John Shearer

Designing from within: humanaquarium

We present an experience-based approach to designing a collaborative interactive performance, humanaquarium. Our research explores public interaction with digital technology through the practice-based inquiry of an inter-disciplinary team of interaction designers and musicians. We present a method of designing experience from within, literally situating ourselves within the performance/use space and assuming the roles both of performers and of designers as we develop and refine the humanaquarium project over the course of a years worth of public performances.

Nightingallery: theatrical framing and orchestration in participatory performance

The Nightingallery project encouraged participants to converse, sing, and perform with a musically responsive animatronic bird, playfully interacting with the character while members of the public could look on and observe. We used Nightingallery to frame an HCI investigation into how people would engage with one another when confronted with unfamiliar technologies in conspicuously public, social spaces. Structuring performances as improvisational street theatre, we styled our method of exhibiting the bird character. We cast ourselves in supporting roles as carnival barkers and minders of the bird, presenting him as if he were a fantastical creature in a fairground sideshow display, allowing him the agency to shape and maintain dialogues with participants, and positioning him as the focal character upon which the encounter was centred. We explored how the anthropomorphic nature of the bird itself, along with the cultural connotations associated with the carnival/sideshow tradition helped signpost and entice participants through the trajectory of their encounters with the exhibit. Situating ourselves as secondary characters within the narrative defining the performance/use context, our methods of mediation, observation, and evaluation were integrated into the performance frame. In this paper, we explore recent HCI theories in mixed reality performance to reflect upon how genre-based cultural connotations can be used to frame trajectories of experience, and how manipulation of roles and agency in participatory performance can facilitate HCI investigation of social encounters with playful technologies.

Bridging the gap: implementing interaction through multi-user design

We describe an interactive museum installation designed to extend visitor participation through personal reflection and contribution. The case study describes design approaches, which focused on multiple individual simultaneous use, which we describe as multi-user design. These approaches were deployed to support the visitor moving from viewer to contributor in a temporary museum exhibition. We present the anticipated use and early analysis of some of the data from actual use of the system. We outline our initial findings for the opportunities and limits in designing for personalised user-generated content through such approaches within museums and suggest areas of future work on qualities of participation and visitor contribution.

humanaquarium : exploring audience, participation, and interaction

humanaquarium is a movable performance space designed to explore the dialogical relationship between artist and audience. Two musicians perform inside the cube-shaped box, collaborating with participants to co-create an aesthetic audio-visual experience. The front wall of the humanaquarium is a touch-sensitive FTIR window. MaxMSP is used to translate the locations of touches on the window into control data, manipulating the tracking of software synthesizers and audio effects generated in Ableton Live, and influencing a Jitter visualization projected upon the rear wall of the cube.

Phantasmagoria: composing interactive content for the humanaquarium

humanaquarium is a mobile performance space which draws upon the traditions of busking and street performance to engage audiences in collaborative, creative play.We describe how the conceptual and physical nature of the performance space affected the way we composed the audio/visual performance content in Phantasmagoria, an interactive art piece built for the humanaquarium environment.

Exploring Storytelling for Digital Memorialization

Memories are an interesting part of everyday lives and memorialization through storytelling is an important way to share memories. The increased use of digital devices in the society has brought about a shift suggesting that people are willing to use technologies to remember the dead. With a view to designing devices and platforms to support memorializing through storytelling we explored how willing and comfortable people are sharing stories about the deceased. Our results revealed longer stories were told about younger people who had been dead for longer. This paper reports on our findings of an exploration of stories told by the bereaved and considers design implications for future work.

Virtual reality crowd simulation: effects of agent density on user experience and behaviour

Agent-based crowd simulations are used for modelling building and space usage, allowing designers to explore hypothetical real-world scenarios, including extraordinary events such as evacuations. Existing work which engages virtual reality (VR) as a platform for crowd simulations has been primarily focussed on the validation of simulation models through observation; the use of interactions such as gaze to enhance a sense of immersion; or studies of proxemics. In this work, we extend previous studies of proxemics and examine the effects of varying crowd density on user experience and behaviour. We have created a simulation in which participants walk freely and perform a routine manual task, whilst interacting with agents controlled by a typical social force simulation model. We examine and report the effects of crowd density on both affective state and behaviour. Our results show a significant increase in negative affect with density, measured using a self-report scale. We further show significant differences in some aspects of user behaviours, using video analysis, and discuss how our results relate to VR simulation design for mixed human–agent scenarios.

Investigating head movements induced by "riloid" patterns in migraine and control groups using a virtual reality display

Certain striped patterns can induce illusory motion, such as those used in op-art. The visual system and the vestibular system work together closely, and so it is possible that illusory motion from a visual stimulus can result in uncertainty in the vestibular system. This increased uncertainty may be measureable in terms of the magnitude of head movements. Head movements were measured using a head-mounted visual display. Results showed that stimuli associated with illusory motion also seem to induce greater head movements when compared to similar stimuli. Individuals with migraine are more susceptible to visual discomfort, and this includes illusory motion from striped stimuli. However, there was no evidence of increased effect of illusory motion on those with migraine compared to those without, suggesting that while motion illusions may affect discomfort judgements, this is not limited to only those with migraine.

Droplets: geo-located audio as a social media platform

Location-based audio has previously attracted some attention from the HCI community. This has mainly revolved around knowledge-sharing and creation of curated experiences as artistic expression. In this paper we present initial work in which we look at located audio through the lenses of social media, and present initial work on a social media app -- Droplets -- which seeks to create new geo-located social media experiences.