The Living Room of the Future

Abstract

Emergent media services are turning towards the use of audience data to deliver more personalised and immersive experiences. We present the Living Room of the Future (LRoTF), an embodied design fiction built to both showcase future adaptive physically immersive media experiences exploiting the Internet of Things (IoT) and to probe the adoption challenges confronting their uptake in everyday life. Our results show that audiences have a predominantly positive response to the LRoTF but nevertheless entertain significant reservations about adopting adaptive physically immersive media experiences that exploit their personal data. We examine ‘user’ reasoning to elaborate a spectrum of adoption challenges that confront the uptake of adaptive physically immersive media experiences in everyday life. These challenges include data legibility, privacy concerns and potential dystopias, concerns over agency and control, the social need for customisation, value trade-off and lack of trust