Christopher Ball
Building a Better Future: Addressing Social Challenges with Immersive Technologies
Christopher Ball, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
Immersive technologies have tremendous implications for society. The social factors theme aims to holistically explore immersive technologies' social dimensions and ramifications. For example, there is a need to examine growing ethical, privacy, and inequality concerns related to immersive technologies. In this talk, I will discuss the benefits and challenges of immersive technologies, focusing on the importance of social factors when addressing social problems. Therefore, I will discuss some of my research examining VR adoption from a digital inequality perspective. I will then highlight some of the work on campus that confronts social problems in innovative and socially conscious ways. My talk concludes with a call for collaboration to proactively tackle the challenges that immersive technologies might address and create to build a better future with these technologies.
Biography
Christopher Ball, PhD, is an assistant professor of augmented and virtual reality at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign within the Department of Journalism, Institute of Communications Research, Informatics (faculty affiliate), and the IMMERSE: Center for Immersive Computing (faculty affiliate). His research interests involve the influence of new interactive and immersive media technologies on society and how these new technologies can be studied and harnessed for research, education, and outreach purposes. More specifically, his research addresses digital inequality and other related social problems by utilizing video games, virtual reality, and augmented reality for prosocial purposes.
Learn more about Christopher Ball and his work at https://christopherballphd.com/.