UBC 2025 Immersive Research Symposium

Breaking Barriers – Cutting Edge Techniques for Improved XR Accessibility

Dylan Fox, Director of Operations @ XR Access, Cornell Tech, New York

Extended Reality (XR) technologies have already begun to redefine the ways in which we learn, collaborate, and explore.  Yet people with disabilities are often held back from using XR by barriers carelessly carried over from 2D software or from physical reality, worsening the digital divide. Join this talk to learn how we can blast through accessibility barriers with the latest techniques for improved XR accessibility, and why accessibility makes XR technologies better for everyone.

Speaker bio: Dylan Fox is the Director of Operations for XR Access, a research initiative of Cornell Tech. An expert on accessibility for emerging technologies, he advises groups such as Meta, the W3C, and the FCC on how virtual and augmented reality can be more inclusive. He chairs the annual XR Access Symposium and is responsible for many ongoing initiatives to connect disability advocates, technologists, academics, and other key stakeholders to solve difficult problems.  Fox is also a former researcher and Masters graduate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked on ways to leverage augmented reality for people with low vision; and has led UX design on entertainment applications used by millions of people.

To Navigate a Spectral Space: An Immersive Performance Explored Through a Lens of Hauntology

Christopher Anderson, PhD student @ Digital Arts and Humanities

Designing Colour Encodings for Ubiquitous Visualizations in Optical-See-Through Augmented Reality

Charles-Olivier Dufresne-Camaro, PHD student @ Computer Science

Beyond Static Training: Building Adaptive and Intelligent XR Systems for Operator Instruction in Advanced Manufacturing

Iman Jalilvand, Postdoctoral Fellow @ School of Engineering

Interactive Narrative Design for Prosocial Learning

Obi Nwosisi, Master’s student @ Digital Arts and Humanities