TBA

The number of individuals using some form of bionic technology that is merged to their bodies (e.g., prostheses, exoskeletons) is likely to increase in the future. Such Embodied Digital Technologies (EDTs) will affect the psychological processes underlying social interaction, perception, and stereotyping, especially when users and non-users of these technologies meet and need to coordinate in public. Therefore, understanding the psychological processes underlying the use and the perceptions of embodied technologies is important for designing such devices for smooth coordination. However, today’s limited availability of both, technology and their users limits the possibilities for conducting psychological studies in this area. We thus suggest employing Mixed Reality (MR) to simulate wearing those technologies and to simulate encounters between users for studying associated processes. We call our system TechnoSapiens to emphasize the merging of human bodies with technology. We describe major technological requirements, propose a psychological framework to assess the system’s capabilities and lay out the current state-of-the-art in the respective fields.