Jonathan BarbaraSaint Martin's Institute of Higher Education · Department of Computing
Jonathan Barbara
PhD Student, B.Sc. (Hon.) IT (CS), MA Games Design, PGCHE
About
19
Publications
5,681
Reads
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45
Citations
Introduction
A PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin reading in the field of Virtual Reality, Interactive Narratives, Transmedia Storytelling and Cultural Heritage.
Representing Malta in the INDCOR COST Action (Dec 2019 - ).
Active participation in RGS-IBG 2019, ICIDS 2015, 2018, EUIC 2018, ACM CHI PLAY 2015
MA in Games Design with UCLAN 2012 -2015, Distinction.
Senior Lecturer @ Saint Martin's Institute of Higher Education, Malta
Additional affiliations
January 2006 - present
Saint Martin's Institute of Higher Education, Hamrun , Malta
Position
- Co-ordinator of Creative Computing
Education
September 2020 - August 2026
Trinity College Dublin
Field of study
- Virtual Reality, Interactive Narratives and Cultural Heritage
October 2012 - January 2015
UCLAN
Field of study
- Games Design
Publications
Publications (19)
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...
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...
Projects
Projects (5)
An early prototyping tool for aural experiences of virtual space including background music, placed sound effects with support for loops.
Just scan a hand-drawn sketch or import a digital sketch, import the asset list and place on the level overlay. Then use the mouse to navigate and trigger the sounds. Includes attenuation, panning and sound blocking wall placement.
Research in the consistency between the amount of story and gameplay found in computer games of the 21st century and how we can improve them.
