Speaker: Lars Erik Holmquist (Nottingham School of Art & Design, UK)

Topic: Liberated Pixels and Virtual Production: A Framework and a Test Case for XR Beyond Glasses

Recording: TDB

Bio: Professor of Design and Innovation at the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University Professor Holmquist has worked at universities and industry labs in Sweden, USA, Japan and UK. His research areas include human-computer interaction, digital innovation, mobile services, ubiquitous computing, information visualisation and immersive experiences. His work has been presented at major academic conferences including CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST, UbiComp, Mobile HCI, InfoVis and ECSCW. His book Grounded Innovation: Strategies for Creating Digital Products provides a practical guide to the design-driven innovation process, with many examples drawn from his own research. More about current research can be found at the Connected Experiences Lab, CX Lab.

Abstract: Despite extensive technical and user-oriented research, Augmented, Mixed and Extended Reality (AR, MR and XR) still has limited impact in the consumer domain. This may be due to the lack of suitable consumer devices such as glasses, as well as that non-glasses alternatives such as projection displays require expensive infrastructure. To accelerate research in XR beyond glasses, I propose a two-pronged approach. First, to provide a viable user experience, I argue that graphics for future XR environments will need to fulfil 3 criteria: they need to be perceivable, addressable, and persistent to all users in the physical world. I propose the framework Liberated Pixels as a research program to achieve this. Second, to develop viable XR products beyond glasses, I believe that virtual production (VP) can present a test case for new technologies. In VP, virtual environments are combined with human actors and physical sets and props, providing a compelling use case where virtual and physical environments are mixed.