Summary of exploring a three-dimensional narrative medium: The theme park as “de Sprookjessprokkelaar,” the gatherer and teller of stories

This paper presents a summary of the author’s doctoral dissertation, which examines the pervasiveness of storytelling in theme parks and establishes the theme park as a distinct narrative medium. It traces the characteristics of theme park storytelling, how it has changed over time, and what makes the medium unique. This was accomplished using a mixed methods approach drawing data from interviews with creative professionals, archival research, fieldwork, and an analysis of more than eight hundred narrative attractions. The survey of narrative attractions revealed the most common narrative expressions to be dark rides and stage shows. Source material tends to be cultural tales (legends, fairy tales) or intellectual properties (generally films). Throughout major periods and world regions, setting, scenes, and visual storytelling are the most ubiquitous narrative devices. Three dozen techniques and technologies are detailed in this project. Significant impetuses for narrative change over time are the advent of technologies, formalization of the industry, explicit discourse on storytelling, formation of design philosophies, and general convergence of media. There are at least a half dozen key distinctions in theme park narratives compared with other mediums: dimensionality, scale, communality, brevity, a combinatory aspect, and a reiterative nature. Also significant is that creative professionals view themselves as storytellers, purposefully design with narrative systems, embed them in spaces, and participate in public dialogue surrounding narrative and design principles

Simulating Location-Based Experiences in VR

This research is a collaboration with Aardman Animations, a world-renowned animation studio to innovate their linear storytelling into a real-time, interactive and spatially immersive experience. We developed a room-scale VR experience to simulate the installation in order to visualise the projection distortion under different conditions. A study was then conducted using our simulation to investigate the effect of distortion of the projections on the experience of immersion and how three factors effected the distortion. This paper explains the preliminary results and the process

Incorporating VR, AR and related technologies in tourism industry: State of the art

The current chapter intends to expose the importance of tourism in the world economy, (ii) give an overview of what academic and practitioners are doing regarding the use of engagement-facilitating technologies in tourism, and (iii) suggest avenues for further research. Thus, first the authors give insights about the evolution and important of tourism. After that, the chapter presents an overview of the state of the art on the use of engagement-facilitating technologies (mainly virtual and augmented reality) in research. The examples of applications of engagement-facilitating technologies come next. In the end, the authors suggest future research directions and present the conclusions.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Physical to Virtual: A Model for Future Virtual Classroom Environments

Virtual reality is a technology that has seen unprecedented growth since the turn of the century with increasing applications within business, entertainment, and educational applications. As virtual reality technologies continue to develops and markets expand, the world may see an increased demand for virtual classrooms: virtual environments (VEs) that students may access through immersive virtual reality technologies to receive guided instruction, conduct simulations, or perform tasks typical in a classroom setting. While many studies document how virtual reality is beneficial to educational processes, there is little discussion on how virtual environments should be architecturally designed. Thus one may hypothesize that physical design strategies translated to virtual environments may have similar results. This thesis investigates virtual environments for education by creating several virtual classrooms embedded within a selective digital twin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. The design of the virtual classrooms was influenced by current architectural trends in classroom design while capturing unique abilities present within a virtual context. A physical teaching module was also designed to create a platform for educators within the university to deliver instruction within the virtual campus

El impacto de la Realidad Aumentada en la experiencia del consumidor.

La sociedad evoluciona y, por consiguiente, la tecnología debe estar al día en este gran cambio con el fin de ofrecer al mundo las herramientas suficientes para enfrentarse a tan extraordinaria evolución. Por ello, el presente trabajo de investigación tiene como objetivo identificar y analizar el impacto que tiene la realidad aumentada a la hora de aplicarla de cara a mejorar la experiencia del consumidor, así como hacer una distinción de los tipos de Realidad Aumentada que existen en función de los objetivos de marketing que se tengan. A su vez, se analizan los principales factores que envuelven el término de experiencia del consumidor, así como sus dimensiones y respuestas tras la aplicación de la RA. A través de un estudio cualitativo, llevado a cabo en forma de focus group, se analiza cómo el fenómeno de los filtros faciales afecta a la sociedad en cuanto a su uso en las redes sociales a través de las opiniones de la muestra utilizada. Los resultados obtenidos ofrecen implicaciones para los gestores de redes sociales y las estrategias de marca.<br /

FUTURE WORLD(S): A Critique of Disney\u27s EPCOT and Creating a Futuristic Curriculum

In my dissertation inquiry, I explore the need for utopian based curriculum which was inspired by Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center. Theoretically building upon such works as utopianism (Bregman, 2017, e.g., Claeys 2011;) and Disney studies (Garlen and Sandlin, 2016; Fjellman, I q work that combines historiography and speculative essays. The work explores how schools must do the hard work of working toward building a better future (Chomsky and Foucault, 1971). Through tracing the evolution of EPCOT as an idea for a community that would “always be in the state of becoming” to EPCOT Center as an inspirational theme park, this work contends that those ideas contain possibilities for how to interject utopian thought in schooling