The Uses and Misuses of Embodiment in Virtual Reality- Cancelled

 Please note that this event is cancelled and will be rescheduled for a future date. 

In order to experience any immersive environment—whether it is augmented, mixed or virtual reality—the user’s movements must be tracked. These tracked movements can be used not just to update the content that the user sees, but also to modify how the user sees his or her own body. Tracked movements can tell designers and experimenters about the user’s state of mind. But, transformed movements may also be able to change the users’ state of mind. In this talk, Professor Stevenson Won will talk about recent research from her own and other labs on the representation and perception of the self in media.

Andrea Stevenson Won is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell. She studies embodiment in immersive media; i.e., how people are represented by avatars controlled by their gestures in virtual reality. She is particularly interested in the clinical, educational and collaborative applications made possible by mediated perrception. She is the founder and director of the Virtual Embodiment Lab and a field member of both Communication and Information Science. She received her BFA from the University of Kansas, her MS from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her PhD from Stanford University.