The IRL hosts researchers from Ispace SFU and facilitates auto-ethnographic study of Isness

1 Jun

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From 17th-21st April, the IRL hosted researchers from Ispace Lab in Simon Frazer University Vancouver. Researchers John Desnoyers-Stewart, Ekaterina Stepanova, Noah Miller and PI Bernhard Rieke took part in our first Iness session in the new VR lab. The session will enable them to write an auto-ethnographic study of their experiences of Insess.

The SFU team will continue work with Insess when they return to Vancouver. Rhoslyn Roebuck-Williams from the IRL taught everyone the technical specifications and how to set up future sessions. In this ongoing collaboration we will remotely assist to facilitate Isness.

Ispace hosted a session to introduce the IRL to one of their current projects, Eve.

Rachel Freire hosted a day of glove workshops to both teach glove maintenance and repair, as well as to discuss future glove developments and collaboration. This summer collaboration aims to refine and test a work-in-progress ‘hybrid’ glove which can work both on the Steam VR and Oculus platforms, working with SFU while the IRL spools up and hires.

IRL lab administrator Sila Sobrado also held a proprioception workshop for the group.

During the same week, CiTIUS held an open evening for everyone at USC. So the IRL teamed up with SFU to showcase interactive projects from both labs. We had free roaming headsets with John’s project Cinedelica (including a waterfall outside of the lab!) as well as multi-person co-located and remote experiences in and outside of our VR lab space.