Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie
Founder and Chief Scientist, All These Worlds, LLC
Bio:
Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is widely known for using technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver meaningful experiences that enrich people’s lives.
Starting in 1990, she developed multi-sensory techniques for VR that predictably elicit emotional responses from participants, for example inventing a scent collar that can deliver aromas to a participant within an immersive experience.
She is also active in social VR spaces and through her company All These Worlds, LLC, has been bringing her techniques to these worlds for Mindfulness applications, storytelling and stress relief.
For NASA she created a virtual world ecosystem called ANSIBLE designed to provide psychological benefits for future astronauts destined to undertake extremely long isolated missions to Mars.
Dr. Morie’s other research interests include how avatars, identity and play in immersive spaces can positively affect our human nature. Dr Morie is currently both a sought-after educator in immersive media and serves as senior advisor to the XPRIZE’s ANA Avatar Prize, which challenges teams to create a robotic avatar people can inhabit from a distance.
Her new 22-chapter book, co-edited with Kate McCallum, The Handbook of Research on the Global Impacts and Roles of Immersive Media, was published in early 2020. Some of her work and images from VR and her extensive Art career can be found at her website morie.org
Keynote Title and Description:
Title:
Musings on creating a meaningful metaverse: Who has the map?
Description:
At a talk in the ancient days of 1994, I described ubiquitous Virtual Reality with full immersion, interactivity and involvement, a harbinger of a future metaverse. Though that future was hardly possible back then, many of us took on various aspects of paving the way for it to happen someday, and now, decades later, we stand on the precipice of defining what it might truly become. For this talk, I will riff on the latest metaverse speculations and what might be possible if our map is more about the travelers than the highway system.
