Jay Vidyarthi
Biography
Jay Vidyarthi is simultaneously a performing musician, human-computer interaction designer and psychological researcher. His experience spans from industry to academia, where he is presently pursuing a Masters degree at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU.
Jay’s portfolio includes a unique brand of psychedelic blues music, comprehensive interface design specifications for various media, and research focused on the psychology of technology use. As diverse as it may seem, Jay’s work intersects at the concepts of ‘immersion’ and ‘expression’. Whether studying how a user and machine express to each other, designing technological mediation of expression between people, or simply expressing himself to audiences, the goal is unified: to create, understand and use new, immersive forms of human expression.
» Read about Jay at the SFU Graduate Studies blog
Projects
Describing media as 'immersive' is ambiguous. From debilitating addiction to therapeutic relief, media engagement holds a clear duality in its effect on humanity...
Without an interdisciplinary characterization of "immersion", why do we allow this concept to be so readily invoked in discussions of books, visual art, video games, virtual reality systems and more?
While "...
Do humans response socially to abstract, expressive human-computer interfaces?
To interact with the Sympathetic Guitar is to use a familiar and comfortable Western musical interface to feel an instant connection to musical culture and style of the East. The prototype senses guitarists' hand motions and performance dynamics to augment a standard classical guitar with a digital drone...
Sonic Cradle suspends the body is a completely dark chamber which encourages experiences comparable to mindfulness meditation. Users compose peaceful soundscapes in real-time using only their breathing.
[vimeo 55230632 width=600 height=337]
Sonic Cradle is a relaxing human-computer interaction paradigm designed to foster meditative attentional patterns. The curren...
Publications
Vidyarthi, J., & Riecke, B. E. (2013). Could an Interactive Medium Introduce Non-Practitioners to Mindfulness Meditation? Presented at the First International Conference on Mindfulness, Rome, Italy.
Vidyarthi, J., & Riecke, B. E. (2013). Mediated Meditation: Cultivating Mindfulness with Sonic Cradle. In Proceedings of the 2013 Annual Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems ALT.CHI (accepted) (pp. 2305–2314). Paris, France: ACM. doi:10.1145/2468356.2468753
Vidyarthi, J. (2012).
Sonic Cradle: Evoking Mindfulness through “Immersive” Interaction Design (MSc Thesis). Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada. Retrieved from
https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7542
Vidyarthi, J., Riecke, B. E., & Gromala, D. (2012). Sonic Cradle: designing for an immersive experience of meditation by connecting respiration to music. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems (ACM DIS) Conference (pp. 408–417). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2317956.2318017
Vidyarthi, J., Riecke, B. E., & Gromala, D. (2012). Encouraging Meditative Experiences through Respiratory-Musical Interaction. In NCE-GRAND 2012 Conference (pp. 1–4). Montreal, Canada.
Vidyarthi, K. J., Riecke, B. E., & Gromala, D. (2012).
Sonic Cradle. Project Exhibit presented at the TEDactive conference, Palm Springs, CA, USA. Retrieved from
http://conferences.ted.com/TEDActive2012/
Vidyarthi, K. J., Gromala, D., & Riecke, B. E. (2011). Are you Immersed? Characterizing Immersion across Literature, Art and Interactive Media. Talk presented at the Society of Literature, Science and Art (SLSA) Conference 2011, Kitchener, Canada.
Vidyarthi, J., Riecke, B. E., & Antle, A. N. (2011). Sympathetic guitar: humans respond socially to interactive technology in an abstract, expressive context. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging (ACM CAe ’11) (pp. 9–16). Vancouver, BC, Canada: ACM. doi:10.1145/2030441.2030443
Gromala, D., Vidyarthi, K. J., & Riecke, B. E. (2011). Sonic Cradle; Project Exhibition in Chronic Pain: Art & Science Collaborations. Exhibition, Sept. 29 – Nov. 30 2011, California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI), UCLA, Los Angeles, USA.
Vidyarthi, J., Antle, A. N., & Riecke, B. E. (2011). Sympathetic guitar: can a digitally augmented guitar be a social entity? In
Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1819–1824). Presented at the ACM SIG.CHI. doi:
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1979742.1979863
