ICS News Archive

Lopes added as keynote speaker for ILRN 2016

Informatics Professor Crista Lopes will provide the Keynote speech at the Immersive Learning Research Network Conference 2016 (ILRN 2016), where immersive learning experts and practitioners from around the world gather to “develop the scientific, technical and applied potential of immersive learning,” according to the conference website. This is the second time the conference will meet, this year at the University of California, Santa Barbara from June 27 to July 1.

ILRN is an international organization of researchers, academics and developers with an interest in immersive learning—a broad, interdisciplinary and multimedia approach to education environments. Immersive learning experiences can be found in a myriad of fields, including, according to ILRN, “computer science, user experience and media design, the learning sciences, architecture, game development, artificial intelligence, biology, medicine, and the thousands of disciplinary and occupational content areas wherein immersive learning and training may be relevant.”

Lopes, noted by ILRN for her work with the OpenSimulator platform, will speak on “Designing for Attention in Virtual Environments (or: How a Camera Changes Everything).” As the talk abstract reads: “3D virtual environments are a new world for user experience design. Unlike 2D media, they include the 3rd dimension, which gives people a lot more degrees of freedom with respect to what to pay attention to. And unlike the physical world, they can be programmed. This talk focuses on the latent, yet largely unexplored, use of programmable cameras for designing user experiences in virtual environments, and how this can affect learning environments in particular.”