MIX Immersive Experience Design and Extended Realities Panel Series

Join us as students from Associate Professor Ana Herruzo's Emerging Media Colloquium class lead a multi-week-long symposium on experience design and extended realities. This class focuses on professional and community development outcomes for the graduate programs in emerging media. 

Students featured in this series will speak critically about topics that they care about in the fields that are advancing at the MIX Center and hear new perspectives. 

Free and open to the public every Monday from Oct. 21 - Dec. 2 (except Veterans Day)! These panels will take place at the ASU MIX Center inside Theater 201. Below are the following topics that will be discussed along with a Q&A from the audience:

Navigating the Next Frontier with Ethics in XR

Moderator: Vedika Bhasin

Panelists: Sparrow Dineen, Orion Dobos, Kacy Hatfield, Anish Powar, Hemanth Kontham

Date: Oct. 21

As immersive technologies like extended reality (XR) integrate into everyday life, ethical considerations become increasingly complex for both developers and companies. This talk will explore the ethical dilemmas surrounding XR, particularly regarding consent in data collection and user experience, while examining emerging technologies like AI and decentralization as potential solutions.

XR experiences, prevalent in industries such as healthcare, gaming, entertainment, and education, raise significant concerns about transparency, informed consent, and data security, especially given the accessibility of users' physical, emotional, and psychological states. The immersive nature of XR introduces both opportunities for innovation and risks, including psychological distress and exposure to harmful content.

Fad or Fact: Can extended reality technologies improve the educational outcomes of students?

Moderator: William Jesse Martinez

Panelists: Alba Olive Marti, Anishika John, Yan Rong, Michael Searle, Lou Shi, Anish Powar

Date: Oct. 28

The relevance and applications of Extended Reality technologies (XR) will likely continue to increase throughout the world in the following decades, mimicking the exponential spread of current mobile communication devices. However, there are several barriers for this technology to truly become a part of daily living. Whether it be cost, public opinion, or hardware functionality, the shift from industry use to wide-scale public acquisition may take several decades. Despite this, the possibilities of XR in various fields such as entertainment, education, training, etc. continue to grow and should be critically assessed now to determine what factors are most important for their effectiveness. This discussion highlights different perspectives on the practical implementation of XR technologies in the field of education to improve the cognitive abilities of the next generation of students, and how these new-age curriculum tools can be distributed to students with traditionally lower access to high-quality educational resources. This panel’s questions will largely focus on the efficacy and practicality of XRT at different levels of education, analyzing the components that are needed for successful implementation.

Designing for Everyone: Addressing Accessibility in Immersive Experience Design

Moderator: Julianna Piechowicz Monteiro
Panelists: Kirti Ashok Jain, Yumeng Jia, Marisa Costagliola, Pranshi Jindal

Date: Nov. 4

Many are familiar with the term accessibility, but what does it truly mean? Traditionally, accessibility ensures that a product or experience is usable to everyone, providing them with equal opportunities, regardless of their level of ability or circumstance. As technology advances and users' needs evolve, the meaning of accessibility must also adapt. It is no longer just about physical access, it is about creating experiences that are inclusive, engaging, and designed to meet diverse user needs. As these emerging technologies open doors for creating interactive opportunities and interfaces, they raise critical questions about how to ensure they are available for all users. Designers and artists must rethink their approach to accessibility in virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality environments. 

Transitioning from Flat Media to Extended Realities (XR)

Moderator: Yannie Szeto

Panelists: Faith Popov, Zesheng Wang, Elizabeth Leung, Hajin Ahn, Smit Vrajlal Tarpara

Date: Nov. 18

This discussion will explore the transition from flat media, like videography, photography, and graphic design, where content is presented on 2D surfaces such as screens or paper, into the world of extended reality (XR). We’ll look at how skills from flat media can be adapted for immersive environments and address the unique challenges and opportunities XR presents.  

Sound & Immersive Experience: Implementations of Spatial Audio in Immersive Media

Moderator: Mikale Kaminer

Panelists: Lydia Cabasco, Sriraj Rajkumar, Jesus Franco Yescas, Michael Shaughnessy, Celia Yang

Date: Nov. 25

As the field of immersive audio experience becomes inundated with varying workflows, use cases, and methods of implementation - accurate quantitative measurements and research to support effectiveness and standardization of practices in such forms of subjective media are particular sources of debate for many professionals within the industry. The question concerning the effectiveness of immersive audio implementations remains a largely unexplored area of research. The effect of audio on the experience in virtual reality in their research, determining the effectiveness of music performed over ambition and Dolby Atmos environments and the effect of audio on virtual reality experiences, respectively, result in inconclusiveness in preference or effective standardizations that consistently point towards a necessity of further research and understanding of such topics.

The Battle Against AI in Art and Technology: Can we find synergy while preserving our jobs?

Moderator: Lilliana Lopez

Panelists: Jo Peterson, Nancy Zuo, Micaiah Wiafe, Odinchezo Nwosu, Hsin-Yu Chang, Olivia Reyes

Date: Dec. 2

From art to code, artificial intelligence has become a key part of our creative and technological projects--whether we like it or not. AI has grown so fast, that regulations on it are struggling to keep up, with heated debates on the ethics of using AI being brought into question. More and more companies are choosing to employ AI prompters to generate images instead of creating them, taking jobs away from the artists who create the very images that AI is trained with. How do we stop this from happening? Can we find a middle ground, continuing to use AI as a tool instead of replacing artists? How have artists already been affected by this in the XR and video game industry?