Prof. Marco Gillies

Bio

Marco is a Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is co-director (with Xueni ‘Sylvia’ Pan) of both the Masters in Virtual and Augmented Reality and the Social, Empathic and Embodied Virtual Reality Lab. He has been researching Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence since the late 1990s and has particularly worked on virtual humans and movement based interaction with VR. He also has a long-standing interest in technologies for learning having created the first MOOC from an English University and the first undergraduate degree on a MOOC platform. His work is highly interdisciplinary and includes applications and collaboration with fields such as dance and performance, medicine, education, games development, critical disability studies, developmental psychology and social neuroscience.

Digital technology ignores our physical experience. We interact with technology using only our fingers: pressing buttons and touch screens We primarily perceive the digital world through 2D screens. This is very different from our experience in the real world, where our whole body is engaged in a 3D multi-sensory environment. This vulnerable digital life has serious health and wellness issues, leaving us isolated and physically inactive. Despite many fictional depictions, virtual reality is a deeply embodied experience. What separates it from previous media is that we physically engage with the virtual world, doing the simple act of turning our heads to create an experience of presence: being in virtual reality. The embodied nature of VR has the potential to create healthier ways of engaging with technology and ways of learning that better translate physically embodied tasks into the real world. However, it also raises new challenges for design: we must include the body in our design processes in a way that was not necessary in screen-based media. This involves grappling with embodied knowledge: things we physically know how to do but can’t quite explain in words. Machine learning can tap into our embodied knowledge, as it allows us to implement computer systems by example without explicitly programming them. However, this approach leads us to rethink machine learning as a tool that allows us to reveal our embodied humanity. This talk will illustrate these concepts with a variety of examples, including virtual dance, narrative video games, cognitive tasks, and the effects of virtual organizations.

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