Beyond virtual cultural tourism: history-living experiences with cinematic virtual reality

Virtual reality offers unprecedented opportunities for creating cultural tourism experiences that tell visitors emotionally engaging stories about the past.  This paper focuses onthe latest frontier of immersive storytelling rivalling feature films, cinematic virtual reality, which can immerse users into 360-degree films making them feel like living the story. Through a qualitative analysis of five projects, this paper explores how this new media form has been applied for cultural heritage storytelling and analyses the reactions of users to the historyliving experiences with an emphasis on their emotional responses. Based on the findings of the analysis, implications are discussed for the design of VR experiences in cultural tourism

Participatory analytics for transport decision-making

This thesis investigates the design and evaluation of several software platforms that facilitate participatory outcomes in transport decision-making across operational, local and strategic scales. These platforms act as instruments to explore aspects of the research question: "How can urban dashboards be contextualised, designed & evaluated in a way that is sensitive to the changing role of digital democracy, immersive technologies and the increasingly collaborative nature of planning?". The concept of participatory urban dashboards is introduced, followed by process of participatory analytics. This process involves bringing more people on board with both using the dashboard (e.g., together or collaboratively) and allowing a more general audience of citizens or stakeholders to make sense and validate what is displayed. The research is applied to the city of Sydney, Australia. Sydney is a growing, global city with a wide variety of transport infrastructure ambitions and a strong, open-data ecosystem. Sydney’s transport system underpins the case studies of the operational, local and strategic digital artefacts assessed in this research. Participatory analytics outcomes as a result of interacting with these digital prototypes are evaluated. This will, in turn, help direct research and real-life applications and development of these tools. Further, it aims to build on research gap calling for further understanding of context-specific, user-centric design and evaluation of these participatory analytics tools

Da imersão à criação : cartografando experiências estéticas de estudantes com a realidade virtual

A Realidade Virtual (RV) vem sendo bastante explorada no âmbito da educação no Brasil e no mundo, sendo o seu uso intensificado a partir da pandemia da Covid-19. Entretanto, a maioria das pesquisas dedicadas ao assunto investigam a usabilidade de ferramentas RV para o ensino-aprendizagem a partir do desenvolvimento de softwares e aplicações, sendo os processos derivados deste uso pouco explorados nas pesquisas, especialmente no campo das ciências humanas, como Artes e Letras. Nessa direção, considera-se que a consequente popularização da RV e demais tecnologias imersivas também traz como problematização o modo como o observador interage e sente os elementos audiovisuais e sua forma de apropriação em processos estético-educacionais. A presente tese tem como objetivo cartografar as experiências estéticas originadas na implementação da tecnologia de RV com alunos em espaços não-formais de aprendizagem, cujos dados cultivados com estudantes buscam responder como as experiências estéticas em RV podem potencializar o aprendizado da arte no espaço não-formal. Para tanto, utilizou-se como metodologia a prática cartográfica de investigação, com o intuito de acompanhar os processos traçados pela pesquisadora e estudantes. Esta tese analisa duas práticas artístico-pedagógicas conduzidas em contextos não-formais de aprendizagem: a primeira, realizada como uma oficina remota sobre a RV, com a participação de sete estudantes com idades entre 8 e 12 anos. A segunda prática foi realizada no NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, durante estadia de pesquisa na Alemanha, com a participação de três estudantes universitárias com idades que variam de 21 a 27 anos. O manejo de análise percorreu três fases principais: (1) Realidade Virtual Cinematográfica: desenvolvendo a educação do olhar, (2) Produção de narrativas: A RV como fomento de experiências artísticas e de design e, (3) Pistas para a pedagogia da percepção e a construção de mundos virtuais por estudantes, nas quais busca-se dialogar com os principais referenciais trazidos na tese, assim como levantar novas problematizações relacionadas às propriedades estéticas e pedagógicas das experiências apresentadas. Assim, os dados cultivados ao longo desta tese mostram, portanto, que as experiências estéticas RV indicam caminhos para a aprendizagem da linguagem da arte em suas múltiplas manifestações audiovisuais, de forma a contribuir para o desenvolvimento da gramática audiovisual inerente à estética RV, bem como ao fortalecer a educação estética de estudantes no âmbito das práticas pedagógicas formais e não-formais.Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely explored in education in Brazil and around the world, and its use has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic. However, most research devoted to this subject investigates the usability of VR tools for teaching-learning from the development of software and applications, and the processes originated from this use are little explored, especially in the field of humanities, such as Arts and Letters. In this direction, it is considered that the increasing popularization of VR and other immersive technologies also brings the problematization of how the spectator interacts and feels the audiovisual elements and how they are appropriated in the aesthetic-educational processes. This thesis aims to map the aesthetic experiences that arise from the implementation of VR technology with students in non-formal learning environments, whose data cultivated with students seek to answer how aesthetic experiences in VR can enhance art learning in the non-formal setting. For this purpose, the cartographic method was employed, in order to follow the processes outlined by the researcher and students. This thesis analyses two artistic-pedagogical practices conducted in non-formal learning settings: the first one was carried out as a remote workshop on VR, with the participation of seven students aged 8-12 years old. The second practice was conducted at NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, during a research stay in Germany, with the participation of three university students aged 21-27. The handling of analysis went through three main phases: (1) Cinematic Virtual Reality: developing the education of gaze, (2) Production of narratives: VR as fostering artistic and design experiences and, (3) Clues for the pedagogy of perception and the construction of virtual worlds by students, in which it seeks to dialogue with the major references brought in the thesis, as well as to raise new problematizations related to the aesthetic and pedagogical properties of the experiences presented. Thus, the data cultivated throughout this thesis show, therefore, that VR aesthetic experiences can indicate paths for learning the language of art in its multiple audiovisual manifestations, in order to contribute to the development of the audiovisual grammar inherent to VR aesthetics, as well as by strengthening the aesthetic education of students within formal and non-formal pedagogical practices