Participatory Actions in Virtual Spaces. The Role of Images in the Construction of Shared Spaces

Participatory actions in public spaces are practices of encounter with the potential to reinforce social ties and foster a renewed sense of belonging to places. They are well-established and widely practiced – both at the national level [1] and internationally [2, 3] – as modes of exploration [4] and participation that are located at the intersection between different disciplinary domains. The particular form of participatory action discussed here ideally takes place on the street, in squares, and on public ground, via interventions that are often temporary in nature and involve the transformation, but even more fundamentally the re-appropriation, of collective space. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, among its numerous repercussions, has also made it difficult if not impossible to carry out such forms of participation in person and on public ground. It has thus become necessary to modify and reformulate the ways in which participatory action is implemented, so as to continue harnessing its communicative power, and to identify new ways of fostering participation, at a time when it is needed more urgently than ever to counteract the risk of isolation. In this paper, we present and discuss forms of participatory action that have recently been transposed into virtual public space and are primarily based on the sharing of images. We investigate the possibilities and valences of such an approach, both in general and at this specific historical moment. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Fruit Golf: An Asymmetrical Shared Space VR/Mobile Experience

While the global COVID-19 pandemic did not catalyze widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR) technologies across all industries as some had anticipated, studies like Hall et al. from 2022 have demonstrated that public valuation of VR remains strongly in gaming, entertainment, and socializing [Hall et al., 2022]. As we look towards a future in which indoor gatherings with friends and family are safe and encouraged once again, there is an opportunity to position VR gaming as a go-to add-on to social gatherings by emphasizing ease of access for players of all levels of experience, and designing gameplay that encourages engagement rather than isolation in shared space. Fruit Golf aims to use an asymmetric multiplayer format to offer an experience that spans collaborative and competitive experiences, and allows players to seamlessly interact with VR, mobile, and physical spaces in ways that most will have never seen before. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Stage Together: Remote Rehearsal of Theater Blocking

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many theater productions to shift to remote rehearsals and performances using online video conference platforms. Video conference software makes it possible to share individual performances, but loses the sense of presence together and provides no way to visualize blocking movements on the shared space of the stage. Rehearsal by video conference can cause productions to either omit blocking altogether or have only a few on stage rehearsals, sometimes just days before opening. This paper presents a Web-based system that enables productions to remotely rehearse blocking at any stage of the production. Remote performers can propose their own blocking, rehearse scripted cues and visualize movements in a shared virtual stage. This paper describes the design, implementation, and focus group evaluations of Stage Together with a college theater production of Medea by Euripides. © 2022 ACM.

Making Space for Cultural Infrastructure: The Breakdown and Maintenance Work of Independent Movie Theaters During Crisis

Independent movie theaters (IMTs) are a part of the cultural infrastructure that offers shared spaces for patron communities to access, share, and engage with cultural artifacts. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, IMTs were mandated to shut down, resulting in unanticipated infrastructural breakdown. Drawing insights from a preliminary survey and interviews with staff members from 18 IMTs in the U.S., this paper attends to how this breakdown disrupted art and community engagement within patron communities. We investigate the sociotechnical practices of maintaining cultural infrastructure through 1) collaborating with community partners and external stakeholders, 2) screening films through online virtual cinema platforms, and 3) retaining community members through online platforms. Our work highlights the tensions and invisible human labor in this maintenance work. Together, this work intends to foreground cultural infrastructure and discuss how HCI can support and contribute to the design and oft-invisible maintenance of cultural infrastructure. © 2022 ACM.

Mask Recognition in the Covered Safe Entry Scanner

SARS-CoV-2 is a highly contagious, airborne-transmission, virus that can be spread by people who do not have obvious symptoms. In 2020, that combination of features forced much of the world to impose a wide variety of forms of social distancing, ranging from simple recommendations restricting how shared spaces can be used to rigidly enforced quarantines. It is unclear how much distancing is enough, but it is clear that the economic and emotional costs of distancing are high. Fortunately, consistent use of simple face masks dramatically reduces the probability of others becoming infected. The catch is that a significant fraction of the US population either is refusing to wear masks or is wearing masks in ways that render them ineffective. For example, it is problematic for a shop owner to prevent potential customers who are not properly masked from entering their store. Thus, we have created the Covered Safe Entry Scanner - an open source system that uses image processing methods to automatically check for proper use of masks and potentially deny entry to those who do not comply. This paper describes the design, algorithms, and performance of the mask recognition system. © This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.