Did you also enjoy Immersive Tech Week? During this anniversary edition, our ECDA team members participated in diverse sessions.
Our Academic Director Yvonne van Everdingen was part of the expert panel during the ‘Digital Humans’ session with Marije Brom, and Gerard Nijboer. The panel, moderated by Harmen van Sprang, led to many interesting discussions on the applications of avatars and showed that digital humans will be an essential part of how we communicate and engage as citizens, customers, professionals, or students.
One of the conclusions was that is important to experiment with avatars and study the societal impact of these digital humans. Here, quadruple helix collaborations between academia, government, industry, and individual end users are essential.
We discussed:
– Digital humans, by being customizable by the end-user, could lead to more user engagement and promote inclusivity across gender, ethnicity etc.
– Using a watermark for digital humans might help users distinguish between real and digital humans. Also, digital representations of real humans have to be protected and raise many ethical questions.
– The experts agreed that digital humans could be our future colleagues going forward, not substituting but complementing our jobs.
We also enjoyed the launch of SHINE (South Holland Immersive Network & Ecosystem). At the playground, we joined the Provincie Zuid-Holland and Gemeente Rotterdam in their booth to celebrate this special occasion, together with many startups from the South Holland region.
Our immersive tech engineer, Marie Kegeleers, supported diverse sessions at the XR arena. Here, amongst others, Phantom gave an interesting talk about their Journey Lens – smart glasses that improve your focus and well-being. The glasses can make you aware of your concentration during the day, stimulating a deeper kind of focus and helping you to consciously face digital distractions, often brought about by social media or digital alerts.
