Responsible Immersive Support for Firefighter Retreat under Unreliable Spatial and Communication Information
Firefighters retreating from a building work under extreme time pressure, poor visibility and high mental load - precisely when positioning and communication can become unreliable. The University of Twente is investigating how immersive systems can make that uncertainty visible and understandable, so that digital cues support decision-making without creating false certainty or placing an extra burden on users.
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Van ethische dilemma’s naar toekomstdenken: immersieve technologie als katalysator voor inclusieve besluitvorming
Technological innovations bring urgent ethical questions with them. These questions call not only for an assessment of what is desirable, but also for anticipating possible futures and the values that are central to them. A major barrier to inclusive decision-making is a lack of futures awareness and ethical capacity. Many people find it hard to imagine the implications of technology. Non-users in particular experience a knowledge gap and feel they cannot join the conversation, even though they do undergo technology's impact. This problem is reinforced because the future of a technology is often imagined by a handful of companies whose business models encourage polarisation and digital dependency, while environmental impact and social costs are externalised. This increases the likelihood of one-sided decision-making. The project applies ethics-by-design by involving a city's residents inclusively and actively in exploring ethical dilemmas around emerging technology. We use social friction as a source of innovation and connect technology development to values such as safety, power and inclusion. The research focuses on strengthening the imagination through two 'Moral Labs': 1 - a traditional presentation (image and text), followed by a conversation; 2 - an immersive presentation in Virtual Reality (VR), followed by a conversation. In both scenarios, several participants discuss the positions taken and the moral dilemmas together. The VR intervention uses multiplayer functionality to create social presence. By running a moderated split test on the two scenarios above, this research weighs the effectiveness of an immersive experience against the traditional presentation. The richness of both conversations is analysed using Ahvenharju's (2018) five dimensions of futures consciousness and the LIWC tool (Boyd, 2022). The results offer insight into how immersive technology can contribute to inclusive ethical dialogue and democratic decision-making.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Exploring the Potential of VR for Decolonial Storytelling
A key focus of the CIIIC stimulus programme is public values. How do we ensure that IX applications are developed, applied and used responsibly? This theme runs as a common thread through all funded projects. The project by Inholland University of Applied Sciences (with, among others, the Nationaal Archief and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek) even focuses entirely on public values. Central to it is the question of how scriptwriters can responsibly develop cinematographic VR narratives about colonial histories and their repercussions in present-day society.
Stage IX
LAUNCHPAD NINE aims to transform the fragmented Dutch IX sector by building an artist-centred infrastructure that unites creation, production, presentation and education. The activity programme generates openly accessible methodologies and toolkits, creates sustainable talent trajectories and reclaims imagination by challenging technology-driven paradigms. The programme works with intensive residencies built around practice-based research with emerging and established artists and collectives, who are recruited through an open call. Each residency includes workshops, prototyping and public activations. Artistic creation processes serve as the main research engine, with residencies generating insights across three research clusters: 'pedagogy, knowledge exchange & documentation', 'sustainable production workflows', and 'audience engagement & experience'.
The Locus Of Fear 7 (TLOF_7)
One example is the project The Locus of Fear, in which UMC Amsterdam collaborates with the University of Twente and two IX creators from the cultural and creative industry. In this practice-oriented art research, they investigate how IX can help to better understand and measure experiences of fear.