Embodiment of virtual feet correlates with motor performance in a target-stepping task:a pilot study

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) has gained popularity in neurorehabilitation for its potential to increase patients’ motivation and engagement. A crucial yet relatively unexplored aspect of IVR interfaces is the patients’ representation in the virtual world, such as with an avatar. A higher level of embodiment over avatars has been shown to enhance motor performance during upper limb training and has the potential to be employed to enhance neurorehabilitation. However, the relationship between avatar embodiment and gait performance remains unexplored. In this work, we present the results of a pilot study with 12 healthy young participants that evaluates the effect of different virtual lower limb representations on foot placement accuracy while stepping over a trail of 16 virtual targets. We compared three levels of virtual representation: i) a full-body avatar, ii) only feet, and iii) no representation. Full-body tracking is computed using standard VR trackers to synchronize the avatar with the participants’ motions. Foot placement accuracy is measured as the distance between the foot’s center of mass and the center of the selected virtual target. Additionally, we evaluated the level of embodiment over each virtual representation through a questionnaire. Our findings indicate that foot placement accuracy increases with some form of virtual representation, either full-body or foot, compared to having no virtual representation. However, the foot and full-body representations do not show significant differences in accuracy. Importantly, we found a negative correlation between the level of embodiment of the foot representation and the distance between the placed foot and the target. However, no such correlation was found for the full-body representation. Our results highlight the importance of embodying a virtual representation of the foot when performing a task that requires accurate foot placement. However, showing a full-body avatar does not appear to further enhance accuracy. Moreover, our results suggest that the level of embodiment of the virtual feet might modulate motor performance in this stepping task. This work motivates future research on the effect of embodiment over virtual representations on motor control to be exploited for IVR gait rehabilitation.Human-Robot Interactio

The Nintendo Wii, virtualisation and gestural analogics

This paper examines the Nintendo Wii from a perspective informed by Martin Heidegger’s existential analysis of equipmental being in order to make some claims about thesignficance of the Wii’s innovative interface. The Wii enhanced the analogical, gestural component of user input in home game consoles which are (or were) based more firmly in digital, finger-based input. The Wii’s redefinition of interactive media engagement heralds a wider transition to a more embodied media technicity ofvirtual experience. I will advance some propositions about how to understand the Wii’s popularity, its place in advancing a mainstream program of the application of VR technics, and its potential to open up other programmings of ‘spatio-physicality.

Boring lizards:Ludic management, affect and ambivalence

This article utilises Game Studies, Animal Studies and Affect Studies approaches to explore how videogame adaptation Jurassic World: Evolution (Frontier 2018) mediates Jurassic World’s (2015) themes of captivity, anxiety and boredom in a time of routinised risk and perpetual crisis management (Bhattacharyya 2015; Beck 1992). Critically, the game has been denigrated as boring and repetitious (Stapleton 2018; Freeman 2018); dinosaurs sleep more than fight; and players balance variables to meet minimum thresholds of dinosaur contentment and their own enjoyment. If the film’s hybrid dinosaur signals the increasing banality of ‘terrible lizards,’ I argue that Evolution explores boredom systemically through simulations of banal park maintenance where the speculative animal might ‘respond’ to the player through shared affects and constraints. As W.J.T. Mitchell asks of the dinosaur’s ambivalent meanings of power and extinction, “Are we to scream or to yawn?” (1998:69). This is not a break with games of exploitation and manipulation of the animal, but rather an articulation of our complicity and enmeshment in loops of captivity that embrace human and animal but neither completely. Unable to see the animal itself, filled with tantalising contradictions and distance, we instead become-bored-with the animal

An Investigation, Development, and Application of Lighting Design for Virtual Reality using Unreal Engine

Humanity has used lighting for millennia to chase away encroaching darkness, to increase the power of narrative, and to enhance the appeal and mood in crafted en-vironments. Theater, cinema, and architecture, among other fields, have developed, applied, and refined concepts of using light as a directed tool, but the relatively young field of virtual reality has not yet developed rigorous conventions. This thesis doc-ument describes work in investigating, developing, and applying designs for lighting conventions in virtual reality. Traditional artwork, photography, cinema, video-game, and environment lighting are considered and used to extrapolate concepts for lighting within virtual-reality applications. The developed concepts are used to design and light an immersive visual narrative implemented as a virtual-reality experience within Unreal Engine 4

Playful Materialities

Game culture and material culture have always been closely linked. Analog forms of rule-based play (ludus) would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. In the act of free play (paidia), children as well as adults transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Even digital play is suffused with material culture: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and processes of de-, and re-materialization

Playful Materialities: The Stuff That Games Are Made Of

Game culture and material culture have always been closely linked. Analog forms of rule-based play (ludus) would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. In the act of free play (paidia), children as well as adults transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Even digital play is suffused with material culture: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and processes of de-, and re-materialization

Playful Materialities

Game culture and material culture have always been closely linked. Analog forms of rule-based play (ludus) would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. In the act of free play (paidia), children as well as adults transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Even digital play is suffused with material culture: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and processes of de-, and re-materialization

Hacking as a playful strategy for designing the artistic and experimental BCI-VR game: ride your mind

Hacking is an ambiguous term. Over the past 50 years, its meaning has been constantly expanded and refined, filtered through several disciplines from divergent fields of application such as, for example, technology, computers, media, art, design, games and more. First used to describe what can be called a playful strategy employed to (creatively) solve a problem (Levy 1986), in public discourse the term hacking now often connotes a form of illicit behaviour in cyberspace. Today, the common perception is that hackers are rule-breakers and system-intruders who seek to do damage or even commit acts of war. In the 1950s, hackers helped transform computers from military devices into entertainment devices. This context swap (military to entertainment) forms the cradle of digital games and functions as the starting point of my research, which will seek to trace the history of hacking as a design strategy and to discover artistic strategies contained within the act of hacking itself. Hacking is, in fact, directly and historically related to computers and particularly to digital games. The first hacks were algorithmic visualisations and interactive programs, specifically interactive games; Spacewar! (1962) is the most famous example. To understand hacking as a strategy for designing games, I will explore historical and artistic approaches that have been used by hackers. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – more specifically, the students of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) – were introduced to MIT’s early digital computing machines. The members of TMRC launched a creative examination of this emerging computing technology; they were equipped with neither instructions nor experience, but they were driven by their goal of using the computer to create “art and beauty” (Levy 1986, p.31). Hackers do not have to be passionate computer users. As Eric S. Raymond (2013) asserts in The Jargon File, anyone can become a hacker. Hacking combines several creative strategies that are related to art, design and other creative disciplines. Like a hacker, I will create my own tools for conducting the proposed research, especially methodological ones. My basic methodological approach is to look at hacking in a chronological and historical way, in order to identify recurring design principles that are representative of hacking understood as a form of design practice. Many other fields intersect with the history of hacking, such as, for example, the history of computers and the history of computer games. Each of these three fields is also linked to fields such as philology, art history, the history of science, telecommunications engineering, economics and communication studies. The result is an as-of-yet undefined field of enquiry. This multi-dimensional context in which hacking exists poses a challenge: it is tempting to take detours in all manner of fascinating thematic and historical directions. To avoid straying from my topic, I will concentrate on the origins of hacking by investigating historical records like Steven Levy’s (1986) and Raymond’s (2013) and by comparing these to the broader context of hacking in the spirit of, for example, Claus Pias (2002b; 2002a; 2013) and Stephan Schwingeler (2012; 2014) and others. I will then synthesise the design elements I have identified and use them to outline a strategy for designing artistic games that will serve as the theoretical backbone for my own work as a media artist and, hopefully, for others’ work as well. I will combine the main strategic elements with an artistic approach into a game, which will constitute the practical element of this research. The outcome is based on the concept of an interactive, hackish neurofeedback real-time virtual-reality game art installation, or in brief, an artistic BCI-VR Game, titled Ride Your Mind (RYM). In the spirit of the early hackers, my research project Ride Your Mind (RYM) playfully explores, examines and hacks the possibilities of an emerging consumer technology, Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI), from the perspective of a game artist and a game designer who is seeking to potentially create a BCI-VR Game. Initially, Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) games (games controlled/influenced by BCI) were used in medical and BCI research to successfully treat diseases such as ADHD (Nijholt et al. 2009, p.88). In the last years, hardware manufacturers such as Emotiv or Neurosky have begun producing consumer BCI technology, and the focus group for BCI has shifted to healthy users (Nijholt et al. 2008; Nijholt et al. 2009; Tan & Nijholt 2010; Loup-Escande et al. 2015; Martišius & Damaševičius 2016; Kerous et al. 2017; Chavarriaga et al. 2017; Vourvopoulos et al. 2017). The concept of RYM (Stober 2013) was developed in 2012 and presented in 2013 at the FROG Games Conference (Mitgutsch et al. 2013). RYM integrates various methods from academic and artistic disciplines, such as experimental and artistic game design, artistic practice, game design research, HCI and BCI research, computer science and neuroscience. Therefore, the approach in this PhD by project is quintessentially transdisciplinary. My work primarily links art and science as creative and artistic research and as an approach of research-through-design (Zimmerman et al. 2007; Zimmerman et al. 2010; Batty & Berry 2015; Gaver 2012; Ylirisku et al. 2016; Barab & Squire 2004; Bateson & Martin 2013; Hjelm 2003; Klein 2010; Balkema & Slager 2004; Mäkelä et al. 2011; Busch 2009; Hellström 2010; Lesage 2009; Ladd 1979; Borgdorff 2007). In summary, the aim of RYM as a research project is to (1) expand traditional digital game design with new knowledge on how to design future BCI games with more sophisticated consumer BCI technology; and (2) to test the possibility of designing an experimental BCI-VR game with existing consumer grade BCI hardware based on hacking as a creative and artistic design strategy. Research with respect to gaming and playful characteristics has previously been done in cognitive sciences and in particular human-centred computing; however, research from a game design point of view is limited. Thus far there are no available guidelines or strategies for BCI game design from a game design research perspective. Apart from its merit as a research-practical exercise in hacking, the work on RYM has revealed current and future possibilities and issues related to consumer BCI technology in the gaming context, and as such contributes knowledge to the chosen field of application. Since there is practically no material on BCI game design, I hope that the insights provided by this game art and game design-centred creative research project will be game-changing for an arising research field within game design research (Gürkök et al. 2015; Loup-Escande et al. 2015; Bos et al. 2010; Nijholt 2016)

A Qualitative Study into the Impact of Outcomes Based Education on Engineering Educators and Engineering Education in the Technical Higher Education Sector in Ireland

This thesis considers the effect the transition to outcomes based education (OBE) has had on engineering educators and engineering education in the Institutes of Technology (IoTs) in Ireland. Whereas engineering education research into learning outcomes largely focuses on how teaching may better align with their use, the focus of this research, the effect OBE has on both engineering educators and engineering education, receives little attention in the literature. I conduct this research as an engineering educator seeking to understand how we have been shaped by OBE, and how this is affecting the education of future generations of engineers. My research employs a qualitative methodology, in which I consider this impact as perceived and experienced by a sample of IoT engineering academics. My research highlights the influence of the market in shaping engineering education, which can be regarded through Bernstein’s (2000) concept of engineering as a region, facing inward to academia, but outward to the market, mediated by the professional bodies. This leads me to draw selectively on social realism, alongside my experience as an engineering educator, as a conceptual framework. This emphasises the need to gain comprehensive understanding of the historical context in which my research is situated, for which my literature review encompasses a number of inter-related socio-historical accounts: of the early development of Irish engineering education; of the establishment of the Regional Technical Colleges (which became the IoTs) to implement government policy that saw education, particularly technician education, as key to improving the life of the citizenry through economic advancement; the later development of the National Framework of Qualifications (NFQ) as part of a skills-focussed reorientation of higher education; and the reasons for, and consequences of, the adoption of OBE for engineering accreditation, internationally and in Ireland. The fieldwork, comprising interviews and a focus group with engineering academics, reveals the perceptions of my research participants of the effect that OBE is having on their academic identity, including their approach to curriculum and pedagogy, and provides insight into the structure of engineering education, and the identity formation of students. I will show that my interviewees regard OBE as effective, in terms of: facilitating communication; improving access to education; impacting positively on pedagogy; and as a framework for curriculum design. However, my research critiques the assessment focussed pedagogy that they appear to have adopted as a consequence, questions the appropriateness of the ‘language of levels’ related to NFQ terminology that has emerged in our pedagogic discourse, and raises concerns about the impact on curriculum and the structure of engineering education