Eyewear 2021 The Forth Workshop on Eyewear Computing – Augmenting Social Situations and Democratizing Tools

Head-worn sensing, especially embedded in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) head-mounted displays and smart glasses is currently increasingly moving away from niche applications and small-scale research prototypes to large-scale consumer adoption (e.g. Oculus Quest 2, Hololens 2, J!NS MEME, Bose Frames). Significant progress in sensing technologies and modalities have lead to a constant increase of commercially available products and unobtrusive, affordable research prototypes. These recent advances allow us to extend the Eyewear Community to enable large scale in-situ studies, as one of the favored research methodologies in Ubiquitous Computing. One manifestation of this can already be observed in large scale dataset recording, eyewear student competitions and programming seminars. In this workshop we focus on supporting these large-scale uses of eyewear computing, discussing lessons learned from early deployment and how to empower the community with better hardware/software prototyping tools as well as the establishment of open data sets. In addition, we will discuss long-term psychological and physical impacts and risks of the technology that become increasingly important with a wider distribution of devices to consumers. The proposed workshop will bring together researchers from a wide range of disciplines, such as mobile and ubiquitous computing, activity recognition eye tracking, optics, human vision and perception, usability, as well as systems engineering research. This year it will also bring in researchers from neuroscience, psychology and other fields that might want to apply or use the research systems. The workshop is a continuation from 2016/2018/2019 and will focus on discussing on how to democratizing tools for researchers who want to apply eyewear computing (sensing/interaction) in their fields, yet are no wearable computing experts or computer scientists.