Inaugural Lecture by Jens Emil Grønbæk

Title
Blended Realities: Bridging Space and Time for Collaboration

Abstract
Tools like Zoom and Teams have transformed the way we collaborate globally, yet they often fail to support the fluidity and creativity of face-to-face collaboration. In this talk, I will present the vision of Blended Realities – distributed multiuser workspaces that provide the familiarity of face-to-face collaboration augmented with beyond-reality interaction capabilities. In Blended Realities, users can move around together and sketch on a whiteboard as if in the same space. But they can also change the shape of their space to suit the task at hand, or record and share sessions across time zones. Drawing from proxemics, I will describe the principles underlying this vision and demonstrate it with prototypes, leveraging XR and AI technologies. Building new bridges is hard, but I will present a 5-year roadmap for my research plans toward enabling Blended Realities.

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Everyone is welcome! 

There will be refreshments after the lecture