Metaverse
The Metaverse Team aims to analyze interpersonal communication dynamics in social VR applications with a primary emphasis on avatar-mediated human communication.
Team Members
Team Lead, Body Positivity
Tierney Burke
Team Lead, Body Positivity
Megu Kanzawa
Team Lead, Passthrough
Nallely Beltran
Team Lead, Passthrough
Beatrice Hackman
Em Dang
Brianna Delatorre
Karla Hernandez
Eyitayo Makinde
Darrien Mitri
Kate Parent
Avi Patni
Izzy Perez
Aditya Puranik
Jonathan Santosa
Erin Schmidt
Angela Solorzano
Ethan Sychangco
Body Positivity Team
The Body Positivity team is a sub-team focusing on gauging the influence of body image comfort through crafting a VR experience with extensive avatar customization options absent in Facebook and Meta platforms, ultimately looking into avatar interactions and social dynamics in VR to assess virtual self-representation.
Passthrough Team
The Passthrough Team is a sub-team focusing on investigating the social implications and user experiences related to VR headsets' Passthrough Mode in different social contexts to explore its potential for enhancing social presence, communication, and user comfort across various settings.
The Metaverse UX project is focused on critiquing the usability and user experience (UX) of the Meta Quest Pro headsets, exploring topics of body dysmorphia, fashion, and design limitations, including lack of representation, gender conformity and identity, and physical comfort and satisfaction. The project also analyzes the social norms of user behavior, specifically critiquing how the Metaverse fails to acknowledge the organic way individuals adopt and interact with certain platforms and online communities based on existing brand identities.
The Avatar Representation Plug-In is working on the development of an avatar customization game using Readyplayer.me and Unity. The game development is inspired by the lack of body representation options present in current avatar customization sites, such as Readyplayer.me.
In collaboration with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Team, this project is working on using computer vision to analyze body motion and non-verbal communication in a VR environment. The project is using existing algorithms to analyze eye gaze estimation, pose estimation, and nonverbal synchrony, or the synchrony of movements between two individuals during a conversation, using video data from the experiments with the Meta Quest Pro headsets in Meta Horizon Worlds.