Designing the Future of Immersive Research: A Holistic Human Experience (HE) Working Lab
Immersive technologies are advancing rapidly — yet adoption lags, and development often remains fragmented across technical, psychological, and social domains. What would change if we treated human experience as the organizing architecture for immersive research, design, and evaluation?
This breakout session is a live working lab built around a new Holistic Human Experience (HE) Framework developed by the IMMERSE Center’s Human Experience Thrust. The framework integrates:
- Seven interacting processing layers (from perceptual and cognitive to social and socio-technical adoption)
- Four stakeholder perspectives (users, non-users, creators/developers, governors)
- Three evaluation dimensions (human-centered, societal, and technical)
Rather than optimizing isolated features, the framework provides a navigation system for addressing complex immersive challenges holistically — anticipating cross-layer effects, stakeholder trade-offs, and long-term societal implications.
What This Session Will Do
This breakout is not a lecture. It is a structured co-design and validation lab.
Participants will:
- Stress-test the HE framework against real-world challenges drawn from the community
- Nominate high-value use cases (e.g., a proposed feature, training platform, therapeutic application, or collaborative system)
- Apply the framework in small working groups to:
- Clarify which layers are implicated
- Identify missing datasets or evaluation criteria
- Surface stakeholder trade-offs
- Anticipate dynamic cross-layer effects
- Strengthen methodological or design logic
By the end of the session, we aim to generate 4–5 refined, community-driven use cases that demonstrate the practical utility of the framework — contributing to a growing public knowledge base and informing the forthcoming white paper publication.
Who Should Participate
- Researchers designing immersive studies
- Developers building XR systems
- Industry partners seeking clearer ROI and adoption logic
- Policymakers concerned with governance and equity
- Anyone working on a problem where immersive technology could be better scoped, evaluated, or justified
If you have a project that feels promising but under-structured, technically strong but adoption-weak, or socially impactful but methodologically diffuse, bring it.