Dear fellow Scholars, my name is Jan Ole Rixen, and I'm a research associate with the Institute for Media Informatics of the University of Ulm Germany.
Today I want to talk to you about our work on exploring future AR devices
and how their capability to influence our visual perception of the world around us might impact our interpersonal communications.
For this reason, please imagine a Future AR device looking like ordinary prescription glasses,
but having scene understanding and capability to opaquely display on the full Field-of-View.
Possessing such a Device, we can now overlay reality and visually shape it the way we want.
Today, we are often talking about the acceptance of AR devices themselves, but leave aside
the acceptance and impact of what the devices will be doing in and to our daily lives.
We, therefore, wanted to explore how augmented visual alterations are influencing
our social interactions in before the technical feasibilities arise,
and therefore keep the discussion about what should be done one step ahead.
To explore this topic, we needed a simple, understandable, and yet universal reason for carrying out visual alterations.
These, in turn, can not be based on aesthetic preferences alone,
which of cause would vary between participants in a potential study.
We found this reason in the so-called Color-in-Context theory.
In summary, it says that we not only perceive color aesthetically but that perceiving color alone can trigger subconscious reactions in certain situations.
As an example, our subconscious mind knows that when people get angry, their blood circulation is raised, and they appear redder.
But it can not differentiate between if the person is red in the face or if they are just wearing a red shirt
and subconscious mind readies us for conflict in an equal way.
Over the cause of a day, we face a multitude of situations and in most of them, we perceive color.
As our future AR device possesses scene understanding and can overlay reality,
it can now help us by overlaying colors that trigger effects we deem as negative while changing color to induce positive ones.
It could therefore recolor a Goalkeeper's red jersey to raise our chance
of scoring in a football (or as you might know it: soccer) match.
On the contrary, we could recolor our own to make us feel more dominant and more venturesome.
At this point, I want to emphasize that we do not argue for or against color alterations in augmented reality.
We, in turn, developed the concept as an explainable reason for executing visual alterations that are not purely aesthetical.
We, therefore, use this concept to get inside into peoples feelings about the thought of visually altering themselves or another person
or, in turn being altered by someone else.
In an online social-acceptability study with 64 participants,
we therefore used this concept as a carrier to explore how either of the conversational partners felt when
the devices wearer
their opposite
or objects disconnected from them are visually altered in the wearer's view only
and how it is influenced by their relation to each other.
We also explored which parts of their bodies the participants felt comfortable with being altered for both persons.
For time purpose, we only present some of the results, please refer to our paper for full insight.
For example, we found a self-stigma against alterations when being with a close person where the person not wearing an AR-Device
and therefore not perceiving the visual alterations
was more comfortable with the thought of being altered than the wearer with altering them.
Generally, we propose that you could stand towards visual alterations in two ways:
On the one hand, if you possess a private display that only you can see
, for others, there should be no different from you just imagining it.
Limiting the possibility to perceive the world the way you want it to be could be regarded as censorship.
Contrary, visually altering someone could be regarded as a strong intrusion into a persons self-determination,
as they can no longer decide how they want to appear to others on a visual level.
This is what a participant in our study stated:
No matter which train of thought you might entertain, we can agree on one thing.
With our work, we took a first peek into how visual alterations might impact social interaction,
but the topic needs a bigger discussion that should be held before technological availability arises.
Thank you for your Attention