Abstract of the Talk
This talk will cover definitions, issues and new technology for the creation and evaluation of virtual worlds, and particularly virtual worlds as learning environments about other cultures, and other periods of history. Some research projects that I have supervised such as alternative realities, peripheral projection, trace-gaming, biofeedback and AI inspired forms of alteritive agency will also be introduced.

About the Speaker

Erik Champion is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at COFA, UNSW. His degrees are in architecture, philosophy and engineering. He has also worked in England, Australia and New Zealand for Digital, Compaq and Hansen Technologies.

He taught game design and supervised multimedia projects in the Interaction Design degree program at the University of Queensland and previously worked as a lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology in Multimedia, coordinating the User Experience Design undergraduate and postgraduate courses. He has also taught animation, digital imaging and CAD.

His doctoral thesis was on evaluation and design in virtual environments, and the industry partner for the ARC SPIRT research grant was Lonely Planet. Since his PhD he has supervised or collaborated on projects in biofeedback, language learning in virtual worlds, physical computing and gaming (such as a half-dome surround  car racing as well as a Chinese calligraphy tracing game with a graphics tablet), evaluation studies of digital archaeology, mixed media urban visualization with a lazy Susan panorama table, and game-based historical learning.

He is currently co-editing special issues of Techné, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and has been invited to speak at State of Play V in Singapore this month on the relationship between architecture and virtual worlds. Next month he presents at DAC (Perth) on Social and Cultural Presence in Oblivion, and at DiGRA (Tokyo) on biofeedback for horror games.

He is currently a member of DiGRA, IGDA (International Game Developers Association), the Society of Architectural Historians (SAHANZ), and ICIP (ICOMOS International Committee on Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites), and CAADRIA. He is also on the editorial board of Loading.: The Journal of the Canadian Games Studies Association.