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The Digital Realities Lab is an interdisciplinary research group at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences working at the intersection of software, design and (creative) engineering, seeking out human-centered solutions to interact with technology. Commited to practice-centered engagement with the design of future digital technology, we aim to create interactions that introduce new physicalities into the digital to foster creativity, learning and play. Through several events and discourse formats, our lab acts as a space for knowledge and experience exchange aiming at gathering designers, developers, researchers and industry.

Augmented & Virtual Reality.

Due to the maturity of AR/VR, we focus our research on an investigation of novel use cases for this technology, often in interdisciplinary settings with domain experts. We perform detailed analyses of potential application areas to identify processes and procedures which benefit most from using AR/VR. This allows us to explore fundamental research questions, but also focus on application-oriented novel solutions for various use application areas such as medicine, industry or education (EdTech).

Hybrid Play & Learning Environments.

This research stream aims at extending existing notions of hybrid play by exploring alternative perspectives on digital and physical play (e.g., by reconnecting the digital and the physical world in unconventional ways). By exemplifying possible futures and alternative forms of hybrid play, we engage in studying and designing games, playful interactions and artifacts that facilitate the emergence of hybrid digital-physical spaces. Our design philosophy focuses on embodying immaterial qualities to create hybrid interactions rather than limiting hybrid play concepts to digital/physical tokens.

Future Interfaces.

Researching the design of new interactive technology and how they change the way we play, learn, and cooperate. By seeking out new materialities in digital-physical interactions we explore meaningful forms of interactions to connect people who are separated spatially, temporally, and emotionally.

Generative Artificial Intelligence.

Generative AI enables the creation of new datasets (text, audio, video, and audio), the transformation of datasets into different domains, and the enrichment of datasets for machine learning applications. This field has developed rapidly in recent years, and we are continuously exploring new trends and methods from this field. We focus our research on the generation of multimedia data for enterprises and pave the way for the generation of creative content with new concepts and methods.