Merging Environments for Shared Spaces in Mixed Reality

In virtual reality a real walking interface limits the extent of a virtual environment to our local walkable space. As local spaces are specific to each user, sharing a virtual environment with others for collaborative work or games becomes complicated. It is not clear which user's walkable space to prefer, or whether that space will be navigable for both users. This paper presents a technique which allows users to interact in virtual reality while each has a different walkable space. With this method mappings are created between pairs of environments. Remote users are then placed in the local environment as determined by the corresponding mapping. A user study was conducted with 38 participants. Pairs of participants were invited to collaborate on a virtual reality puzzle-solving task while in two different virtual rooms. An avatar representing the remote user was mapped into the local user's space. The results suggest that collaborative systems can be based on local representations that are actually quite different

Moveable worlds/digital scenographies

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ Intellect Ltd 2010.The mixed reality choreographic installation UKIYO explored in this article reflects an interest in scenographic practices that connect physical space to virtual worlds and explore how performers can move between material and immaterial spaces. The spatial design for UKIYO is inspired by Japanese hanamichi and western fashion runways, emphasizing the research production company's commitment to various creative crossovers between movement languages, innovative wearable design for interactive performance, acoustic and electronic sound processing and digital image objects that have a plastic as well as an immaterial/virtual dimension. The work integrates various forms of making art in order to visualize things that are not in themselves visual, or which connect visual and kinaesthetic/tactile/auditory experiences. The ‘Moveable Worlds’ in this essay are also reflections of the narrative spaces, subtexts and auditory relationships in the mutating matrix of an installation-space inviting the audience to move around and follow its sensorial experiences, drawn near to the bodies of the dancers.Brunel University, the British Council, and the Japan Foundation

Place-centred interaction design: situated participation and co-creation in places of heritage

This paper argues that the design of interactive installations for museums and other heritage sites should be concerned with understanding, supporting and augmenting visitors 19 lived experiences in context, thus their ability to actively participate in an exhibition. We use the concept of 18place 19 to refer to the physical environment as it is invested by the qualities of human experience, and to placemaking as the active process of connecting and relating to locations that become meaningful in our lives. We will discuss some of the limitations of existing heritage technologies in considering aspects of active place experience, and will argue how a place-sensitive approach can lead to successful interaction design whereby people establish meaningful and active connections at personal, cultural, social and physical levels to the places of heritage they experience

Inchcolm project

Inchcolm Project is part of an interdisciplinary research project which develops new ways of designing for the moving body across media, by combining aesthetics and design methods from contemporary performance practice and video games. As such, it brought a video game (Dear Esther, The Chinese Room, 2012) to life on a Scottish island (Inchcolm island in the Firth of Forth). During the two hour experience on Inchcolm the audience/players wander freely on the island encountering geo-tagged audio, live music, performers and installation spaces evocative of the game world, a playthrough of the game projected in the 12th century Inchcolm abbey, and an orchestral performance of the video game’s soundtrack (composed by Jessica Curry, arranged by Luci Holland and David Jamieson, performed by Mantra Collective)

The Planetary Collegium: Master Plan for a Distributed Mixed Reality Campus

This paper describes the design for a Mixed Reality campusfor the Planetary Collegium. The Collegium is an international research network centered at Plymouth, U.K. Its plans call for seven sub-centers, or nodes, to be builtin different parts of the world. These nodes would be linked by shared virtual spaces and digital networks. The paper describes how the Collegium's seeming contradictions (distributed/unified, simulated/physical, local/remote) can be reconciled. The resulting project is a mixed reality that transcends scales from global to local and, ultimately, to the constituent buildings and their digital spaces

Extending the Metaverse: Hyper-Connected Smart Environments with Mixed Reality and the Internet of Things

The metaverse, i.e., the collection of technologies that provide a virtual twin of the real world via mixed reality, internet of things, and others, is gaining prominence. However, the metaverse faces challenges as it grows toward mainstream adoption. Among these is the lack of strong connections between metaverse objects and traditional physical objects and environments, which leads to inconsistencies for users within metaverse environments. To address this issue, this work explores the design and development of a framework for bridging the physical environment and the metaverse through the use of internet-of-things objects and mixed reality designs. The contributions of this include: i) an architectural framework for extending the metaverse, ii) design prototypes using the framework. Together, this exploration charts the course toward a more cohesive and hyper-connected metaverse smart environment

Using Games as a Means for Collaboration

The availability of a good interface for online user collaboration has been a sore point for most collaboration applications to date. While MUD's, MOO's, IRC and other chat applications are well suited to impersonal communication, the meaning of a single message can often be misconstrued or misunderstood, and the effort often required to learn control of a new application while understanding navigation in a virtual world, can be difficult to overcome. The Nexus promises to aid in the intuitive act of communication, interaction and movement and in the process enhance the collaboration experience for the user, through the use of a game engine