In this research, we investigate consumer responses to technology-enhanced storytelling marketing via augmented digital humans in two different contexts. We test the role of an augmented digital human stimulus as a moderator for storytelling satisfaction in a technology-enhanced retail complex. Building on visual perception theory and information processing theory, the findings from our study reveal sequential links between the four realms of experience economy theory in a mixed reality environment and subsequent effects on storytelling satisfaction, which in turn are boosted by digital human storytelling. Overall, our findings reveal that digital human storytelling is an effective long-term marketing strategy in technology-enhanced environments.
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Fashion design has rapidly become a digital process where textiles are simulated as soft, conformable materials on a digital body. The embodied experience and physical interaction with the textile have been replaced by screen-based media, resulting in a gap in understanding between physical and digital textile material. Consequently, understanding digitized textile properties and characteristics has become challenging for practitioners. This research investigates fashion designers’ implicit understanding when selecting textiles, specifically how interactions with physical textiles influence design considerations. Twenty digital fashion designers interacted with ten physical textile materials via tangible and scientific drape measurements, reflecting upon their design considerations. In digital environments, a tangible understanding of material properties is vital, and scientific drape measurements add significant understanding to digital design. The research advances our understanding of integrating digital tools in textile and soft material practices, where a postphenomenological approach is employed to help formulate the design considerations in selecting materials.
There has been significant progress in the graphical realism of digital humans in recent years. This work investigates the realistic portrayal of emotions beyond facial expressions by analysing how skin colour changes when expressing different emotional states. The study combines existing knowledge from old painters, photogrammetry data, thermal imaging, and skin colouration maps to create an artistic guideline to portray emotions realistically, resulting in the proposal of a set of colour maps representing the six basic emotions. By using skin colour changes to represent emotional states, the proposed colour maps offer an alternative workflow for portraying emotions. During the experiment of this research four of these proposed colour maps, which represent neutrality, anger, disgust, and happiness, were preferred over traditional alternatives in terms of realism perception and likeability. The findings have implications for the development of digital human technology, particularly in the creation of more realistic and expressive digital characters.
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This project develops a European network for transdisciplinary innovation in artistic engagement as a catalyst for societal transformation, focusing on immersive art. It responds to the professionals in the field’s call for research into immersive art’s unique capacity to ‘move’ people through its multisensory, technosocial qualities towards collective change. The project brings together experts leading state-of-the-art research and practice in related fields with an aim to develop trajectories for artistic, methodological, and conceptual innovation for societal transformation. The nascent field of immersive art, including its potential impact on society, has been identified as a priority research area on all local-to-EU levels, but often suffers from the common (mis)perception as being technological spectacle prioritising entertainment values. Many practitioners create immersive art to enable novel forms of creative engagement to address societal issues and enact change, but have difficulty gaining recognition and support for this endeavour. A critical challenge is the lack of knowledge about how their predominantly sensuous and aesthetic experience actually lead to collective change, which remains unrecognised in the current systems of impact evaluation predicated on quantitative analysis. Recent psychological insights on awe as a profoundly transformative emotion signals a possibility to address this challenge, offering a new way to make sense of the transformational effect of directly interacting with such affective qualities of immersive art. In parallel, there is a renewed interest in the practice of cultural mediation, which brings together different stakeholders to facilitate negotiation towards collective change in diverse domains of civic life, often through creative engagements. Our project forms strategic grounds for transdisciplinary research at the intersection between these two developments. We bring together experts in immersive art, psychology, cultural mediation, digital humanities, and design across Europe to explore: How can awe-experiences be enacted in immersive art and be extended towards societal transformation?
The scientific publishing industry is rapidly transitioning towards information analytics. This shift is disproportionately benefiting large companies. These can afford to deploy digital technologies like knowledge graphs that can index their contents and create advanced search engines. Small and medium publishing enterprises, instead, often lack the resources to fully embrace such digital transformations. This divide is acutely felt in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Scholars from these disciplines are largely unable to benefit from modern scientific search engines, because their publishing ecosystem is made of many specialized businesses which cannot, individually, develop comparable services. We propose to start bridging this gap by democratizing access to knowledge graphs – the technology underpinning modern scientific search engines – for small and medium publishers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Their contents, largely made of books, already contain rich, structured information – such as references and indexes – which can be automatically mined and interlinked. We plan to develop a framework for extracting structured information and create knowledge graphs from it. We will as much as possible consolidate existing proven technologies into a single codebase, instead of reinventing the wheel. Our consortium is a collaboration of researchers in scientific information mining, Odoma, an AI consulting company, and the publisher Brill, sharing its data and expertise. Brill will be able to immediately put to use the project results to improve its internal processes and services. Furthermore, our results will be published in open source with a commercial-friendly license, in order to foster the adoption and future development of the framework by other publishers. Ultimately, our proposal is an example of industry innovation where, instead of scaling-up, we scale wide by creating a common resource which many small players can then use and expand upon.
GAMING HORIZONS is a multidisciplinary project that aims to expand the research and innovation agenda on serious gaming and gamification. The project is particularly interested in the use of games for learning and cultural development. Gamification - and gaming more broadly – are very important from a socio-economic point of view, but over the past few years they have been at the centre of critical and challenging debates, which highlighted issues such as gender and minority representation, and exploitative game mechanics. Our project’s key contention is that it is important for the European ICT community to engage with design trends and social themes that have affected profoundly the mainstream and ‘independent’ game development cultures over the past few years, especially because the boundaries between leisure and serious games are increasingly blurred. GAMING HORIZONS is a direct response to the official recognition by the H2020 programme of work that multidisciplinary research can help to advance the integration between Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH). The project’s objective is to enable a higher uptake of socially responsible ICT-related research in relation to gaming. This objective will be achieved through a research-based exchange between communities of developers, policy makers, users and researchers. The methodology will involve innovative data collection activities and consultations with a range of stakeholders over a period of 14 months. We will interrogate the official ‘H2020 discourse’ on gamification – with a particular focus on ‘gamified learning’ - whilst engaging with experts, developers and critical commentators through interviews, events, workshops and systematic dialogue with an Advisory Board. Ultimately, GAMING HORIZONS will help identify future directions at the intersection of ethics, social research, and both the digital entertainment and serious games industries.EU FundingThe 14-month research project 'Gaming Horizons' was funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
