I was thrilled to sit down with Mirjana Spasojevic, head of the Immersive Experiences Lab at HP, to chat about building emotional connections and human resilience. She recently spoke at RISE 2017 about the work HP Labs has been doing to better understand people and their practices in order to craft the best experiences with future technologies.

Here’s a snapshot of our conversation about the Immersive Experiences Lab’s quest to understand and fulfill the promise of valuable, delightful experiences through data-driven, user-centric solutions.

How does HP’s mission and outlook on Megatrends play a role in the Immersive Experiences Lab?
HP’s mission to “engineer experiences that amaze” plays a vital role in how we innovate in the Lab. We want to create technologies that makes our customers’ lives better. We do that by studying how people work and live – their motivations, their emotions – and then we consider how technology might change their practices in the future. We are constantly prototyping, experimenting, and iterating based on our learnings because we want to help drive positive change in people’s lives through the solutions and experiences we create.

We also make big bets based on Megatrends – Rapid Urbanization, Changing Demographics, Hyper Globalization, and Accelerated Innovation. With these Megatrends as a backdrop, we as researchers craft experiences that anticipate how the world will be in three to seven years.

What projects has the Immersive Experiences Lab worked on that exemplify this?
Recently we created Project Jetty. This concept started in a brainstorming session, and our team’s goal was to help people feel connected without actually being connected. In our study, we placed an “art object” – a 3D-printed, realistic representation of a subject’s house – in the home of an older adult and another 3D-printed house in their children’s homes. Each printed house glowed when its owner was home, and it sat in a photo frame with holographic, real-time weather displayed around it.

Before the study, all of our study participants indicated they didn’t stay in touch with others as often as they’d like, and felt dissatisfied with their current methods for keeping in touch. After the study, we heard comments like, “I feel happy and warm inside because in some strange way I feel I am able to see them through this device.”

This is when we saw an exciting shift in how these people experienced the concept away from technology and toward the fulfillment of emotional needs.

I find the shift from technology to emotion fascinating. Can you tell me more about that goal?
Of course. With Jetty we aren’t necessarily looking to develop a new HP product. Instead, we wanted to extend our understanding of how technology can help us live better and feel more resilient in our lives.

We’ll use the learnings from Project Jetty in a wide variety of future projects. We believe the future of computing is people-centric. Wearables, smart materials, and technology in general should always strive to support human resilience and authentic experiences.

This people-centric approach is at the heart of everything we do in the Immersive Experiences Lab.

Learn more about the work Mirjana and her team are working on here.