Virtual, Mixed and Augmented Reality Affordable and Useful Experiences in Education and Health

Immersive technologies, including virtual, augmented and mixed reality, offer many possibilities to improve our interactions in different domains. They are currently experiencing a hype boosted by the popularity of the metaverse, however not all the experiences that are being deployed are useful what can derive on underestimating the real value of these technologies. Novelty is not enough to guarantee technology acceptance, as it fades when then honeymoon effect declines. What is required is to support a sustained interest in their use by providing affordable and useful experiences. There is a plethora of scenarios in which immersive technologies provide unique affordances to learn, train or understand better, but this requires a careful design to take profit from the interaction affordances underlying such technologies. In this talk, I will focus first on the unique affordances of immersive technologies (physical, functional, emotional and cognitive) that can be exploited in areas such as education and health. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on strategies to turn immersive experiences from something sophisticated or only used for gaming to environments that improve quotidian activities. First, I will show some examples of affordable immersive technologies and then I will explore to the concept of democratization of innovation that involves engaging end users in creating useful scenarios of use. Codesign practices and end-user development tools can integrate end users and stakeholders into the ideation and design of meaningful use cases in which the full potential of the technologies is adapted to the needs and constraints of the real context of use. All the examples are based on the work done at the Interactive Systems Research Group that has been doing research in these areas for more than two decades.