FUSION - Future Social Interaction in XR

FUSION envisions immersive technologies that create hybrid experiences continuously in everyday life. Immersive technologies will fundamentally change how we experience reality and connect with each other. This change presents unresolved challenges for how we will behave, interact, and relate to each other in a possible future where XR is always available.

There is a present-future gap in immersive technologies because we do not yet understand how to stabilise interaction in hybrid reality/virtuality. Because individuals can experience materially different realities, interaction can destabilise without shared points of reference. Collisions, gaps, and mismatches between social signals as individuals move across the XR continuum are also a source of instability. To realise the potential of XR to bring us together, we need new models and techniques for enabling stable interactions in XR.

FUSION proposes a novel fusion of social signals between individuals and across realities to improve how we interact in XR. This approach will advance our understanding of how people experience hybrid reality/virtuality together, enable new measurements of stability during hybrid interactions, and improve the quality of interaction in XR. FUSION will produce novel models of social signals during hybrid interactions and establish the first measurements of stability and quality for interaction in hybrid reality/virtuality.