No abstract

The ARIA project aims to create an engaging visitor experience for archives of music Cultural Heritage that targets the wider public. The challenge is to conceptualize an experience design where the intangible seamlessly meets the tangible, bridging the gap between obscure archival material and the direct and emotional experience of listening to music. The project will apply innovative technologies, such as eXtended Reality (XR) and collaborative digital storytelling, to augment the reception of the musical experience through establishing an affective connection of the visitor with the music composer. In this work we present the results of a user study with 198 participants, designed to assess user expectations and identify concrete needs to inform a multimodal experience design about the composer N. Skalkottas, The results of this study guided the design of an experience which combines a single user immersive VR application to promote reflection on the music piece, with a group participatory digital storytelling mobile app to establish affective connection with the composer. We conclude the paper with our insights on the effectiveness of the approach as well as how the experience design could contribute to further studying and understanding in a holistic way the factors that play a role in feeling moved by or connected with a composer and his work.

The annotation of animated motion-captured segments is a challenging, interdisciplinary task, especially when it comes to characterizing movement qualitatively. The lack of intuitive, easy-to-learn-and-use frameworks is considered to be one of the biggest challenges in this process; another is the lack of approaches able to motivate a wide audience of users, from the broader public to dance experts, researchers and performers, to contribute with annotations. In this paper we present Motion Hollow, a story-driven playful experience that uses metaphors based on Laban Movement Analysis, an established framework for movement analysis and annotation, to familiarize novice users with the process of qualitative characterization of dance moves. This work proposes a first step into introducing movement annotation to non-expert users, and as such, its main goal is to explore the implications and potential of such an approach. The evaluation of the experience confirms its potential to transform the annotation of dance movement segments into an engaging and enjoyable experience as well as to foster a deeper understanding of movement annotation both as a concept and process.