Embodied and Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments: Tactics and Exemplars

Abstract

As the next generation of active video games (AVG) and virtual reality (VR) systems enter people’s lives, designers may wrongly aim for an experience decoupled from bodies. However, both AVG and VR clearly afford opportunities to bring experiences, technologies, and users’ physical and experiential bodies together, and to study and teach these open-ended relationships of enaction and meaning-making in the framework of embodied interaction. Without such a framework, an aesthetic pleasure, lasting satisfaction, and enjoyment would be impossible to achieve in designing sonic interactions in virtual environments (SIVE). In this chapter, we introduce this framework and focus on design exemplars that come from a soma design ideation workshop and balance rehabilitation. Within the field of physiotherapy, developing new conceptual interventions, with a more patient-centered approach, is still scarce but has huge potential for overcoming some of the challenges facing health care. We indicate how the tactics such as making space, subtle guidance, defamiliarization, and intimate correspondence have informed the exemplars, both in the workshop and also in our ongoing physiotherapy case. Implications for these tactics and design strategies for our design, as well as for general practitioners of SIVE are outlined.