Multimodal Virtual Experience for Design Schools in the Immersive Web

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has made most schools, universities, and gathering spaces fully virtual. Commonly used communication platforms such as Zoom, Skype, and Microsoft Teams are limited in recreating physical interactions and offer mostly static interfaces with limited occasions for spontaneous encounters. This project creates a space that seeks to address this issue, first through the digitization of familiar physical spaces, and then through their augmentation via WebXR technologies[1]. A gamification strategy is adopted, where users can virtually learn, collaborate and socialize through personalized avatars within a dynamic and multi-sensorial digital environment. In this paper, we present a completed prototype that is currently being tested at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The school of architecture has been digitized and experientially augmented thanks to an asymmetrical system that offers rich modalities of interaction through different platforms. The project builds upon the wide experiential potential of digital platforms, otherwise not possible in reality, and implements a customized multi-modal user interface (Reeves et al. 2004).