Immersive technology's advances pose new risks for user safety and privacy, from risks associated with recorded movements to risks from how virtual environments track user behaviors. Through this research, we hope to examine the challenges of protecting human rights in an emerging paradigm of immersive technology, focusing on novel approaches to guarding data privacy, freedom of speech, and bodily autonomy. As the public struggles to handle the quantity of data already being collected behind opaque privacy policies, we hope to explain how privacy is evolving with emergent immersive technology and trace the routes of data collected in virtual worlds. The Metaverse Park Service supports a design agenda rooted in environmental protection imagining new paradigms of privacy and sustainable data ecologies with XR technology.
Lab activities focus on understanding how to build interactive computing environments that directly augment a user's senses with computer-generated material. Researchers are interested in augmenting the user's perception, and place particular emphasis on the interaction between the users and their environment.
