Research

How can we know when it is justified to design an interactive experience?
What is it that we are providing that is truly new and that cannot be provided by other media?
Which is the true potential of interaction to offer experiences to users?

How can we model an interactive user experience?
How can we design the experience in an adequate way for each type of application and/or user group?
How can we obtain experiences that are more natural, non invasive, socially close and culturally coherent?

How can we obtain a high throughput (flow) of users in experiences for public events?
How can we nonetheless maintain the robustness, naturalness and richness of the experience?

My research tries to understand the specific properties of real-time generated interactive media, such as: Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, Augmented Reality, etc. I am especially interested on full-body interaction, in which the users interact through the movements, behaviours and gesticulation of their whole body or, at least, the experience offers an interaction context at a human scale. In this sense, issues such as naturalness and non-invasiveness in the interaction become of great importance.

Interaction design -of the interactive experience, of the interactive communication- as a process and methodology is what I am most interested in understanding. This research needs be interdisciplinary and, hence, it is placed between computer science and communication. In other words, between CHI (computer human interaction) and audio-visual communication.

The approach is undertaken from the design of experiences in the following areas:

• Applications for people with special needs (the elderly, physically disabled, psychologically disabled, etc.)
• Cultural and leisure applications: educational experiences for children, attractions for entertainment centres, etc.
• Artistic and creative applications, which, in fact, are the area that opened the research done up until now, together with Roc Parés and within the project Galeria Virtual.

These areas share the characteristics and issues described above.

All my research is developed from the Experimentation on Interactive Communication group (eIC) that belongs to the Audiovisual Institute (IUA) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). More information on research may be found at the eIC web site.

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