Immersive Speculative Enactments: Bringing Future Scenarios and Technology to Life Using VR

Can virtual reality (VR) radically change empirical research and development (R&D)? In this talk, I describe the latest developments in the use of VR towards immersive speculative enactments (ISEs, or virtual field studies). In an ISE, participants are immersed in a speculative world or scenario depicted by designers and researchers and can engage with it in its truest envisioned form. This way, researchers can design and run ecologically valid empirical user studies within immersive virtual environments that would, otherwise, be near impossible to run in the real world due to technological limitations, ethical and social concerns, or due to participants' safety. Ultimately, my talk describes various case studies that illustrate how ISEs can use used to reap the benefits of both lab (reproducibility) and field studies (ecological validity).

Speaker:
Augusto ESTEVES - University of Lisbon

This session was recorded at UnitedXR Europe 2025 - the world's largest XR event in Europe. To learn more visit: https://unitedxr.eu/

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