
Mara DionisioMadeira Interactive Technologies Institute
Mara Dionisio
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Publications (34)
Exergaming is a modern approach frequently used to promote physical activity at all ages while playing digital games. Given that
physical health deteriorates with age, that older people tend to live sedentary lifestyles and that they get tired faster due to lack of
physical stimulation, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and regular exercise routine i...
Life-supporting ecosystems are facing impending destruction. The human–computer interaction (HCI) community must rethink how to design technological interventions that reconcile concepts and theories for ecological computing. Proponents of sustainable HCI have pushed for tools and systems that aim to decenter the human in a shift toward posthuman d...
Transmedia Stories are becoming an increasingly important technique for the tourism industry. They are successful tools to engage, inspire and gather audiences online and offline. In this article, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Fragments of Laura, a bespoke Transmedia Storytelling (TS) experience designed to involve visito...
The use of Conversational Interfaces has evolved rapidly in numerous fields; in particular, they are an interesting tool for Serious Games to leverage on. Conversational Interfaces can assist Serious Games’ goals, namely in presenting knowledge through dialogue. With the global acknowledgment of the joint crisis in nature and climate change, it is...
Immersive technologies aligned with storytelling can create novel and powerful tools to inform and ponder on social issues. This demo paper describes a cinematic virtual reality project, Tell a Tail 360\(^{\circ }\), on the rescue of abandoned companion animals. Tell a Tail 360\(^{\circ }\) was designed targeting teens (13–19 years old) and its inc...
Storytelling is a fundamental component of a child’s early development stages, informing their world view and promoting self-growth. Comic books are a common medium in these development stages, for their power of communication and expression. Inspired by narrative branching structures and technological advances in Augmented Reality (AR), we develop...
Playful interactions and storytelling become a powerful conduit for educational-entertainment experiences aimed at informing and critiquing social issues. In this paper, we describe the design of a transmedia experience, which uses its separate channels to deconstruct a complex social issue, while maintaining a coordinated and consistent story expe...
In this paper, we describe the conceptualization, design and preliminary evaluation of Há-Vita, a participatory platform populated with video interviews about nature and biodiversity preservation, designed primarily for tourists and visitors of a popular Touristic Island destination. The content was selected to raise awareness towards environmental...
More people are traveling than ever before. This intense and disproportionate growth in tourism may, however, generate negative environmental and social effects, especially on islands. In order to address this issue, this article presents the design and evaluation of Há-Vita, an interactive web platform, whose goal is to foster awareness of local n...
Museums are increasingly turning to technology to improve their offerings. This presents an opportunity to surrounding neighborhoods to take advantage of the museum in order to connect with visitors and offer them a glimpse into their community. The work presented in this article contributes to advancing the state of the art in designing Mixed Real...
As 360° immersive Mobile Virtual Reality (MVR) experiences are reaching a wider public, thanks to inexpensive and more powerful mobile technology available on the shelves, it is also rapidly growing as a research arena to investigate how to best design such VR experiences. Adding to this research direction, in this paper we report on an exploratory...
This paper investigates whether location and medium affect the experience of interactive storytelling in the context of mobile Virtual Reality systems. For this purpose, we discuss the development of Fragments of Laura, a location-aware multimedia application in a larger interactive transmedia story, where users can view a 360° narrative in a 3D en...
The widespread affordability of digital technologies is encouraging artists to experiment and make use of them in their artworks. This paper describes the design and in-the-wild evaluation of DreamScope, a bespoke 360° mobile virtual reality (VR) interface designed for immersive interaction in the Lucid Peninsula physical narrative art installation...
Many destinations' economies strongly rely on tourism. To entice tourists to return to a destination, it is crucial to meet their expectations. The geographical formation of certain touristic islands often leads to local climates where it can be rainy and windy on one side while sunny on the other. In this paper, we present LightBeam, a mobile loca...
This paper describes IVRUX, a tool for the analysis of 360º Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) story-driven experiences. Traditional cinema offers an immersive experience through surround sound technology and high definition screens. However, in 360º IVR the audience is in the middle of the action, everything is happening around them. The immersivenes...
Humanity benefits from natural ecosystems in a multitude of ways; collectively, these are known as ecosystem services. Our project investigates how storytelling, coupled with mobile interactive technologies, can be used to design interventions that bring awareness and engage people in understanding the benefits of ecosystems and their underlying bi...
This work investigates the transmedia aspects and implications of “Echoes of Nature” (EoN), an interactive platform functioning as a touchpoint for a range of diverse experiences designed to open up dialogues between visitors of the island of Madeira and its rich natural capital, traditions and folklore.
Location-based services, narratives and interactive experiences have a substantial tradition in human–computer interaction. Building on this background, we report the iterative design process, prototyping and evaluation of Seven Stories, a location-based narrative experience. The design includes two novel features that aim to link the user experien...
This paper describes Yasmine’s Adventures, a location aware multimedia story designed as a location based service for a museum. Yasmine’s Adventures follows a young local girl (Yasmine) through a series of short animated adventures, tailored specifically to engage visitors in exploring the relatively neglected streets of the area in which the museu...
Dream Scope is the interactive, stand alone, self-contained portion of a bigger Art installation named Lucid Peninsula. The goal of the installation is to offer a way for people to experience the future through a physical interactive installation. To achieve this aim we designed and developed the interactive DreamScope device, while the Time's Up c...
Urban computing systems impact quality of life in densely populated areas. With the widespread availability of wireless networks and portable devices, urban areas are fast becoming a hybrid of the physical environment and the digital datasphere. This paper describes Yasmine’s Adventures, a location aware storytelling platform that leverages on urba...
In this paper we present Lucid Peninsula, an interactive installation designed to immerse participants in a dreamlike, post-apocalyptic story world. The goal of the installation is to offer a way for people to experience the future through a physical interactive installation. To achieve this aim we designed and developed the interactive DreamScope...
Modern society is moving towards a busier lifestyle, people have less time to enjoy themselves despite the increasing leisure options. Also, many countries around the world are facing a financial crisis, making people less wiling to travel abroad. In this paper we describe Eat&Travel, an interactive solution that ties dining and traveling together,...
iLand is a technology enhanced location aware narrative experience that captures and exposes the rich oral culture and traditions in the Island of Madeira for a wide variety of audience in particular foreigners and tourists. Using the Madeira main city, Funchal, as a setting to bring a new level of engagement of the audience with the old part of th...
This paper describes the initial stages for the iLand project, a Location Aware Multimedia Story project that captures and
exposes the rich oral culture and traditions at the Island of Madeira, using the Madeira main city, Funchal, as a setting
to bring a new level of engagement of the audience with the city and its traditional stories. We develope...