Themed Workshop 2 (Afternoon session)

Designing and Studying Meaningful Engagement in Immersive Digital Environments

Description: This workshop aims to advance understanding of a simple question: what makes engagement in immersive digital worlds feel meaningful, and how can we design and study it in the metaverse and other immersive virtual environments? The focus is on people’s experiences, what they do in these spaces, and in the context of consumer experiences, what keeps them coming back over time.

Session 1 focuses on the moment-to-moment experience and interaction between humans and AI in collaborative settings: how presence and social connection are created, how identity and self-expression are expressed through avatars and spaces, how different activities shape engagement, and how we can measure these outcomes clearly. This includes experience design questions that are relevant to socially rich virtual environments, such as trust, agency, competence, and quality of interaction, while accounting for negative factors, such as anxiety, discomfort, and overreliance.

Session 2 focuses on sustained engagement: why people return, what changes as they spend more time in an immersive world, and how longer-term participation can become meaningful and socially grounded rather than merely novel. It also covers how to study these longer-term effects in realistic settings and what context-aware measures and psychometrics are needed to capture them, including measures that translate across consumer, organisational, and service contexts.

The format is discussion-led, and participants are invited to bring early ideas, concepts, methods, design cases, or empirical findings for group discussion and synthesis. A key goal is to foster collaboration and multidisciplinary work, including shared research directions and joint papers. We invite attendees to bring their ideas, challenges, and proposals to the workshop to kick off collaborative work.

The workshop contributes to the Business Finland Project MetaMarketing. 

Chairs: Dr. Emma Jane Pretty (emma.pretty@tuni.fi; main contact), Dr. Jakob Korbel (jakob.j.korbel@tu-berlin.de), Dr. Marc Riar (m.riar@ieseg.fr)