Alina Striner

Alina Striner, Lennart E. Nacke, Elizabeth Bonsignore et al.

Workshops are used for academic social networking, but connections can be superficial and result in few enduring collaborations. This unworkshop offers a novel interactive format to create deep connections, peer- learning, and produces a technology-enhanced experience. Participants will generate interactive technological artifacts before the unworkshop, which will be used together and orchestrated at the unworkshop to engage all participants in an alternate reality game set in local places at the conference.

Alina Striner, Jennifer Preece

Environmental citizen science frequently relies on experience-based assessment, however volunteers are not trained to make qualitative judgments. Embodied learning in virtual reality (VR) has been explored as a way to train behavior, but has not fully been considered as a way to train judgment. This preliminary research explores embodied learning in VR through the design, evaluation, and redesign of StreamBED, a water quality monitoring training environment that teaches volunteers to make qualitative assessments by exploring, assessing and comparing virtual watersheds.

Alina Striner

Mixed reality experiences often require detailed narrative that can be used to craft physical and virtual design components. This work elaborates on a mentoring experience at the Carnegie Mellon's ETC to consider how improv games may be used ideate and iterate on storytelling experiences.

Alina Striner

As the internet of things (IoT) has integrated physical and digital technologies, designing for multiple sensory media (mulsemedia) has become more attainable. Designing technology for multiple senses has the capacity to improve virtual realism, extend our ability to process information, and more easily transfer knowledge between physical and digital environments. HCI researchers are beginning to explore the viability of integrating multimedia into virtual experiences, however research has yet to consider whether mulsemedia truly enhances realism, immersion and knowledge transfer. My work developing StreamBED, a VR training platform to train citizen science water monitors plans to consider the role of mulsemedia in immersion and learning goals. Future findings about the role of mulsemedia in learning contexts will potentially allow learners to experience, connect to, learn from spaces that are impossible to experience firsthand.

Alina Striner, Sasha Azad, Chris Martens

Audience interactivity is interpreted differently across domains. This research develops a framework to describe audience interactivity across a broad range of experiences. We build on early work characterizing child audience interactivity experiences, expanding on these findings with an extensive review of literature in theater, games, and theme parks, paired with expert interviews in those domains. The framework scaffolds interactivity as nested spheres of audience influence, and comprises a series of dimensions of audience interactivity including a Spectrum of Audience Interactivity. This framework aims to develop a common taxonomy for researchers and practitioners working with audience interactivity experiences.

Alina Striner, Brenna McNally

Live interactions have the potential to meaningfully engage audiences during musical performances, and modern technologies promise unique ways to facilitate these interactions. This work presents findings from three co-design sessions with children that investigated how audiences might want to interact with live music performances, including design considerations and opportunities. Findings from these sessions also formed a Spectrum of Audience Interactivity in live musical performances, outlining ways to encourage interactivity in music performances from the child perspective.

Alina Striner, Jennifer Preece

StreamBED is an embodied VR training for citizen scientists to make qualitative stream assessments. Early findings garnered positive feedback about training qualitative assessment using a virtual representation of different stream spaces, but presented field-specific challenges; novice biologists had trouble interpreting qualitative protocols, and needed substantive guidance to look for and interpret environment cues. In order to address these issues in the redesign, this work uses research through design (RTD) methods to consider feedback from expert stream biologists, firsthand stream monitoring experience, discussions with education and game designers, and feedback from a low fidelity prototype. The qualitative findings found that training should facilitate personal narratives, maximize realism, and should use social dynamics to scaffold learning.