Active Arts, Culture & Design Computing & AI

FUSION - Future Social Interaction in XR

Funder UKRI
Recipient organisation University of Glasgow
Funding £1.7M
Period Apr 2024 — Apr 2029

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

When you put on a virtual reality headset, the person standing next to you in the same room may be seeing a completely different world—and that mismatch can make social interaction awkward, confusing, or even impossible. This project tackles a fundamental gap in immersive technology: we do not yet know how to keep social interactions stable when people experience different blends of physical and virtual reality. As individuals move between real and digital environments, their social signals—eye contact, gestures, tone of voice—can collide or fail to align, destabilising conversation and shared understanding. FUSION will develop new models that fuse social signals across different realities, allowing people to interact more naturally even when their visual or auditory experiences diverge. The team aims to create the first-ever measurements of interaction stability and quality in hybrid reality/virtuality. This is primarily fundamental research into how humans behave when reality is no longer shared. If successful, it could eventually underpin everything from remote surgery and collaborative design to everyday video calls and virtual meetings—any situation where people need to work or socialise together across mixed realities.

View original technical description
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.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Julie Williamson (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Social and hUman ceNtered XR
Cyberselves in Immersive Technologies
Identity Fusion in Virtual Groups: The Impact of Shared Dysphoric Experiences in Global Echo Chambers on Online Radicalisation
Frameworks of transdisciplinary practice for the creation of interactive and immersive XR experiences, incorporating generative AI and real-time data
Cyberselves: How Immersive Technologies will Impact our Future Selves

Original classification

Research Grant

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