“I want to make virtual worlds more accessible for all”
Dr. Kata Szita is a research fellow at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin. She has published widely on user experiences, cognitive and physiological processes and behaviour in terms of mobile technology, augmented reality, virtual reality and the metaverse.
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Dr Kata Szita has always loved gadgets and playing around with new technologies.
“I'm also reflective of how I use them, how I experience gadgets or applications or what I feel when I use virtual reality. What elements worked for me? How can they be improved potentially? What are the interesting phenomena that could be researched a little further? A lot of my research has been inspired by these ideas.”
Her career goal is to make virtual technologies more accessible and Dr Szita’s current research in the Insight Centre looks at improving the quality of music experiences for people with hearing impairment.
“The whole idea behind this project that I'm involved with here at UCD is the fact that people with hearing impairments and those who are using hearing aids or cochlear implants have a hard time listening to music because of how these devices are calibrated or set up. Basically when these people are listening to music, it's just a blur of noise,” she explains. “The project that we're working on aims to create a tool where we can change, in real time, the different aspects of music - the pitch, the volume and other aspects - in order to make it not only bearable but also enjoyable for people with hearing impairments. This project is about using augmented reality (AR) technology to achieve this so it's not something that has to be translated through a computer; instead while one is listening, it is happening in real time.”
"The project that we're working on aims to create a tool where we can change, in real time, the different aspects of music - the pitch, the volume and other aspects - in order to make it not only bearable but also enjoyable for people with hearing impairments."
Besides the examples of Pokémon Go, the hugely popular 2016 AR mobile phone game, and the function allowing you to add features like bunny ears to yourself while on video calls, she describes AR as “a pretty complex thing” and “a useful tool for adapting sensory experiences in real time for all sorts of stimuli and experiences”.
She adds: “Basically the technology means that a user has access to a real time recording of the physical space, and that is augmented with digitally manipulated, digitally created objects, like little Pokémons or the bunny ears, or the customised music experience.”
Dr Szita has also looked at how watching movies in virtual reality compares with in-person co-viewing.
“This project was inspired by how the pandemic changed practices around entertainment and social activities and was based on my own experience of watching movies in VR. My first impression of using one of these apps by myself just for my own entertainment is that it's less likely that one gets dizzy in virtual environments because of the lack of motion and because you are static and watching a screen but what I was also intrigued by is how people interact with one another.”
For this project her research participants wore VR headsets and watched a movie in a virtual environment with others doing the same.
“Or participants found this to be a pretty natural experience. They were sitting in what looked like a cinema room and they were watching something on the screen and they would even feel that it was a social experience when there were others around. The interesting part of it is that these are avatars that you can’t have physical contact with. You cannot touch them, but at the same time they are around and they can still create a social experience.”
“This project was inspired by how the pandemic changed practices around entertainment and social activities and was based on my own experience of watching movies in VR."
She found that even the in-person experience of collective reactions, like laughter, can also happen in the virtual cinema.
Another of her projects has looked at making smartphone video content more accessible.
“We wanted to understand whether this sort of viewing would produce the same level of emotional engagement or attention as watching something on a big screen.”
Dr Szita found that it doesn’t, especially given all of the distractions of the outside world, and pop-up boxes and notifications on the phone itself.
“I would say that since we are so used to watching videos and films and TV shows on our phones now, our attention is probably a lot more focused than when some of these studies were conducted a couple of years ago. But the fact that people are just more susceptible to distractions is still there; it's still something that has to be dealt with when designing applications and producing content.”
Yet more of Dr Szita’s work has looked at how the avatars people use to represent themselves can impact their behaviour online.
“A lot of people create their avatars deliberately not to reveal certain demographic characteristics in order to fit in,” she says. “Whereas others would appear as an avatar that looks closely like them, but they might face discrimination or issues because of that. So this is why some people adapt their avatars to certain social scenarios in virtual worlds.”
Choosing different avatars can also be a source of fun, escapism and inquiry.
“For transgender individuals, it might be a good way to experiment with who they are or how they identify. Or in some other cases where people with disabilities can explore ways of how to operate objects, move, or learn in virtual environments,” she says. “I guess my ultimate goal is to make extended reality technology - all these different technologies - more accessible to people and more inclusive for certain populations. Because I think a lot of our future social interactions will happen using these technologies and in virtual spaces.”
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