Developed in partnership with artist Brendan Walker, VR playground transforms an everyday playground swing into a series of thrill rides. Riders can choose to experience four different virtual worlds in which their kinaesthetic sense of swinging back and forth propels them through quirky visual and auditory journeys delivered using VR headsets. Conceptually, the work explores sensory (mis)alignment—the idea of deliberately misaligning sensory stimuli so as to deliver powerful embodied experiences.

Papers

Marshall, J., Benford, S., Byrne, R. and Tennent, P., 2019, May. Sensory alignment in immersive entertainment. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300930

Tennent, P., Marshall, J., Brundell, P., Walker, B. and Benford, S., 2019, May. Abstract machines: Overlaying virtual worlds on physical rides. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300811