EUROPEAN COMMISSION 

HORIZON 2020 TRACTION PROJECT

Feb 2020-Feb 2022

​

My work in the Traction project is to understand opera experiences and develop technologies to bring opera from the elite to the public, enabling opera co-creation as a path for social and cultural inclusion.

Defining Audience Interactivity for Entertainment Domains

The concept of audience interactivity has been rediscovered across many domains of storytelling and entertainment—e.g. digital games, in-person role-playing, film, theater performance, music, and theme parks— that enrich the form with new idioms, language, and practices. The goal of this research is to support designers working in transmedia experiences by establishing a common vocabulary for the design space across entertainment domains. 

The Ambient Holdeck Multisensory System

Multisensory media has been shown to extend information processing in education, but HCI has yet to consider its value on observation skills in context of VR. This research considers the effect of overlaying videos of outdoor habitats with ambient sensory stimuli (smell, heat, humidity, wind) on the level of detail with which participants make landscape observations. To support the StreamBED VR project, we designed and build the Ambient Holodeck, replicating environmental conditions of two stream habitats. We use this system to compare how learners make observations and infer patterns, with and without sensory cues.  

StreamBED VR: Training Citizen Scientists to Judge Stream Habitats 

Advances in immersive virtual reality (VR) have created opportunities to recreate physical environments with minimal cost, making it possible to train citizen scientists to make qualitative experiential judgments usually reserved for domain experts. My dissertation research trained citizen scientists to assess outdoor stream habitatsTo do this, we built the StreamBED VR system, and a multisensory VR training platform called the Ambient Holodeck.