Ernesto Morales

By Geoffrey Edwards, Jocelyne Kiss, Ernesto Morales, Coralee McLaren, Serge Lacasse, Marie Louise Bourbeau, Juan Nino Falcon and Jonathan Proulx Guimond

Opera as an art form should lend itself to participatory design, given its wide variety of theatrical and musical components. Opera, however, imposes its own constraints and challenges. The problem as laid out in the early stages of the project was to design a short one-act interactive opera that could be managed within a modest budget. The source material was a science fiction manuscript currently undergoing publication by a small independent publishing house. Our research and production team included a composer, several singers/musicians, an engineer, a designer, and a choreographer/dancer as well as the writer. Furthermore, several of these had done extensive work with interactive and immersive environments. In addition to the opera itself, which incorporated both live and virtual elements, we recycled the 3d virtual designs as the substratum for an online co-creation environment that could be used to elicit public participation in the future development of our operas. We discuss both the diverse challenges involved in creating the opera and the co-creation environment, and highlight projected future work.

Part of the book: Interactive Multimedia

By Afnen Arfaoui, Geoffrey Edwards, Ernesto Morales and Patrick Fougeyrollas

We developed an end-to-end co-creative methodology for designing interactive and immersive multisensory virtual reality experiences with a particular focus on people with disability. Our method draws on what is called “design thinking” to provide a backbone to our approach. This embraces three stages, an empathic first stage, followed by an ideation phase, during which the thematic context is elaborated, and then an iterative exploration phase during which the initial concept is refined and the implementation is achieved. Furthermore, the “cognitive design” methodology developed by one of us led us to an approach incorporating all sensory modalities, not just the audio and visual modalities (that is, it includes odor, tactile, taste and proprioceptive stimuli), in order to deliver an experience that fully enhances the user’s sense of embodiment, and also led us to place the user’s experience at the heart of the installation. Users participate in the design process through co-design protocols. We showcase the application of this methodology in a detailed way for the construction of an interactive and immersive VR installation for people with disabilities.

Part of the book: Virtual Reality and Its Application in Education

By Dominique Michaud, Geoffreyjen Edwards, Jocelyne Kiss, Jonathan Proulx-Guimond, Jonathan Caron-Roberge, Ernesto Morales, Mary Thaler and Cyril Schneider

Based on previous work, we created wide handmade belts as support for a live augmented reality (AR) event. We describe how the garments were made to best meet the constraints of the AR design and how they were used as part of a fashion show and book promotion event. We determined the kind of features the AR software can detect and then created prototypes based on those characteristics. The belt design followed several steps: 1. Computer image preparation; 2. Thread preparation; 3. Thread dyeing; 4. Weaving; 5. Assembly; 6. Photographing the result and retouching the image. The lack of adjustability to deformation was a concern when dealing with clothing and fabric. We resolved this issue by stiffening the fabric. We discuss belts performances well during the live event; other textile techniques as substitutes (e.g. patchwork) and future research prospects.

Part of the book: Modern Development and Challenges in Virtual Reality