Event overview
Virtual Reality as a Technology of Reconnection
We are becoming increasingly disconnected. Disconnected from our bodies, from other people and from the natural world. Technology, such as mobile devices and social media, is often seen as a key contributor to the disconnection. Virtual Reality, with it’s immersive power has the potential to disconnect us even further. In this talk I will attempt to paint a different picture of how VR could be a technology of reconnection. I will do that through three case studies of projects in the SeeVR Lab. The first, the 4i project, addresses how we can help our disconnection from our bodies by creating ways of interacting that use our whole bodies. Secondly, I will talk about how contemporary social technologies lack the important non-verbal cues that are vital to social connection and how we can build them back in. Finally, I will talk about Sensing Nature, a multisensory VR artwork that aims to help us rebuild our sensibility to the natural world.
Marco Gillies is a Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He co-leads both the Masters in Virtual and Augmented Realty and the Social, Empathic and Embodied VR (SeeVR) research group. He has over 25 years of experience of research at the intersection of AI and VR, having completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge and a post-doc at UCL. He has led and contributed to many research project, these currently include the AHRC BRAID demonstrator project, Archai.art, with the Universities of Nottingham, Exeter and Coventry ; the ESRC project, Plasticity of the Bodily Self with Durham University and the newly funded UKRI cross council project: Asymmetric Augmented Reality with KCL. He has also been a visiting researcher at UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Feb 2026 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
Accessibility
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