Jonathan Barbara

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Verified

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• PhD Candidate, B.Sc. (Hon.) IT (CS), MA Games Design, PGCHE
• Lecturer at Saint Martin's Institute of Higher Education

Draft letter to your PhD supervisor requesting funding to attend a PhD training school happening in Malta this July. More details here: https://training.ardin.online/taime-walker-phd-summer-school-2024

Providing enough information to allow the VR player to self-identify is an important factor in their immersion into a virtual world. The sensory information being provided to the player’s eyes and ears through the headset must support the suspension of disbelief and telepresence into the virtual world. Given sound’s easily realized potential for di...

Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) literacy and authoring skills are being gained too late along a typical student’s educational journey and only by a niche subset of learners while such skills are crucial to consume modern day media communications reporting on complex phenomena from multiple perspectives. This paper acknowledges the impact of tec...

Uncertain cultural heritage presents a dilemma in its narrative representation. History seeks to push a grand narrative, at the expense of less convenient narratives. Critical historiographic approaches favor the consideration of multiple narratives as they focus on the mediation of history rather than arriving at a single truth. Virtual Reality In...

Citizens everywhere have the right to be well-informed. Yet, with the high complexity of many contemporary issues, such as global warming and migration, our means of information need to mutually adapt. Narrative has always been at the core of information exchange - regardless of whether our ancestors sat around a fire and exchanged stories, or whet...

This White Paper was written by the members of Work Group 3 focusing on Evaluation of the COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR).We here present some empirical methods employed by INDCOR members in their research including UX toolkits and scales. Particularly, we consider the impact of IDN on transfo...

In this overview paper, we consider interactive digital narratives (IDN) as a means to represent and enable understanding of complex topics both at the public level (e.g. global warming, the COVID-19 pandemic, migration, or e-mobility) and at the personal level (trauma and other mental health issues, interpersonal relationships). We discuss scholar...

The digital representation of our past has long been an important tool in the interpretation of cultural heritage in museums. The recent rise in the use of Augmented Reality (AR) has seen various approaches to adding dynamic information to existent artefacts. The challenge is even greater when uncertainty further complexifies the represented histor...

Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) provides expressive opportunities that can be applied to many serious and non-fiction topics. Such applications, in particular, but also fictional IDN, have an ethical dimension, an aspect in need of increased attention as IDN matures and is more widely deployed. In this chapter, we identify aspects of IDN ethics...

One’s digital identity on the Metaverse is critical enough to warrant EU regulation. Suggesting Interactive Digital Narratives as having a role to play in the Metaverse, we focus on the identity of the Virtual Reality interactor in such virtual spaces, and the potential impact this may have on the self-identity of the interactor. Building upon the...

Scriptwriting for Virtual Reality Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) derives insights from writing for linear or cinematic Virtual Reality (VR). However, due to the lack of agency in linear VR, insights from the scholarship that might improve the writing process are limited. Therefore, this paper suggests a new research agenda to explore scriptwr...

The use of immersive virtual reality for learning is a growing opportunity that has so far suffered from limited application in the classroom, particularly with students in the 11 to 12 year bracket. Due to more concern being shown toward usability rather educational goals, mixed feelings exist about the technology’s ability to teach. Meanwhile, hi...

In this overview paper, we consider interactive digital narratives (IDN) as a means to represent and enable understanding of complex topics both at the public level (e.g. global warming, the COVID-19 pandemic, migration, or e-mobility) and at the personal level (trauma and other mental health issues, interpersonal relationships). We discuss scholar...

As IDNs are used to represent complex phenomena, we are bound to assess the ethical dimension of these representations in order to help IDN mature as a practice and a discipline. In this paper, we consider ethical aspects arising from applications of IDN in VR for Cultural Heritage experiences. Using a discussion of ethical aspects of cultural heri...

Self-identification is a key factor for the immersion of the VR interactive narrative player. Diegetic non-protagonist narrators, touched-up heterodiegetic narrations with internal focalization, and casting the player in a ‘virtual sidekick’ role are suggested by the literature to support self-identification. This paper analyses the use of second-p...

The Hypogeum of Hal-Saflieni is a 6000-year-old Neolithic burial place whose microclimate is threatened by the presence of thousands of visitors all year round. Beyond digital preservation and accessibility, this project aims to provide a highly accessible experience to the virtual tourist or academic. This short paper reports on progress in faithf...

Teaching Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) to undergraduate students ought to be more than branching narratives and using popular authoring tools. Exposing them to challenges of IDNs and pushing them to address these issues can help students think beyond the conventional. Authoring tools may fail AQ1 to provide functionality to support tackling...

Digital heritage has matured over the past twenty years and now calls are being made for interactive experiences that augment digital representation with digital performance. The paper considers sources for such a performance: be it documented sources, contemporary cultures, or gameplay from other entertainment game genres. It considers the needs o...

Digital heritage has matured over the past twenty years and now calls are being made for interactive experiences that augment digital representation with digital performance. The paper considers sources for such a performance: be it documented sources, contemporary cultures, or gameplay from other entertainment game genres. It considers the needs o...

Draft article for HCI conference

The transmedial consumption of stories is dependent on disjoint experiences that exhibit coherence despite their medium differences. Coherence, however, is subjective and depends on the audience’s prior exposure to other experiences in the transmedia franchise. This article presents an empirical study involving an online questionnaire with 106 part...

The analysis of text adaptations across media in Adaptation Theory serves as a precursor to evaluating the narrative consistency of Transmedia Storytelling, but the expansionist and extensionist nature of Transmedia Storytelling demands a criterion beyond the fidelity of crossmedia adaptations. Furthermore, Seymour Chatman's notion of Story and Dis...

Interactive Digital Storytelling has a role to play in transmedial storytelling and yet there is no instrument to measure one of the critical success factors of such narratives: consistency. This short paper explores what is meant by consistency in this context and identifies it as being a subjective evaluation, part of the user experience. A consi...

Stochastic data for procedural content generation is rarely specified in research, and left up to the game designer. Extending an existing set of levels, however, requires their consideration in order to generate spatially consistent levels. Stochastic analysis techniques are adopted from musical composition research and applied to level generation...

Consistency across experiences in a transmedial production is a criterion of user experience that has so far eluded capture. This position paper highlights the challenges met in designing a tool to measure consistency and suggests a consistency scale model across the four dimensions of transmedia experiences.

This study\(^1\) investigates the various pose normalisation techniques that can be used for 3D vehicle models. A framework is built on which the pose normalisation performance of four PCA based techniques are tested on a database of 335 3D vehicles. The evaluation is performed using two methods. In the first method a silhouette view of each pose n...

Comparison of user experience between multiplayer digital games and board games is largely unexplored in the literature, with no instrument found to suitably measure user experience across game formats. This study explores the use of the Social Presence module of the Games Experience Questionnaire to measure user experience in a multiplayer board g...

Measuring user experience in board games is broadly unexplored with research mainly focused on digital games. This paper assesses the suitability of using a questionnaire, developed for digital games, for use on board games - thus providing a common measure of user experience between board and digital games. The study involved play testing a themed...

Measuring user experience in board games is broadly unexplored with research mainly focused on digital games. This paper assesses the suitability of using a questionnaire, developed for digital games, for use on board games - thus providing a common measure of user experience between board and digital games. The study involved play testing a themed...