Abstract

Short paper, theme: Educations and Societies: Participatory practices and institutional change
Venue: CCCB, date: June 14

This research examines opportunities for using virtual reality (VR) as an autobiographical storytelling tool for students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collaborating remotely with eight university undergraduate students in Canada, we created eight individual 3D nonfiction VR pieces that express the students’ own pandemic experiences. Through a collaborative design process, our findings highlight how VR was used as a meaningful device for telling students’ autobiographical stories about the COVID-19 pandemic: delivering the storyteller’s own feelings, creating a sense of confinement and disconnection, showing environmental details, and expressing inner worlds.

• Sojung Bahng is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and researcher, and currently works as a postdoctoral fellow in the Bachelor of Media Production and Design at Carleton University in Canada. She will be appointed as an Assistant Professor in Media and Performance Production at Queen’s University, beginning in July 2022. Sojung holds a PhD from SensiLab at Monash University in Australia. She explores cinematic media via digital technologies to reflect aesthetic and narrative experiences in cultural and philosophical contexts.
• Victoria McArthur is an Associate Professor in the Bachelor of Media Production and Design program at Carleton University, Canada. She received her honours BA in Music from Brock University in 2007, MA in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2010 and PhD in Communication and Culture in 2015 from York University. Victoria minored in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in both of these degrees. From July 2014 – 2018 she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology, where she taught courses on games and HCI.