Together with my colleague Patrick Pennefather we’re currently teaching our brand-new 15-credit immersive course entitled “Semester in Alternate Realities”
In this project-based course, participants will be challenged to develop solutions using technologies such as VR (e.g., Oculus Go/Rift, HTC Vive) and immersive multi-modal mixed reality installations. In addition to focusing on the co-construction of digital prototypes affording meaningful experiences in “alternate realities”, our objective is to stimulate documented reflection and discussion throughout the process. Participants can expect to work collaboratively, be matched according to the skills they bring, and be provided time and resources to learn new techniques and approaches, soft– and hard skills, and processes to conduct user research. Participants will get the opportunity to reflect on future technologies and their potential impact on the world, and improve their presentation skills and publicly showcase their projects at three showcases throughout the semester. To incorporate diverse perspectives, students from different disciplines were invited to apply and, in their application, argue how they could contribute to the course and the co-construction of team projects. 18 students from different departments were selected.
This semester’s design challenge is “creating for good”: Use alternate realities techniques and technologies, guiding theoretical frameworks, and appropriate processes, project management and collaboration approaches to iteratively ideate, design, prototype, and evaluate an interactive alternate realities experience that affords meaningful experiences for the betterment of humanity and/or our planet.
There is increasing evidence that the immersive nature of VR makes it a powerful medium for “doing good,” and it is particularly well-suited for helping people develop compassion and empathy. In this course, we will explore the potential of doing good using alternate realities (that are booming around the world and particularly in Vancouver). This new course builds on our prior experience in teaching immersive environment courses and XR rapid prototyping, doing joint VR4Good projects, and organizing a Siggraph Birds of a Feather session on VR/MR/AR 4 Good: Creating with a Purpose.
First Showcase: February 1st 2019
We’ll have our first Student Virtual Reality Showcase on Friday February 1st, ca 1:00 - 4:30pm, on the SFU Surrey Campus Mezzanine, where the 18 students from different SFU departments show their first immersive project. Below are their project videos and brief project descriptions. See our facebook event page for first pictures of the showcase, more will follow soon.
Rising Waters: Is this your future?
Rising Waters is an exploratory context driven game that sets you in the future, in which pollution has devastated the planet. Through narrative and context clues, the player is set to navigate the world and automatically obtaining samples within their robotic suite to see how a low-lying coastal city has been damaged through careless environmental damage. Once the mission is complete, the player exits the experience and reflects on their own environmental impact.
Goal: The goal of this project is to prompt participants to consider the long-term impact of their actions on the environment through visual, auditory and experiential learning. By situating the participant in a familiar location, city banners are used to help localize the experience, participants will learn about how a localized city can be impacted through a lack of immediate change towards combating global and local pollutants, affect how the biosphere behaves, which can contribute to rising sea levels, and degradation in the overall quality of the environment.
Core User Experience: The core user experience centers around narrative and experiential learning through interaction with the built environment. In Rising Waters, the focus of attention first and foremost should be on how the user interacts with the built environment, driving the core experience to be exploratory in nature. By having participants interact with the environment, Rising Waters wants to confront the user’s initial sense of awe, with one of dread and shock. Ideally, the user experience presents itself as something nouveau, driving forward a sense of urgency that imbues the user with a desire to complete the experience.
Restless Sleep - A Waking Coma Experience: To find the forest through the eyes of others
“Restless Sleep” is an innovative VR experience of a fabulated narrative in which users’ mind is connecting with the consciousness of coma patient in order to see and feel through a comatose perception. The experience is composed by both performative and virtual elements, incorporating interactive responses between haptics and visuals, to guide users into the full embodiment of a coma patient, who is constantly feeling and interacting with their physical environment.
Goal: Our goal of the project is to let the user foster empathy towards coma patients. Many people question how conscious of their surroundings Coma patients are and how much outside stimulation they can actually interpret. By being in a VR coma experience (per, during and post), the users are put into the shoes of a coma patient where they can learn how coma patients are treated and also to show that they have a mind of their own which are not fully unconscious.
Core User Experience: The core user experience we want to accomplish is to foster empathy for coma patients and develop an understanding of what they can feel and how bystander actions can influence the mental state along with the mental interpretations of the patient. We want users to walk away from the experience with a sense of introspective contemplation, and hopefully knowledge on how best to handle themselves around people in comas (or even those in other states of altered consciousness). This is because we identified a surprising amount of misinformation and ignorance surrounding comatose states, as well
as many first-hand experiences of comatose patients. The most impactful was the story of a girl who was in a two week medically induced coma and her recounts of the hallucinatory dreams she had while in the coma.. While we deliberately didn’t want to subject the users to this, we did want to bring attention to the feeling of helplessness one feels, and how it is analogous to being in VR — especially in a public setting.
https://vimeo.com/315911417/b084425816
The Pitch of Red: Every colour has a voice
The Pitch of Red is an immersive VR experience that allows the user to experience synesthesia — a condition that blends two or more senses together. In our experience, users are able to hear the sounds of the colours they see as they wander through the mind of Wassily Kandinsky — an artist who had such a condition.
Goal: The project tries to bring the user closer to the notion of mixing human senses. The psychological deviation can be experienced by anyone to any extent. It is mostly based on what the person associated with a certain sound, colour, taste or any other humanly understood medium. The amount of people who experience that feeling is relatively small, however, the impact they have made in history or their way of perceiving the world is worth studying. The project is focused on communicating the idea of mixing human senses, also known as — synesthesia to those who have never heard something similar to that or never experienced that sense.
Core user experience: For The Pitch of Red we aim to provide immersants with a greater understanding of what it is like to have synesthesia of associating colors to sounds, or at the very least, be able to describe what such synesthesia is to someone who may not know what it means. During the experience they will be granted a “superpower”: being able to hear every colour that they look at and we would expect users to feel curious, excited and intentionally a bit overwhelmed. After finishing our VR experience, we would like users will come out with a better understanding of what this particular type of synesthesia might feel like in real life.
Aesthetically, we want the experience to allow the immersant to see an alternate reality through the eyes of Wassily Kandinsky. With that said, one of the difficulties of VR is the lack of haptic touch so our focus with The Pitch of Red is to try to simulate the relationship between sight and sound.
Barriers: The TRIP of a lifetime
BARRIERS is a virtual experience that allows the user to view interactions through the eyes and ears of a Non-Native English speaker. After biting into a “magical” cookie, the participant is transported to a fantasy world. In order to achieve their goal of finding a washroom, the immersant must interact with nearby talking animals.
Goal: The main emotion we are trying to evoke in our experience is the vulnerability of relying on other people to be willing to help you when they don’t understand what they are saying. What makes our project unique is its ability to make anyone feel as though they do not understand the language since it is made up. This ties in with the course theme because it invokes empathy in the user and give them an experience they would not otherwise have access to.
Core user experience:
Through BARRIERS, we hope to place users in the vulnerable position of relying on other people for help. This experience aims to recreate the frustration that comes with not being able to speak English and the gratitude that arises when an individual takes the time to explain and use different communication techniques to foster understanding.
