The School of EECS, UQ, is hosting the following seminar:

Date: Wednesday, February 7

Time: 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Location: Building 78, Level 3, Room Number: 78-311 – Robotics Lab, UQ

Abstract: We are on the verge of Collaborative Mixed Reality becoming an everyday reality. Consumer headsets like Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro will be in millions of homes. But the research on Mixed Reality remote collaboration has mostly focused on two users working across identical spaces with fixed technology setups. This overlooks the complexity of group dynamics, which often involve shifting spatial configurations of people, furniture, and technologies. In this talk, I address this challenge through Socio-Spatial Computing – my vision for group collaboration via computing devices in which users can harness real objects and spaces for dynamic social interaction. I use prototypes from my prior work to exemplify the vision (incl. shape-changing surfaces, tailorable video-conferencing interfaces, and lightweight Mixed Reality systems). From these examples, I derive open questions and distill principles that may enable more effective scaling of Collaborative Mixed Reality solutions for distributed groups of users.

Bio: Jens Emil Grønbæk is a Postdoc at the University of Melbourne. He has a PhD in computer science from Aarhus University in Denmark. His research interests are Human-Computer Interaction related to Collaboration, Proxemics, and Mixed Reality.