshall and Tommy Nilsson

Joe Marshall - Visual Kinaesthetic Experiences

I’m going to talk about some work with Paul Tennent and others in which we argue that ‘virtual reality’, the use of head mounted displays to create simulations of other realities is only one possible use of head mounted 3d visualisation technology. In particular we focus on kinaesthetic experiences that accompany 3d content – current VR work typically strives to reduce focus from the fact the experience of VR is physically situated in the real world, to achieve ‘immersion’, something that is explicitly defined as being a state that limits awareness of the real physical world; this treats bodily experience either as something to take people’s attention away from, or as something that must be simulated to be as close to the virtual experience as possible. This reality focused treatment of kinaesthetic sensations is only one possible example of a wide ranging design space of what we call ‘visual kinaesthetic experiences’, experiences in which bodily sensations are in some way linked to HMD visuals, but not necessarily in a purely realist and literal manner. Essentially, we believe that the prevailing purely realist treatment of physical sensation in VR should be viewed as analogous to realism in visual art forms, as only one possible option amongst a wide range of possibilities. I’ll demonstrate what we’re on about with reference to VR Playground, an ongoing art project in collaboration with Brendan Walker, involving 6000 members of the public and 8 playground swings.

Tommy Nilsson - “Breaching experiments” as a tool in usability research

Harold Garfinkel, the father of ethnomethodology, introduced a novel research approach centered around the idea of deliberately violating established norms of a community in order to expose and study its social structures. In other words, Garfinkel believed that by confronting people with behaviour that was outside of social norms, their set of expectations about social order would get revealed and in turn become easier to examine.

As various computing solutions are now increasingly invading our homes and other daily life environments, it appears inevitable that our norms will at least partially be violated. This fact has lead multiple researchers to liken the deployment of technological innovations to Garfinkel’s “breaching experiments”. Breaching experiments in this sense can become a valuable tool to reveal the contingent ways in which a novel technology is made to work and the interactional practices organizing that work.

In this talk I will attempt to summarize my experience of using breaching experiments in an HCI context. Specifically, through a series of focus group sessions, I evaluated a set of scenarios deliberately breaching social expectations by postulating unorthodox uses of domestic autonomous systems. By presenting the study design and its key findings, I hope to provide basic insight along with some pros and cons of this research approach.