As one of the most accomplished scholars in his field, our own Dr Leighton Evans has been creating some global ripples of late…
On April 29th, Leighton presented a paper at the Digital Worlds Workshop, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. The paper, Being-in-the-Metaverse: Immersion and Worldhood in Digital Worlds as Attunement and Dwelling, was responded to by Doruk Tsakiran of Ryerson University. In the paper, the forthcoming Metaverse is critiqued as a space of commodified alienation which could, if necessary, be a space of human dwelling if this did not conflict with the commercial and control aims of the companies involved in the development of these spaces. This paper will be further developed on in June 2022 when Leighton will present as an invited speaker at the two-day seminar “Questioning immersion. A cross-disciplinary seminar on the theory and design of spatially immersive technologies” at the University of Bergen, Norway. This paper is part of the ongoing research into VR, AR, XR and digital worldhood in the Department of Media and Communication.