Imagining, researching, and even designing the future has never been easy. Common design projects often look into a problem that exists in the current time. However, the research goal is to understand users’ reactions and thoughts about our speculation on the future scenarios and applications enabled by 6G and study their interaction patterns.

With 6G being our broad project scope, the most critical research question is: how might we use current technologies to simulate a future experience for the users to evaluate? The following sections highlight a summary of the essential findings and insights backed up by our methodologies.

Research Process Overview:

Research Questions We Had in Mind:

1. What are the users’ behaviors, needs, and motivations that will still be relevant in the future?
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2. What drives users' appetite for hyper-personalized or immersive experience?
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3. What are the social boundaries that might encourage, hinder, or prohibit the adoption of 6G technologies? And which avenues might be better directions for innovation?
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4. How do everyday technology users react to ubiquitous hyper-personalized and immersive experiences?

Understanding 6G and the domains that will be affected

Based on InterDigital’s interests, we focused on the domains of entertainment, smart devices, and gaming to understand the impact 6G will have on these domains. The ten expert interviews are not only with 6G experts but also with both industry and academia experts in each field. Our goal is to understand the fundamentals of each industry and the future that the industry leader is imagining.

Probing for user’s mental boundaries and ideal states

We identified user needs, activity context, and social boundaries in the three domains through speed-dating sessions of our risky/partial storyboards. Despite the fact that most of our participants self-identified as "low-tech users", they expressed great interest in advanced technologies that involve direct manipulation of information in virtual spaces.

Pushing the boundaries of immersion and personalization

To gauge target users’ interest in future applications of 6G, we conducted initial idea testing sessions targeting a specific field of interest across smart environments, gaming, and entertainment. We learned about:
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1. the level of comfort users have with the application
2. the desirability of the proposed experience and the criteria that makes the experience desirable
3. the risks or concerns users have and what disrupted the experience
4. the unmet needs or wants users have with the application

AR filters applied to users’ bodies while in public.

A hyper-personalized smart home with devices catering to the user

An immersive AR assistant when users are travelling.

Understand context of socially immersive experiences

To have first-hand experience of immersing ourselves in these experiences, we visited the Van Gogh immersive museum in Pittsburgh. Along with observing viewers during the exhibition, we also asked their thoughts on the immersive art experience when they were leaving.

A majority of research participants have a desire for even more immersive experiences but this desire was highly dependent on the social and spatial context.

Creating digitally-powered ecosystems

two hypothetical Verge articles to further test our ideas in public spaces, travel experience, and private space, which is a sports watching experience at home.
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The AirShare article describes future travel experience from hotel to outdoors. T configuration follows t everywhere and provides t with perfectly personalized, seamless experiences during t In this scenario, people are required to wear AR glasses everywhere to enjoy this experience. But this causes them to feel self-conscious because they don’t want to look like a tourist. 
We wrote and developed

‍Super Bowl article introduces a future sport-watching experience augmented by haptic wearables, extended reality headsets, and holographic displays. In this scenario, people are very cautious of adopting novel technologies due to unfamiliarity and privacy concerns.