Search

The creation of imaginary worlds has been the focus of philosophical discourse and artistic practice for millennia. Humans have long evolved to use media and imagination to express their inner worlds outwardly via artistic practice. As a fundamental factor of fantasy world-building, the imagination can produce novel objects, virtual sensations, and unique stories related to previously unlived experiences. The expression of the imagination often takes a narrative form that applies some medium to facilitate communication, for example, books, statues, music, or paintings. These virtual realities are expressed and communicated via multiple multimedia immersive technologies, stimulating modern audiences via their combined Aristotelian senses. Incorporating interactive graphic, auditory, and haptic narrative elements in extended reality (XR) permits artists to express their imaginative intentions with visceral accuracy. However, these technologies are constantly in flux, and the precise role of multimodality has yet to be fully explored. Thus, this contribution to Feeling the Future—Haptic Audio explores the potential of novel multimodal technology to communicate artistic expression via an immersive virtual reality (VR) volumetric music video. We compare user experiences of our affordable volumetric video (VV) production to more expensive commercial VR music videos. Our research also inspects audio–tactile interactions in the auditory experience of immersive music videos, where both auditory and haptic channels receive vibrations during the imaginative virtual performance. This multimodal interaction is then analyzed from the audience’s perspective to capture the user’s experiences and examine the impact of this form of haptic feedback in practice via applied human–computer interaction (HCI) evaluation practices. Our results demonstrate the application of haptics in contemporary music consumption practices, discussing how they affect audience experiences regarding functionality, usability, and the perceived quality of a musical performance.

This study examines motivations, definitions, methods and challenges of evaluating the social impacts of smart city technologies and services. It outlines concepts of social impact assessment and discusses how social impact has been included in smart city evaluation frameworks. Thematic analysis is used to investigate how social impact is addressed in eight smart city projects that prioritise human-centred design across a variety of contexts and development phases, from design research and prototyping to completed and speculative projects. These projects are notable for their emphasis on human, organisational and natural stakeholders; inclusion, participation and empowerment; new methods of citizen engagement; and relationships between sustainability and social impact. At the same time, there are gaps in the evaluation of social impact in both the smart city indexes and the eight projects. Based on our analysis, we contend that more coherent, consistent and analytical approaches are needed to build narratives of change and to comprehend impacts before, during and after smart city projects. We propose criteria for social impact evaluation in smart cities and identify new directions for research. This is of interest for smart city developers, researchers, funders and policymakers establishing protocols and frameworks for evaluation, particularly as smart city concepts and complex technologies evolve in the context of equitable and sustainable development.