Call for Papers

Thinking Within Symposium, Call for Papers

Symposium date: 12/2/2017

Location: Penn State, University Park, PA

Deadline for abstracts: 11/10/2017

Website: https://sites.psu.edu/thinkingwithin2017/

Immersive technologies, that is, everything from augmented to virtual realities (short xR), are improving human live. At the minimum they make it tremendously more exciting. While envisioned decades ago, immersive technologies only now enter mainstream as tech giants like Google, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft, to name just a few, push the technology through massive investments and have successfully addressed cyber sickness and affordability issues.

With immersive technologies becoming a phenomenon of mass communication it is essential to conceptually and empirically address how they change education and learning and how they foster insights that other technologies are falling short of delivering. There are unique characteristics of immersive technologies as a medium that have the potential to be disruptions to existing communication paradigms. One example is the ability to present spatial environments at scale that otherwise have to be scaled down to, for example, fit on a screen.

This symposium will bring together educators and researchers that address questions of how immersive technologies change their approach to learning and understanding. While we are certainly in need of conceptual clarification we particularly encourage empirical contributions.

The style of the symposium mimics its predecessor, The Pennsylvania and Friends Spatial Cognition Symposium, in that we will have a number of prominent keynote speakers but otherwise will be focusing on presentations by junior researchers including graduate students. Depending on the number of submissions we will be adding a poster option to presentations.

Symposium topics include but are not limited to:

Empirical evaluations of immersive technologies
Immersive environments for empirical evaluations
Availability of standardized 3D environments
Mobile versus fixed-screen applications
Theoretical contributions to theories benefitting from immersive technologies (e.g., place, genius loci)
Revisiting communication paradigms
Virtual field trips
Augmented field trips
xR in the classroom
Remaining technical challenges
Efficient workflows
Democratizing xR