 Let's get started. I want to introduce our three panelists. Thank you so much for being here. First off, we have Stephen Lee, who's a designer and educator. He has a background in branding, motion, interactive and experience design. He's an assistant professor in the graphic design program at Portland State. And I've actually collaborated with him on some hubs projects in the past for a study and nonprofit here in Portland. So Stephen, thank you. We have Dylan Fox, part of the coordination and engagement team for XR Access, an organization dedicated to making virtual and augmented reality experiences accessible to people with disabilities. He also works as a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. And he's studying how AR can help people with low vision navigate real world obstacles doing some really cool work. Dylan, thanks. And lastly, but definitely not least, Mark Gonzalez Franco, a principal researcher at Microsoft's extended perception, interaction and cognition lab epic. And one last note is that, you know, I'm using VR, but I think for the purposes of this panel, I will extend that to XR. So, are you all ready? Let's go ahead and get started. Mark, I first came across your work when I discovered the locomotion vault. And I'd love to share, I'd love to have you share it actually, and maybe talk about it a little bit. For me, it was the perfect case study in the hubs experience I was building around what's being explored in terms of different ways of getting around in VR. So will you share a little bit more about what led you to build this. I mean, this is, you know, many times, we find that problem that is a problem for us and it's probably the problem for many other people too. And that the applies to accessibility in many cases, right. We find a problem in a general public or inaccessibility and transfers to the general public or from general public to the accessible community and I think this sort of interaction is even much bigger in VR and AR, right, we're still learning from the technology. So I want to share a bit what this locomotion vault is first. So the locomotion vault is more of a dynamic visual exploration and database that is supposed to grow as the community grows also because I think this is a very early times. So one of the things we did here, let me make this a bit bigger. Is we started, you know, I've been working for a while in VR I did some accessibility and locomotion tools myself before, like the ground level scaling in I'm a giant right is work that we presented a couple of years back. With multiple ways of moving across this very large space. And one of the things we found is that there are so many ways to move around. So I talked to Max DeLuca, one of my authors in this work. At the early days we were like, hey, let's look at how many locomotion techniques are out there, right, very much exploratory. And we know that the research arena maybe has not moved as fast as for example some development. So we were like, it doesn't matter if it hasn't been published right like if it's out there and people are using it we're interested. And I think it was around when we got to 20 of them that we realized this was going to be on a different scale of numbers and in fact we have over 100 techniques in the database right now that I'm sure we're missing some. When we enroll also has to safety. into preparing this locomotion bolt sees an expert in visualizing databases this way also so partially the idea here is that whatever you need right if you need some sort of a controller technique or you know I want to use gaze only. You could search for it right look you want something that creates a lot of a spatial awareness requires very low energy. And you can multitask, and then you you have reduced the number of possible things that you can use right and this is for example one possible technique. You have things like that joy thing. There are many options right and some are super crazy and hard to even understand just by description so we introduce this idea that you can visualize it a little bit more. And then also YouTube videos possible games that you can try to try what it feels like right. For example, this is a technique that you're in third person, but you can also teleport and be in first person, right. So it gives you these overview and also the detail of interacting in first person perspective. And this comes also a little bit from this idea that we publish a couple of your bags on, you know, it's an opportunity for virtual reality that we, we think of an accessible design from the start, right. You know, there are very few technologies in which we have had this awareness of accessibility before we even started creating things. And I think we are is is one of them. I welcome people to go through these, you know they're all sorts of things things that only require hand movements. Things that are based in controllers and I want to go a little bit from all of the analysis we did after we introduce is everything in the database. You know, we look at what other people have done before, what type of categories they use all these taxonomies, what they were finding and then we kind of created this massive database out of all these various, you know, previous work, but we didn't want to propose a taxonomy because I feel like there are so many gaps yet, that you're like you should be able to describe the whole thing before you can. So we were more into this idea that okay we're going to put sort of the same type of categories and attributes that were used before. And then we're going to find similarities right try to classify things. We also did a bit of an interesting demographic experiment on the locomotion techniques how they've been exploding their many more appearing. Let me get a bit closer. So you can see these right in the in different categories you know movement seems to be one that grows very fast. You know, a lot of these embodied aspect of we are, but I feel like controller are a few of the things that can grow bigger for accessibility rely more on controllers or maybe on gestures that complete movements right. You require a full ability to be on the movement side. Kind of interesting the whole analysis we do we also go through a symbolic regression, but at the end of the day we this we find these three main aspects that are key to access to locomotion. And one is that how accessible the locomotion technique is, whether it creates now sia so the less accessible the closer to to real life right and room scale, and that reduces now sia, because you have a better one to one of your vestibular. You have more limitation of movements, right because you're restricted to your basic movements. You move towards, you know, things that are more abstract, like a controller. You can be much more accessible, but it doesn't use more now sia, and you can have many more types of movements right like acceleration, 60 of flying things like that that you will never do if you're on a one to one. I think that kind of summarizes a little bit what the locomotion bolt is and I, you know, I'm happy to talk more about it but I think we have a whole set of speakers here today. Yeah, thank you for sharing it and people can share their own locomotion methods if they're aware of others that are out there right. Yeah, you can share it there we introduce it well I mean we look at it. So the idea of this locomotion ball is that as you're exploring things you might find a gap right like and recently I was in the XR bootcamp. And there is a person there doing a lot of things with hands right like now that hand trackings are out there. And he's sort of like getting all these locomotion techniques and what how would it work if it was with hands. It's interesting because the same thing can happen with gaze right like, how can I make this better if I have gates control right. And I feel like this will allow for many more techniques to come out I hope we see this explosion exponentially and the way I see this moving forward. I'm setting up as a sort of a challenge for university students with different professors. It will be announced soon, but we're going to try to create a repo with all these techniques implemented. So, you end up having sort of a passport, like if you're building a game, you just use this repository, and then it's up to the user to select though I want to use these three different types of locomotion. It's a passport for you, you bring it to the different games right. I do feel like there is not going to be a winner locomotion technique even on games like Alex. Now, we see a lot of, you know, they even should allow you to have three different techniques for locomotion while you are playing. So I feel like this multi versality of different locomotion techniques will be there. It's definitely the configurability to just let people choose what works best for them. Speaking of kind of some hand tracking and things is Dylan, I know you did a little presentation about sign language and VR and XR and some of the things that people are doing there. You also helped to organize XR access, you know, a community that I found really helpful when I was starting to research this project. Will you say more about what else you see XR access contributing to the field or what you experience with the hand tracking? Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, Mike, thanks. Thanks for having me here. It's really great to come on and speak to you all about accessibility and whatnot. So XR access just to give a little introduction is, yes, as mentioned, it's basically a community that's dedicated to ensuring that virtual and augmented reality are accessible to people with disabilities. And, you know, I think one of the things that the big things that we're doing with extra access is we do we have, of course, you know, we kind of started out as this attempt to kind of coordinate and archive and make sure that we have an understanding of what resources are out there. Mar, we've definitely got the locomotion vault in there now. I, as soon as I saw it at the bootcamp thing last, last week I knew I had to get that in there. But something that the else that I think we're doing is that, you know, I kind of realized early on when I was studying XR accessibility is that it's really cross disciplinary more than a lot of other kind of areas right now. To make XR accessibility happen, you need to have a lot of people with very different skill sets collaborating. You need to have accessibility experts, you need to have VR and AR designers and developers. You need to have researchers, you need to have professionals in kind of education and healthcare and all the areas that we want to actually, you know, put XR to good use in. And there's a lot of different people from a lot of very different types of organizations that really need to come together in order to have buy-in on this to make things accessible. So in addition to providing resources, a big part of what XR access is trying to do moving forward is basically to serve as this kind of boundary organization, you know, bringing together all these different people and making sure that everyone is communicating in ways that other people can understand. We're trying to make sure all these different stakeholders are both getting what they need from other people in a way that they can understand. And making sure that their expert knowledge is making it into the final result on a lot of these different apps and platforms and so on. So I think having events like this and you know having Mozilla has been consistently a really active participant in these discussions, which is excellent. And so making sure that, you know, for example, Mozilla has the input it needs from any of these other groups that are involved in this space is the type of thing that we really want to make sure happens. Thank you. Yeah. And speaking of someone who has been through many different disciplines themselves, Steven, I know you have a background in interactive experience design. You've built installations for big public gatherings you also teach students in a physical classroom and have been digging really into hubs quite a bit yourself. I imagine for you. The world has shifted quite a lot in the past few years. Can you talk about the experience of building an XR curriculum. I think to give it some context versus, you know, I teach at Portland State University, which is a public university in Oregon. And the population that we serve is is pretty diverse we have people who are first generation college students we have older students veterans and people with learning disabilities. And a really wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds which I think all of those things kind of affect people's access to this new technology. And when you know when Kobe hit and we had to kind of scramble and change the way we were delivering this. It's sort of exacerbated some of the sort of issues that we were already seeing in the classroom you know like access to technology or just you know the different ways to try to accommodate. So, you know, like, right before this hit we were like, looking at VR headsets and trying to like, think about how to provide the technology in the classroom. And then once we went remote it was like, we kind of have to work with whatever what people have at their disposal and so I think, you know hubs was actually a really nice tool in that sense because it was so accessible to students with with like, maybe lower technology resources. And also you know there is that kind of accessibility component throughout building to it. Great thanks yeah I want to, in the interest of time, kind of shift the conversation to prioritizing accessibility and and providing that use case for folks to to push this work forward in in their own disciplines. I had a conversation recently with ace the dots there from the Firefox accessibility team, and he phrase things really interestingly for me he said that when we build digital experiences, we are building the barriers. It's not that we, we build a thing and then we, we allow ways to get around them. We're actually imposing those restrictions as we build things. So, I'm curious for each of you. If you have any thoughts on this why should we be focusing on accessibility. I'm happy to jump in here. For me I came to accessibility first from UX design is kind of where I originally got my start. You know, the kind of constant mantras of UX design like the first commandment in the UX design Bible is know your users needs and design for your users needs. And when you think about the fact that literally one in four people in the United States has a disability. If you're going to design something that you know up to a quarter of your users might not be able to use. You know that really kind of reflects poorly on you as a designer. I think something that we often forget is that people don't inherently have problems because of their disabilities. They have problems because we don't consider their disabilities in design. Right. You know, if you look at the deaf community, for example, a lot of a lot of people are proud to be deaf they consider being deaf part of their culture. And a lot of the times in the past when people have offered oh hey look here's you know this cochlear implant that will cure your deafness. There's a lot of people that that really don't like that they say that you're trying to erase a part of why yeah. And so for people in that position, having things like captions having accessibility features that let them participate and let them use your applications. So that is just good design and the problem isn't that they're deaf the problem is that you didn't consider their deafness in your design process. When I jump there I think we're in front of the one of the first times in which newer technology is that is supposed to replace right the other technologies is less accessible. And the existing one right like from a very simple things like how do you put it on right is a wearable and some people cannot really have that type of mobility to put on a whole headset. To things like Dylan was saying read readability like with the current screens and optics that we have a consumer like barely you can print text on the center right so we will occupy. Like if you put it down there probably you're not going to be able to read it at this if you're using Fresnel. It's getting better right like the resolution is going to get better this optics will get better, but so far, and the last one is the embodied part of it right like this idea that you substitute your body when you are in VR. And what if your body is not able fully able of movement that transfers. Okay, so I feel like these are a few challenges that transcend just the consumer. It applies also to an accessible work environment to you know how how our company is going to put this as their main devices. Like will even to the basic level of regulations right. So I do feel like all of these challenges are very. They are important right for adoption even. I know even for me with with certain VR experiences I don't have a big room to be able to use VR and I was playing some game, and I kept smashing my face on furniture and walls around me. And so even you know if you think about accessibility as the access to technology and to space. Steven, you probably, you know, have students coming from from all these different backgrounds that you mentioned, who have different different levels of access to technology. Did you encounter that like with the hubs experience that you built for your students gallery. I mean, I think it with that experience and also just teaching online I would just have, I realized some things like I took for granted you know a steady internet connection, or the ability to like have multiple browser windows open and have things running smoothly like that those are things that I hadn't thought would be an issue and like trying to troubleshoot those things virtually is really, really difficult and so that was a lot of what we were like trying to play with to optimize the experience so that it was like it was accessible right on on lower end devices or on a phone let's say right. I was going to say like in terms of accessibility I think you know when we design things for people at the margins, it's, we make a better product for everyone. And that's important I also think there's this like, and there's accessibility and there's also this idea of inclusion and bringing people from different backgrounds or other voices and I think especially like in this environment you know people from like BIPOC communities or you know just other like getting making sure that we're not just like listening to one voice is really important in this as we develop this technology. Yeah, that's actually a really great segue into a question I had for you Mark. When I was researching this project Microsoft kept coming up around accessibility research and innovation. And someone mentioned to me that that Microsoft just actively weaves accessibility into the fabric of how things are built from the start, including recruiting folks with disabilities and a culture that sees focusing on accessibility as a route towards building those those better projects and products. Can you talk a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think we have a very good track on these. There is always more to be done of course, but I want to put an example of another project I'm involved on the accessibility arena that also shows the potential of these technologies to impact the life of a person who has limitations is much higher than what we think of the general public. And I think the project soundscape. I don't know if you ever try this Microsoft soundscape app, which is meant to allow navigation in a match easier way for folks who are blind or, you know, with the vision limitations quite large vision limitations. It's mostly based on audio beacons. So the idea here is instead of using the regular GPS navigation of turn right turn left. It's more of an auditory experience in which you have a sound coming from a particular destination that you select right. And then that guides you there, even from an anthropological perspective, it's much more natural for humans to go in that direction right like when we were foraging in the forest. We would hear, you know, some sort of water source, you know, some waterfall, some river, we would walk towards there, we will create a mental map and be able to return. And GPS navigation nowadays how many times you get somewhere and you don't remember how you got there right with the turn right turn left. So it's even a, you know, undermining our own decision making and our own mental abilities in the general public, but for blind folks to discover things around them on their own. And this is just a mind blowing thing because they generally have been trained to learn specific route with a trainer. And this tool allows them that once they are confident with the tool. You know what actually the lead on this project who is blind himself often tells the story of, you know, I got off the Bronx stop in the bus, and these things save it. Like I was able to just navigate to where I was supposed to go, despite missing my bus stop. And it encompasses a bunch of more things like, you know, it tells you as you're walking what is around you so it means that you can use it, even when you're on the car or like it gives you much more mental awareness of things surrounding you. And this is a particular case of what the Stephen what's saying right like we create this tool that is very much focused on this opportunity for supporting this very large number of people if you look globally. And in fact we're in six countries already. We recently launched in Brazil, and you know this is the research project is. It's a product from Microsoft but it comes from research. And what we're seeing is that this type of GPS navigation is better than turn by turn. And we're trying to push this type of navigation even for the general public right like imagine if you could have this on being maps or. You know, I think that oftentimes we learn things here that can transfer to the other side. And the other reason why I like this project a lot is because it doesn't focus. It's an augmented reality experience it's a virtual reality experience spatial computing focus on blind users. Which generally you're like oh you know we are doesn't work for blind people. And you're like well, think of it as a spatial computing think of it as the content now is around us. Instead of inside a screen. And in fact if you think in this way, it's probably more accessible to blind population that it was before because before it was truly only on the screen. And now it's around you so you can perceive it in many new ways and I think the experience of soundscape, you can try it you can download it. It's very interesting in that sense it opens new ideas of accessibility in in XR. Yeah, this is the tool and this is how. I'll share it again with audio. I'll just go very quickly. I'm not going to take a lot of time with this but I think it's, you know, one of these tools that gives a very different experience. A busy city street, Maya with a guide dog. Good boy steady, steady, good boy. So one of the interesting things is we're not trying to replace tools that blind folks are used to right like you still use your cane or your dog for the immediate mobility. This is more about the spatial mapping of where are you in the world. Because it's designed such that you can just put it in your pocket and go Maya using soundscape walking with Alex DSW shoe warehouse DSW shoe warehouse. Cool things happening around town here. When I'm with other people, I'm able to gather a lot of the same information my sighted friends or family are getting from the signage around me. And with that I'm able to participate in, hey look what's over there. Disigual. Oh, disigual is showing up here as well, which is one of my favorite stores. Oh really? Yeah. Those moments that don't usually happen for me in my life. David walking in the park. Using the technology is relatively easy. You have to still concentrate on listening for obstacles. But you then get used to the chatter in the background and you can pick out suddenly something that's of interest to you. Shona around town. It was great. Tell me all the different shops as I passed, which is lovely. And the different street names as well. Quite often I don't know, you know, which street split. Approaching intersection, mastery goes right. Maya touching phone screen. We have a beacon set for Nike store, 248 yards. The beacon has been helpful in approaching different addresses and places in busier areas. Arm extended, pointing with her phone. I'm getting the bell right about here. Great, so let's just head off that way. Okay, forward. Passing through an open market. It's been a unique experience to work with the soundscape team. They have been so transparent, forthcoming, open to feedback. It's been a really dynamic relationship. You have blind people on your team. You're working deeply with agencies like Lighthouse and reaching out and engaging with blind people in different places and from different backgrounds and really making sure that what's being created is aligned with the needs of the community. Fiddler forward. So I'll leave it there, but you see it has different tools in it like this. I want to go here too. I want to know what's around me from things that are like what the stores are what the, and it's a few of the things that we were very focused on the creation of this tool is one, it works on phones, which is something people already have. You can like as a head headphones and other options of a head tracking are coming available. We're incorporating them like they both a head sunglasses that have head tracking. But if you have your phone, you can use the phone to point right like it has a way to navigate this way to. You know, it's compatible with current technology. We try to make it forward compatible with future technology too. And I feel like the partnerships with current teams that are already helping people to navigate right like to to learn how to move. They give them the dog and the app. They teach them over a couple of few weeks and then they go on their own. And I feel like that's the perfect partnership also. Right. So I often times I worry in the accessibility community that you need to have the right partner. Right. There is like a million types of gloves created for signaling million types of, you know, it's like maybe that's not what the community needs. So I feel like in order to really do that having inside the company people like almost Miller, for example, who is the lead on this who is blind himself. Right. It gives you a very different perspective and you look at the app and the app is. It's not super nice visually but it doesn't matter because it reads super nice through the screen reader. It does the things that it needs to do for a blind population. Yeah, speaking of that, that community angle Dylan, I know you were the one that kind of introduced me to the phrase, nothing about us without us or nothing, nothing for us without us. And in your work with access I'm sure you must encounter that that need to collaborate across disciplines and across organizations, a lot. Can you think of like a couple of like key or easy entry low hanging fruit accessibility ideas that you would recommend to folks to incorporate into how they design and build things. Yeah, absolutely. I think that the single biggest thing you can do is, you know, as part of saying get people with disabilities on your team. Feeling that at least make sure that you're testing with them because, you know, I'll give you some tips here but but I think that's that's absolutely the biggest one is getting people. As you said, nothing, nothing about us without us I think a lot of that sometimes is changed to simply nothing without us, meaning make sure that you're designing things with the just hand in hand with the people that you're trying to help. That being said, I think two things that I think a lot of XR developers could really benefit from terms of accessibility. One is make sure that your app can be used by someone seated with one hand or no hands without having to kind of twist or lean over in your chair or stand up and walk around. Because doing that is not only going to make it accessible to a wide variety of people with mobility impairments is also going to mean that somebody can use your app on airplane or seated in a cubicle right. And not have to to even if you're able bodied you know apps that expect you to duck and dodge and dive and roll, or even just to like go up here and go down there and do a lot of physical physical movement. Those are going to be less accessible and they're just going to be tiring and they're going to be limiting to the limiting your app to people with the space necessary for those kinds of movements. That's one. And then two is a big thing in in VR as it is in 2D include captions, you should be able to use your experience muted and not get stuck right. That's just something that that is almost everywhere now in 2D design but in in XR it we're kind of having to do it all over again. It's tricky because captions the next are you can't just put them at the bottom of the screen, because you know let's say I have somebody talking on my left, and then an alarm starts blaring on my right. You know, ideally these captions should be placed in a summer that's comfortable to read be it should tell me a little bit about maybe who's talking or and what direction I need to look in order to see them. And you know these are these aren't trivial challenges and hopefully soon will have API is that you can just tap into so you don't have to kind of do all this from scratch but nonetheless, I think captions are just so helpful for so many people. You know hearing or not that I have to put them as the other kind of shout out here of, if you have to pick, you know one or two accessibility features these are the ones to get. If you want to read a bunch more just really low hanging fruit yeah things that if you're just thinking about them during the design process they're not hard to do. Go to XR access dot org slash resources, and I'll put this in the chat here in a minute, and we've got you know a bunch of really excellent resources, including the XR Association, one of our partners just put out a, you know 10 page or so guide to accessibility and inclusive design and immersive experiences. And it'll give you kind of a rundown of here's the, the kind of top features that people, you know, benefits people with visual disabilities the benefit people with hearing disabilities come so on and so forth. So, so definitely check that out. And just just try to always keep in mind, you know, think about users that that are different than you think about users that you know think if you're, you know, I think somebody just put a great question in the chat like children and elders you being able to use XR think about those users think about the people that not only are permanently disabled but that maybe have something else going in the background think about people that are doing something else with one hand or multitasking your, your accessibility features will benefit them to. So take a look at those guides spread them around. And it's going to make applications for everyone better I think it will be exciting to see those advancements taking place. And I guess with that in mind that for for any of you. Are there particular things you see on the horizon that you're really excited about. I'll just do a quick one. I'm really excited about open XR. I think having a lot of different groups different platforms using this kind of common platform that hopefully, you know, soon we're one of our big goals for XR access is to work with groups like open XR to make sure that if you want to include captions. Let's make it easy for you let's not make you have to reinvent the wheel. So seeing things like that and seeing things like the locomotion vault where I'm not sure right now whether it includes like code snippets and whatnot but I'd love to see a future where people can just kind of take these known accessible techniques and just kind of dip in and having it as your unity project your unreal project be as easy as downloading a plugin. Or, you know that's happening I think it's really exciting what hopefully we'll be seeing soon. I want to add here because I feel like in general one of the areas that is a bit underserved for the VR AR community is a creation tools, right authoring tools, and that gets even more exacerbated for these, you know, on the on the sides of what is mainstream. And I feel like I, at least I am trying to build a lot of open sourcing to work around this right like I've been open sourcing avatars open sourcing emotion capture tools for avatars. And now the locomotion techniques that I'm going to try to implement an open source also with, you know, a global force of people because once you have this amount of techniques it becomes kind of is not a work of a one person at this point. So I am also engaging a lot with external collaborators for this open sourcing work. And I think that's the only way we get to the plugin levels that Dylan is talking about but I think authoring tools in general are still not for you know where is the scratch of VR where is the, you know all these things and then going back a bit to what Dylan was saying also on the captioning that needs to be attached to particular events also and I feel in general we need to put these new devices and they will also change over time into the public and see how they respond to it. And then what we will see is maybe a website doesn't look like a website at all once you're in VR, right, or maybe so I do think that one of the way to get to there is if you look at the day we have 24 hours. We can have two hours of maximum of entertainment gaming or whatever if you have kids. Forget about that so you have maximum your eight hours of work and I think that and then you sleep and eat and so I think those eight hours is when you can really introduce new technologies is through the productivity area. And, and if you think of portable device that you know has a lot of real estate and you know more than one screen in theory you can render all of that inside the VR headset. So that would be kind of the entry point I think that makes more sense for for most of people. Once you're there you're going to figure out okay. Well now gaming doesn't look like traditional gaming now you know I sort of feel like we, we have started by putting trying to put these devices, very much on areas that are hard to enter. And, but we will learn a lot when we put them as a replacement of the laptop as a replacement of right and then we will figure out many new things. And it is an opportunity right as we're saying for for accessibility that we can design from the scratch being accessible. It's not happening yet on the largest scale I would say that it's again going just for the general public, even VR headsets are are not ready for kids, right like it's a super large population. I'm not even talking about disabilities there who cannot even wear a headset, because it's not meant for their IPD right. So I do feel like there is a lot of work there too. So it is an authoring tools, and on this whole idea that there is no diversity in how things are built and we don't know how things will actually look like. Yeah, I was surprised it kind of what got me down this path in the first place to learn more about VR accessibility was just the fact that I came across. I think it was in November or December, Oculus posted their first VR accessibility like design guidelines and they've been around for, you know, eight, eight years and are just now getting around to that aspect of it so clearly has a long, long way to go. Steven, I'm curious, you know, from your perspective in virtual education, you must have students really, you know, wishing or asking for, you know, different features than what they're they're being given in the sort of like zoom classroom environment I know zoom fatigue is a thing we hear a lot about. Are there, there are things you kind of see on the horizon or have on your wish list. There are some things that zoom those well and, you know, like being able to have this like synchronous conversation be able to like monitor everyone. Like, you know, if everyone turns their cameras on and you're able to see faces I feel like you get a little bit more feedback than, you know, in one of my classes we were building hubs, and we were in there and it was, you know, we're all avatars and it's like sometimes kind of hard to know like oh this is person understanding what I'm saying or, you know, what how is this person responding. But I think what worked really well is like, you know, we were building out a space and we're building an exhibition. And so to be to be able to prototype something that and at scale and to experience it. These are things that are kind of hard to do in the real world at scale like you know if we wanted to build an exhibition and walk around and it would be really hard or if like you know I've done projection mapping with classes but that requires certain technology and like like conditions and things like that and now we could just throw up a video in a virtual space and kind of test that out and experience that so that that was, I think that was helpful. And I also think people will just with this new technology they'll kind of figure things out I think people are figuring out how to use zoom effectively and people are figuring out how to use hubs or other XR technology I think you know we had like a gallery opening you know just it was interesting to see the way people like started figuring out how to use the tools or like one person was like dancing by like moving their mouse really quickly you know like and just seeing that was was kind of interesting so. Yeah, the improvisation and the techniques that people find to to make things their own and feel right for them is really fascinating actually that brings up Dylan. An example I saw in one of your videos where somebody was using, I think it was VR chat and the hand tracking there to come up with like essentially like a new form of sign language that that got around the issue that you can't use all of your, you know, five fingers on both ends to sign in VR. They're the good examples you've seen of that where people are kind of, you know, coming up with their own solutions. You know, people period, when they have goals when they put their minds to things they will try to come up with workarounds to make it make it work right. You just look at Minecraft and the shenanigans people got up to making custom computers and not using mine cards and you can see an example of that. I think when it comes to things like sign language, it's an interesting example because, you know, there's definitely the group of people there's going to be some, you know, some deaf folks that that really absolutely have seen this, this thing they want to participate in and they will. You know, come up with, you know, for example, the case in point here is basically a kind of suite of signs that make advantage of the fact that some of the early VR controllers give you basically big mittens. You know, you can't control each finger independently. And so these, you know, folks would would come up with kind of an alternate dialect almost that makes that feasible. Of course, I've talked to some deaf folks about this since then and you know some of them say well, oh, you know, that's, that's great that people are doing it. Others say well, you might as well ask people to join voice chat but they have to how this thing stuck on their awful whole time and they'll come up with an alternate dialect that lets them talk around it. I think we, it's, it's fantastic to see examples of this like where the community is is pushing on way and it's great to learn from that, and to try to use those to see samples to make the core experience better. I think it's also important that we try to make sure that we can make these things accessible without asking certain certain groups of people to make these huge compromises and how they use the applications and how they communicate. And I think it's, it's both excellent, you know, inspiring but also kind of a cautionary tale. And I think it's something that we definitely should should learn from and look to the ways that people are are taking this and making it their own and try to adapt those and make it make it better with them. We're running short of time but to kind of bring it back to, you know, the community and to, to what all of us can be thinking about. You know when I asked you what you wanted to make sure we covered in the session, you phrased it really well you said the connections that will need to be made between people that understand the need for accessibility. Those that understand how, and those who are actually in a position to implement these accessible interfaces and hardware. For all of us here and and elsewhere who want to see this moving forward to convince those decision makers money people that this stuff should be prioritized. What's one piece of advice that we can walk away with from the session to help make that happen. Yeah, I think that the big one is that accessibility isn't just the ethical thing to do. It also makes really good business sense, you know one in four people in the US are disabled, which means that inaccessible applications are leaving behind a lot of kind of potential barriers and money on the table. And what's more, a lot of buyers in government in education and healthcare and industry are legally required to only purchase accessible software. I think you'll find for a lot of enterprise clients accessibility is really part of those kind of minimum requirements. And so if you want, you know, this is an addition of course the fact that making apps accessible makes them better for everybody whether they have permanent disabilities or not because all of us are in places where we have kind of temporary or situational disabilities and that curb cut effect is definitely real. I think one of the things we realize of course that accessibility often gets left behind is so kind of we'll get back to this later type type thing when really it needs to be part of the minimum viable product. And that's why for us at XR Access, one of the big things that we're going to be doing one of our core pillars is business cases for inclusive XR. We're going to be compiling, you know, use cases, case studies, you know all kinds of things that will help kind of managers and executives whatnot who maybe don't have either a design development background or an accessibility background but they know kind of what needs to be done in terms of everything else to make an app launch. We're going to be making resources, kind of buy them for them and so that's something you're interested in you know you don't need to have a back a technical background or to contribute to this discussion. So definitely come by you know XR Access and help contribute to that conversation. Thanks yeah, Mara or Steven do you have any, any closing thoughts. I feel like I'm not coming from the accessibility group per se we're sister groups in, in, in the, in the research org, and I work a lot right like I work on soundscape I come more from neuroscience perception and also real time systems in computer science. I feel like the gaps that should be more multidisciplinary right I feel like that is an area that many more people can start contributing to the accessibility space and I think, you know, options like the XR Access are becoming more important for people to know that they how they can bridge their this gap and I feel like you know you you were saying here. We need more developers to be working on this we will, we need that combination right like it's not the community that can build their own path forward it has to be also on the trenches people who are already working with the technology that they start bridging gaps, and I think it seems more complex, but it also is more threadable multi threaded right like it can go in parallel it can grow. It has some potential there that in short time we can make a lot of impact if if a lot of people get involved in this. Yeah, great well I want to say it looks like we got maybe like one minute, but I would love for us all to just take one minute. Before we close things down to just think about and maybe write down you can feel free to put it in the chat like one thing you could be doing that we all could be doing to advocate for greater accessibility in the workplace. So feel free to just take that minute and then we'll we'll wrap up and in the meantime I'll be posting links to panelists work and to the hubs experience, if folks want to check that out. And Dylan Morris even if there are other links you'd like to post feel free. Welcome also to enter our Microsoft research accessibility group, which has also in the past on seen VR, which has been very interesting hacking to existing VR applications to, you know, amend contrast or make things bigger or read aloud the content right. The interesting thing is that it cooks into existing games, right so it's not just a demo. I'll share that too. Thank you. And thank you everyone for being here and for the work that I'm sure you no doubt do in your own communities around this issue, whether you're an expert or you're new like I am to the space. I think it's really fascinating to dive into this work and put it out there for everyone to see. And the reality is that we're going to get things wrong and there's a lot of work that needs to be done but the point isn't to get everything right. The point is for more of us to be moving this work forward and to normalize it, and to be designing these tools as we mentioned before, from the start. It's great to reach out to me to the panelists and their organizations to the people in your own community communities and to continue to advocate for inclusive technology. I will be moving over to the main room of the hubs experience that we posted a link for and I've got about 20 minutes or so that I can take there to kind of introduce folks to to that experience. It's not a work in progress, but designed to just call out some of the considerations that are and advancements that are happening in VR accessibility so check that out. Enjoy. Thank you all for for being here. Thanks Mike for hosting us. Great panel. Thanks everyone. My thank you. Thank you. Thank you for a great session. Thank you. Candice stands ahead. And next. Candice purses her lips and rolls her neck.