XR Research

Research Overview

Virtual and Augmented Reality (XR) devices are rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives. This emerging Immersive Technology lets users experience wholly virtual environments (like distant places, times, or even fantasy worlds) in VR, or virtual objects in the real world (Pokemon in your garden, a virtual temperature gauge on your GBBO cake) in AR. This is the much-vaunted metaverse.

I explore what this technology means for our concept of what is real, what it means for the trust we put in perception, and how this technology might disrupt our preferences and decision-making processes.

I have significant industry experience in this area, as well as pertinent philosophical expertise, and Fiona Macpherson and I have attracted significant funding in support of XR projects including: Project Mobius and our RSE Network concerning Augmented Reality (the latter with Derek Brown and Ben Colburn).

In September 2017, I took up the post of Lord Kelvin Adam Smith fellow in Virtual and Augmented Reality at the University of Glasgow. In Summer 2022 I will revert to a standard role within Philosophy at Glasgow.

Presentations:

(* for peer review)

"Autonomy and Immersive Technology" with Ben Colburn

2020 Edinburgh Philosophy Society

2019 Autonomy and Immersive Technology Workshop, Glasgow

"Virtual Fictionalism and the puzzle of virtual theft" with Nathan Wildman

*2019 Politics, The Law, and Ontology, Manchester.

2019 Glasgow Humanities Public Lecture series.

*2018 Salzburg workshop on Fiction and the Law.

"Virtual Reality: Digital or Fictional" with Nathan Wildman

*2018 ESA, Maribor.

"Virtual Reality in Teaching"

*2018 LTDS Conference, Glasgow

"Virtual Causation"

2017 Philosophy of Virtual and Augmented Reality Workshop, Glasgow

"Virtual and Augmented Reality in Science"

*2017 Visualisation in Science Conference, Glasgow