Studio 3 Folio 1

Dusk is silhouetted branches, masked lapwings singing their spot and the smell of the earth releasing a breath. Night falls and pinpoints of light pop into your peripheries of vision. The brightest barely visible until night falls to the horizon.

This project is discovering ways to record and communicate the stories we tell about the stars. This is an early exploration with a possible future project to develop a tool for knowledge owners to share their wisdom through the medium of virtual reality.

Like a quiet night stargazing, this will be a solitary, contemplative experience, learning from Lucas Zanotto who found if you feel alone and you feel unobserved ... you're more personal, you're a better person. This is a 'leaning back' (Bogost, 2007) so far you're lying down.

But first, let's talk about hands. Joining hands is a ritual of social connection. Holding our hands to the sky is a human way of measuring space and place. And yet the VR hands in oculus quest feel disembodied, they look masculine to me.

My hands hold a lot of knowledge, they can hand-stitch a quilt, they can type without looking at the keyboard. To me, this is bodily knowledge is an example of unknown known, I don't know how it happens but when I observe it happening, it becomes a known known. My aspiration is to tap into the unknown knowns of this country on which I work, as I pay my respects to the traditional custodians and to their elders past and present.

My inspiration is Corey Tutt and his organisation Deadly Science, inspiring the next generation of scientists.

How can the design make use of the Quest's hand tracking for simulating physical interactions? One of Rizzotto's principles for amplifying emotion: actions must have visual, auditory and haptic feedback is consistent with Kovalenko's analysis of the role music plays in learning in planetarium environments, music connects knowledge to our emotions to engage attention and make it memorable (Kovalenko, 2019). And researchers (Kirsting et al, n.d.) from the OZGrav project found "So to be able to not just look at something passively, but to be able to interact with it and see what happens, how it changes. That's a good side of VR.” These experiments are exploring the construction and impact of multi-sensorial, multi-modal, interactive forms of communicating knowledge.

If education is not about an approved body of knowledge that students absorb. Instead education is a process of leading novices into the world to learn and be taught by the world: it's an education of attention. (Ingold, 2015) The learning design is to facilitate meaning-making through encounters with digital heavenly artefacts (Charitonos et al, 2012).

The design of this experience is itself a learning process. Experimenting with hand controller avatars coloured brown-black in VR reveals the power of a silhouette to leave space for our imagination while using minimal, 2dimensional silhouetted tree and people shapes is an opportunity for an aesthetic that works with the author's minimal design skills and meagre budget for unity development time. I have moved from not knowing what I don't know about hand controllers in VR, to knowing I don't know how to map hands to the VR controller, to knowing enough to know I can use handtracking to interact with game objects, a known know, while still understanding I don't know how to map different hand gestures to different interactions, known unknowns.

The first experiments are exploring ways that the oculus quest VR headset could enable player-storytellers to link a constellation to their spoken story. This will be a series of experiements to understand how hand tracking can enable interaction with stellar objects to play sounds. Each experiment is moving my understanding of the materials I'm working with, closer to known knowns.

What lines can I trace in the sky with my hands? How are these lines joined together - is it a knot that eases and tightens tension between the lines? Is it a hand-hold, easy to join, easy to release?

I don't know. But I aim to.

4 minutes

Dusk is silhouetted branches, masked lapwings singing their spot and the smell of the earth releasing a breath. Night falls and pinpoints of light pop into your peripheries of vision. The brightest barely visible until night falls to the horizon.

Like a quiet night stargazing, this will be a solitary, contemplative experience, learning from Lucas Zanotto who found if you feel alone and you feel unobserved ... you're more personal, you're a better person. This is a 'leaning back' (Bogost, 2007) so far you're lying down (Bogost, 2007).

But first, let's talk about hands. Joining hands is a ritual of social connection. Holding our hands to the sky is a human way of measuring space and place. And yet the VR hands in oculus quest feel disembodied, they look masculine to me.

My hands hold a lot of knowledge, they can hand-stitch a quilt, they can type without looking at the keyboard. To me, this is bodily knowledge is an example of unknown known, I don't know how it happens but when I observe it happening, it becomes a known known. My aspiration is to tap into the unknown knowns of this country on which I work, as I pay my respects to the traditional custodians and to their elders past and present.

My inspiration is Corey Tutt and his organisation Deadly Science, inspiring the next generation of scientists.
"
We were the first astronomers, chemists and forensic scientists. It is important to recognise our worth as scientists ... My challenge is to walk with me."
                                         - Corey Tutt

How can the design make use of the Quest's hand tracking for simulating physical interactions? One of Rizzotto's principles for amplifying emotion: actions must have visual, auditory and haptic feedback is consistent with Kovalenko's analysis of the role music plays in learning in planetarium environments, music connects knowledge to our emotions to engage attention and make it memorable (Kovalenko, 2019). And researchers (Kirsting et al, n.d.) from the OZGrav project found "So to be able to not just look at something passively, but to be able to interact with it and see what happens, how it changes. That's a good side of VR.” These experiments are exploring the construction and impact of multi-sensorial, multi-modal, interactive forms of communicating knowledge.

If education is not about an approved body of knowledge that students absorb. Instead education is a process of leading novices into the world to learn and be taught by the world: it's an education of attention. (Ingold, 2015) The learning design is to facilitate meaning-making through encounters with digital heavenly artefacts.

The design of this experience is itself a learning process. 

Experimenting with hand controller avatars coloured brown-black in VR revealed the power of a silhouette to leave space for my imagination while using minimal, 2dimensional silhouetted tree and people shapes is an opportunity for an aesthetic that works with the author's minimal design skills and meagre budget for unity development time. 

These experiments are exploring ways that the oculus quest VR headset could enable player-storytellers to link a constellation to their spoken story. 

As the project moves into the next three-week sprint, I'll be looking to learn about a playful approach to research data collection to make an experience that is useful, usable and desirable (Buchanan, 2001). 

So, How can we design an experience to collect data, such as the stories we tell about the stars, without the friction of an afterthought survey. Could a VR experience that records a spoken story remove some the barriers to quality data for analysis ... from typed in forms? If participants can relisten to their story, listen to others' stories, then choose whether to submit their story for research, does that give them greater agency over the data they're contributing to a research project? How do we give these audio interactions a sense of playful () physical interaction .. a sense of the material (Wiberg, 2018)? How do we design an experience to ethically capture audio data with informed consent? Does interaction design for data collection in a gallery or museum setting give quality research data outcomes?

I don't know ... the next sprint will be experiments to understand these unknowns.

Methodology inset text
This project is an iterative exploration of the materialitiy of a planetarium inspired VR experience, based on my novice learnings of indigenous astronomy. Each sprint has a reflection activity so that the thoughts and emotions generated with use of the technology are built back into the experience (Barrett, 2007). Each phase will be creating an artefact that provides a measure of progress and a foundation for the next phase. The iterative form of this approach is strongly influenced by agile methodology commonly used in software development (Poppendiek, 2003); instead of working software being the only measure of progress, the creative artefact (Candy, 2006) from each sprint gives a measure of progress.

References:
Bogost, I 2007, Videogame Zen, blog, viewed 9 October 2020, http://bogost.com/writing/videogame_zen/
Buchanan, R. (2001). Design Research and the New Learning. Design Issues, 17(4), 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1162/07479360152681056

Barrett, E. (2007). Experiential learning in practice as research: context, method, knowledge. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 6(2), 115–124. https://doi.org/10.1386/jvap.6.2.115_1

Costello, B, Edmonds, E (2007), 'A Study in Play, Pleasure and Interaction Design', Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, pp. 76-92.

Candy, L., Amitani, S., & Bilda, Z. (2006). Practice-led strategies for interactive art research. CoDesign, 2(4), 209–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880601007994

Ingold, T. (2015, October 19). Abup talks - “The life of lines.”

Kersting, M., Steier, R., & Venville, G. (n.d.). Exploring participant engagement during an astrophysics virtual reality experience at a science festival. International Journal of Science Education. Part B. Communication and Public Engagement, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/21548455.2020.1857458

Kovalenko, Nataliya. “Astronomy: Learning Theories Applicable for Education in Planetarium Environment.” EPJ Web of conferences 200 (2019): 1014–. Web.

Rizzotto, L.  (2018). Where Thoughts Go: How to Make People Cry – Creating Emotional Experiences in XR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BZgt742Jz4

Poppendieck, M., & Poppendieck, T. (2003). Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit (1st edition). Addison-Wesley Professional.

Wiberg, M. (2018). The materiality of interaction : notes on the materials of interaction design. The MIT Press.