SSH-XR is launching a seminar series that showcases research using virtual reality and other immersive technologies across the social sciences and humanities.
Time: 14:15–15:45
Location: Unioninkatu 37, Faculty meeting room (Room 1066) + hybrid on Zoom (link will be sent before each seminar)
Upcoming seminars
19 March 2026: Nina Rapoport (Aix-Marseille School of Economics), Looking the part: Gender, virtual bodies and willingness to compete
Registration: coming soon
Bio. Nina Rapoport is a postdoctoral fellow at Aix-Marseille School of Economics. Her research lies at the intersection of economics and psychology, with a focus on the psychological mechanisms underlying gender inequality in the labor market. Alongside traditional experimental methods, she incorporates virtual reality interventions, as well as insights from psychology and cognitive science. She obtained her PhD from the Paris School of Economics in 2025 and was previously a member of the Behavioral Economics Group at the Inter-American Development Bank.
Past seminars
12 February 2026: Romi Mikulinsky (Tampere University), Speculative Publics: Designing Governance for Phygital Environments
Registration:
Abstract. The rise of smart glasses and spatial computing signals a dramatic transformation in how people perceive and engage with the world around them. Unlike screen-based devices that pull our attention away, these systems embed digital overlays directly into everyday environments, blurring the line between the physical and the computational. We call these hybrid environments “phygital spaces” (Altshuler et al., 2025) to emphasize their social, cultural, and ethical implications, rather than their underlying technical infrastructure.
With the introduction of AI-enhanced glasses by Meta and Google, and new XR devices by companies such as Samsung and Apple in 2026, AI-driven interfaces will become widespread (Williams 2025). Unlike traditional algorithmic systems, phygital spaces rely on continuous AI sensing, inference, and prediction that shape what users perceive and how they interact with other people, machines, and their surroundings. Existing governance approaches, including Privacy by Design (Cavoukian, 2009) and Human Rights by Design (Yeung et al., 2019), remain anchored in data protection, overlooking the relational, embodied, and socio-spatial transformations introduced by AI-mediated perception. Building on insights from critical STS, digital rights, and design research (Bendor 2021, Bleecker et al., 2023, Dunne & Raby, 2013), this paper argues that the convergence of AI and XR profoundly transforms socio-spatial dynamics, public spaces, and collective rights - yet remains under-theorized and insufficiently regulated.
Our paper presents a year-long interdisciplinary research programme bringing together policymakers with interaction designers, producing an innovative methodology for translating values and rights associated with near-future technologies into the language of regulation. The methodology combined:
1) speculative scenarios and worldbuilding to articulate near-future contexts where AI-enhanced glasses are common;
2) legal mapping to examine how these scenarios fit - or exceed - current rights frameworks;
3) field diaries documenting existing public spaces while imagining their transformation under AI-mediated vision;
4) participatory role-play workshops where experts from law, technology, urban innovation, and design enacted conflicting roles within simulated phygital environments. These gamified workshops surfaced ethical, and interpersonal tensions (“unknown unknowns”) that traditional empirical methods fail to capture.
We developed a new framework for governing phygital public spaces, entitled “the Ethics of Interactions.” We identified five modes of interaction: person-to-person, person-to-space, person-to-reality, person-to-machine, and person-to-platform (P2P, P2S, P2R, P2M, P2PL). These modes provide an analytical lens for understanding shifts in visibility, trust, autonomy, privacy, and shared experience.
Our findings show how AI-driven overlays shape public space by selectively highlighting or suppressing environmental cues; how AI-assisted perception destabilizes shared reality, producing divergent experiences of the same environment; and how AI inference enables new forms of interpersonal surveillance, including emotion tracking and behavioural prediction. We further show how AI’s infrastructural role redistributes power across urban spaces, individuals, and platforms, echoing broader debates on platform governance, spatial justice, and infrastructural publicness (Frischmann and Benesch, 2022; Crawford, 2021).
Taken together, these insights demonstrate that design-led methodologies offer a valuable contribution to shaping regulatory futures. Speculative scenarios and participatory enactments allow policymakers to experience emerging sociotechnical dynamics in a situated, affective, and immediate way, enabling them to identify governance blind spots at a formative stage.
Bio. Romi Mikulinsky is a design strategist, researcher, and game designer working at the intersection of emerging technology, ethics, and societal transformation. With over 20 years of experience across academia and the international IT and media industries, she develops participatory tools, game environments, and gamified foresight formats for municipalities, foundations, and research consortia in Europe, Japan, and Israel. Formerly Head of the Master’s Program in Industrial Design at Bezalel Academy, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is currently a researcher at Tampere University’s Game Research Lab, exploring how AI, spatial computing, and immersive environments reshape cities, workplaces, decision-making, and collective imaginaries.
In 2026, SSH-XR will organise two City Centre campus-wide methodology workshops. The workshops will focus on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches to virtual reality, offering hands-on examples, tools, and space for peer feedback.