[아트&테크놀로지] Imagination Seminar (03/20)

Title: Rethinking Immersion in Extended Reality

Date & Time: March 20 (Friday) at 1:30 PM

Venue: X514 Immersive Hall

Speaker: Kimberly Hieftje, PhD; Veronica Weser, PhD, Shu Wei, PhD

Abstract:

This talk will incorporate a series of three mini-talks from three researchers and XR developers from the Yale Center for Immersive Technologies in Pediatrics and the XRPediatrics at Yale. Dr. Hieftje will introduce the lab and center, sharing the team’s work designing and studying immersive experiences for young people.  She will open a conversation about immersion as a fundamentally human experience, one that precedes and extends far beyond screens and virtual environments and ask what it might mean to rethink how technology can shape the way experiences are felt and remembered. Drawing on projects from her lab that incorporate spatial audio, soundscapes, hand and eye tracking, and physiological input, she will examine how emerging tools engage perception and ask what it takes to create experiences that feel genuinely meaningful without relying on visuals alone.
Dr. Weser will discuss how young adults remember real and virtual objects in mixed reality (MR) environments. She will highlight recent findings that identify features make virtual objects feel “real,” why some objects are misremembered, and what these patterns reveal about source monitoring in immersive technology. The focus will be on the implications for safety, design, and preventing false memories as immersive technology becomes more widely available.
Dr. Shu will introduce The Arborist, an MR artwork that transforms participants’ biometric signals into living digital forms. Through this project, she explores how physiological data can move beyond sensing to become a creative medium in immersive environments, enabling new forms of participatory storytelling and collective artmaking.

Speaker Bios:

Kimberly Hieftje, PhD is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine and co-founder and co-director of XRPediatrics and the Yale Center for Immersive Technologies in Pediatrics. Her work centers on developing and evaluating XR and game-based interventions to improve youth health outcomes. With more than 16 years in health behavior change and child-centered design, she has led NIH, CDC, industry, and foundation-funded projects using immersive technologies in clinical and educational settings, with a focus on narrative, spatial audio, and biometric integration. Dr. Hieftje has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Games for Health Journal. Dr. Hieftje is a strong advocate for ethical guidelines around youth XR use and is actively engaged in shaping policy and best practices for immersive health interventions,

Veronica Weser, PhD is Associate Director of XR Pediatrics at the Yale Center for Immersive Technology in Pediatrics and a Research Scientist at Yale School of Medicine. She studies how virtual and augmented reality can improve the wellbeing of youth and young adults. Working with an interdisciplinary team, she contributes to the full development and evaluation of evidence-informed game-based health interventions, from stakeholder interviews through real-world testing in schools and hospitals. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Virginia, focusing on extended reality and human perception, and applies this foundation to design immersive, research-driven interventions for pediatric patients and caregivers.

Shu Wei, PhD is a XR developer and researcher, creating XR experiences that blend art, technology, and youth wellbeing. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford focused on virtual reality for psychiatry and has over a decade of experience designing immersive systems with vulnerable communities. Her work has been presented at venues including Games for Change and the Serious Play Conference, and recognized with awards such as Best 3D UI at IEEE VR and Best Android XR at MIT Reality Hack. 

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