Keynote: Brenda Laurel
Location: McConomy Auditorium, Jared L. Cohon University Center at CMU (map)
Time: 5:00-6:00p
Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976 as a designer, researcher, writer and teacher. She worked in the computer game industry from Atari to Activision, and in research labs at Atari, Interval Research, and Sun Labs, where she was a Distinguished Engineer. She co-founded Telepresence Research, a VR research and production company, in 1989, and is the author of The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre, Second Edition (2013).
In this presentation, Brenda digs into the previous wave of VR experiments in the 1990s, to lay bare perennial and abiding issues in virtual experience design: essential questions about virtual environments which are independent of incremental hardware improvements, and instead have everything to do with theatre, storytelling, and interaction. Along the way, we’ll learn how insights from Aristotle to Brecht can help today’s VR creators approach questions of empathy, catharsis, agency, and the representation of new and different bodies.