Welcome. Our Collaborative Creative Project addresses some of three themes: Community/Isolation, Grind, and Futurity. In this development blog, we will document our process of creating and demonstrating an idea that addresses these themes.
We have conducted a Second-Person Dating study, where we put pairs of participants on a mediated date where each participant wears a VR headset showing their partner's perspective. We accomplished this by attaching a phone to each headset and having corresponding headsets and phones join the same Zoom meeting. This idea underscores our common pandemic experience of seeing ourselves on camera in online video conferences and extrapolates it to the romantic realm. It also comments on the potential of connection and intimacy between partners without seeing each other, subverting normative expectations in a gendered culture dominated by economies of visibility.