Fiona Carroll

The place probe: exploring a sense of place in real and virtual environments

This paper describes the design, application, and refinement of a qualitative tool designed to study sense of place. The Place Probe incorporates a range of stimuli and techniques aimed at articulating a persons sense of place. It has been developed, used, and undergone three revisions. The paper describes the background to the choice of measures that were included in the Place Probe and describes its application in both a physical place and a virtual representation of that place. This enables a comparison of the experiences. An analysis of the results reveals a similarity of reported experience, however the extremes experienced in the physical place were less pronounced in the virtual representation. The Place Probe has been refined in light of the results of the empirical work and now incorporates both qualitative and quantitative data on the experience of place.

Measuring presence in virtual environments

This demonstration presents findings from two studies on presence that use a new technology for developing photo-realistic virtual environments. Our studies have used a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures, and in doing so have pointed to the importance of exploring place as part of presence. The demonstration explores issues of presence in such environments and the range of data capture methods we used and methodological issues found..

Exploring how social media can enhance the teaching of action research

Action research has an extensive history of being used to improve teaching and learning in many different professional settings, for example, schools, colleges, universities health and social care services. Educational action research embodies a process that necessitates honesty and openness and which lends itself to the betterment of one’s practice; in the current e-learning climate, where education is rapidly changing and the role and practice of the educator is evolving yet uncertain, action research has never been more valuable. This article explores and presents how social media have been used to enhance the teaching of action research and also how students gained an understanding, appreciation and an evolving experience of action research. Exploring the intricate relationships between action research, new technologies and the learning that took place during an Understanding Action Research module, this article is written from the perspective that the module team was interested in ensuring that students acquired a fully rounded understanding of action research in order to utilize it in the improvement of their own practice.

The Tourist Gaze: Towards Contextualised Virtual Environments

This chapter argues that our bodily experience of place may provide a key to achieving a contextualised sense of presence in virtual environments. We begin by briefly reviewing current practice in evaluating virtual environments. The evaluation of these environments hinges on measuring our sense of being there. This is treated as our sense of presence but as we will show this is a curious decontextualised sense of being there. From there we turn to the question of contextualised presence – what it is and why it is becoming important for current and emerging virtual reality (VR) applications. We draw upon the philosophical, empirical and phenomenological treatments of body, place and the conjunction of the two to inform this discussion. We conclude by proposing a new paradigm for designing and evaluating contextualised virtual environments, based on the metaphor of tourism and the tourist gaze (Urry, 2002). Understanding Presence Understanding and measuring presence is a key aim of virtual reality research. Presence has numerous and frequently conflicting definitions. Lombard and Ditton’s (1997) review of the usage of the term revealed six different explications in the VR literature: these include social richness, realism, transportation, immersion, social actor within medium and m edium as social actor. Despite this diversity they concluded that in the context of immersive VR (as opposed to desktop or nonimmersive VR) that presence was most usually characterised as transportation. (Terms such as co-presence and social presence are also used to denote the sense of being together with others in such environments). In contrast to these rather loose, qualitative descriptions of presence, Schloerb (1995) has proposed a quantitative approach to the problem, comprising two categories of presence, subjective and objective. Subjective presence relates to judgements an individual might make of

A Learning, Research and Development Framework to Design for a "Holistic" Learning Experience

The design of experiences and, in particular, educational experiences is a complex matter and involves not only using effective technologies and applying cognitive triggers, but there is a need to think outside the box in order to also design for the affective dimension of human experiences; the impressions, feelings and interactions that a learner might/could have with the online content and technology. The purpose of this article is to delve deep into this complex entity and, in doing so, to identify how one might approach designing for ‘holistic’ educational experiences. The article presents a case study describing the journey of a group of learning technologists and educators through the design and development phases of an action research online ABCD module, and it highlights the learners experiences. It discusses the development of a learning, research and development framework to support the ABCD learning experience and, in particular, what was actually required to undertake the design for this learning experience. In summary, the article reports on a learning, research and development framework that provides solutions and support to a number of aspects involved in the design of holistic learning experiences and, in particular, the often neglected, yet complex, issues around experience design.

Designing (for) experiences in photorealistic VR environments

This paper investigates the role of aesthetics in the design of “intended” experiences in photorealistic virtual reality (VR) environments. It is motivated by the very notion that the aesthetic potential of photorealistic VR content is, and continues to be, underestimated whilst the emphasis on the development of newer and more efficient visualisation technologies to create new and exciting VR experiences increases. Challenging this, the paper looks beyond the technological (and the more traditional human computer interaction approaches that have primarily focused on the performance and efficiency issues of the technology) in order to explore more human values and the experiential side of VR. It focuses on the design of an “engaged interaction” and in doing so, implements a comparative study to explore how the strategic patterning of the aesthetic elements (particularly colour) within a photorealistic VR environment can allow for the design of a certain experience. In conclusion, the paper demonstrates that aesthetics and the “engaged interaction” can play an important role in getting to the heart of the photorealistic VR “user” experience. It highlights how we might design for (i.e. suggest, coax and guide) an “intended” VR experience.

Creating seating plans: a practical application

This paper examines the interesting problem of designing seating plans for large events such as weddings and gala dinners where, among other things, the aim is to construct solutions where guests are sat on the same tables as friends and family, but, perhaps more importantly, are kept away from those they dislike. This problem is seen to be -complete from a number of different perspectives. We describe the problem model and heuristic algorithm that is used on the commercial website www.weddingseatplanner.com. We present results on the performance of this algorithm, demonstrating the factors that can influence run time and solution quality, and also present a comparison with an equivalent IP model used in conjunction with a commercial solver.

Colouring the Gaps in Learning Design: Aesthetics and the Visual in Learning

The visual is a dominant mode of information retrieval and understanding however, the focus on the visual dimension of Technology Enhanced Learning TEL is still quite weak in relation to its predominant focus on usability. To accommodate the future needs of the visual learner, designers of e-learning environments should advance the current attention on usability and functionality to include aesthetics, the visual and the affective. The challenge lies in finding a way to fully address the needs of the visual learner. This paper explores the role of visual aesthetics in improving engagement in online learning.

Patterns of Place: An Integrated Approach for the Design and Evaluation of Real and Virtual Environments

This chapter describes an approach to the development of virtual representations of real places. The work was funded under the European Union’s €20 m Future and Emerging Technologies theme of the 5th Framework Programme, “Presence”. The aim of the project, called BENOGO, was to develop a novel technology based on real-time image-based rendering (IBR) for representing places in virtual environments. The specific focus of the work presented here concerned how to capture the essential features of real places, and how to represent that knowledge, so that the team developing the IBR-based virtual environments could produce an environment that was as realistic as possible. This involved the development and evaluation of a number of virtual environments and the evolution of two complementary techniques; the Place Probe and Patterns of place.

Affect and Dialogue in Collaborative Cross- Disciplinary Research: Developing Interactive Public Art on Cardiff Bay Barrage

Abstract Where Cartesian philosophy distinguishes the perceiving and perceptual mind from the body, phenomenology constitutes the experiential/experiencing body as the subject, giving rise to the affective potential of art. An immersive world of digital connections, smart cities and the Internet of Everything dramatises the centrality of relationship, the intertwining of Self and Other, in the lived environments of human experience. This article addresses the contextual, disciplinary and practical challenges encountered in developing an ambitious interactive public art project embedding SMART technology on the coastal fringes of Cardiff, the capital city of Wales (UK). It examines the processes and problems involved in delivering a stimulating aesthetic experience in and on a complex site, for a complex audience profile. It traces, in particular, the dependence of a multi-disciplinary project team on the theoretical and practical effects of affect in their ongoing effort to produce engaging, provocative, socially inclusive interactive public art, in and through human-centred design techniques.