I design XR experiences and research embodied interaction — from movement practice with dancers and athletes, to social experiments in virtual space, to conversational AI agents inhabiting virtual bodies.
My PhD, completed at Koç University’s KARMA XR Lab, developed a design space for avatar abstraction in XR movement contexts. At its core is a reframing of the virtual body as a reflective medium — one through which practitioners sense, interpret, and transform their movement for both learning and performance. Central to this work is engaging practitioners directly: dancers, athletes, and the embodied knowledge they carry.
More recently, I have been working with embodied conversational agents in XR — LLM-driven characters embedded in social experiments and immersive simulations. These agents communicate through speech, but do not yet engage through movement or behavioral sensing. That boundary is where my current curiosity lies.
My background spans psychology, cultural studies, and design — a formation that makes me attentive to lived experience, critical of assumptions, and curious about what bodies know that has yet to be articulated.
Saliha Akbas 