Mr. Isak de Villiers Bosman, a lecturer in the BIS Multimedia degree, presented at the 4th African Human Computer Interaction Conference in East London, which took place in East London, South Africa. AfriCHI’23 is organised by a pan-African team, in co-operation with the Association of Computer Machinery’s Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction, ACM SIGCHI.

He presented a short paper titled "The relationship of visual and aural perspective with decentering in virtual reality", which was written in collaboration with researchers from Tampere University, Finland, and University of Bergen, Norway. The paper abstract reads as follows:

Several areas of application for virtual reality technologies have seen significant growth recently, including mindfulness practice. This paper investigates the relationship between the mindfulness-related construct of decentering, i.e., detaching oneself from automatic thinking and observing one's thoughts and emotions, and body representation within virtual reality. Using a within-subjects approach, we investigated whether a third-person perspective, both in terms of visual and aural representation, affects decentering in virtual reality. This was done using a virtual reality application that presented a guided body-scan meditation in virtual reality and utilised these different forms of perspective. Our results do not show a significant effect of either form of perspective on decentering in virtual reality.

The paper is published (Open Access) here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628096.3628741