Engagement
I research how playable software can produce new knowledge between scholars, institutions, and communities. Game design is a growing practice in academia and meets growing games literacy in the public, but we lack methodologies that operationalize making and play as collaborative humanistic inquiry. My dissertation contributes propositional modeling, a methodology where digital artifacts trigger divergent interpretation and accumulate what that interpretation yields, so that public play compounds knowledge scholars can’t produce alone.
About
I research how playable software can produce new knowledge between scholars, institutions, and communities. Game design is a growing practice in academia and meets growing games literacy in the public, but we lack methodologies that operationalize making and play as collaborative humanistic inquiry. My dissertation contributes propositional modeling, a methodology where digital artifacts trigger divergent interpretation and accumulate what that interpretation yields, so that public play compounds knowledge scholars can’t produce alone.
Nicosia International Airport VE
A museum installation featuring a reconstructed 3D model of Nicosia International Airport's modern terminal based on LiDAR scans and archival documentation, housed in a custom-designed wooden console with touchscreen navigation and immersive projection. I developed the participatory virtual environment to test dissertation methodologies on interface-mediated, co-constructive 'virtual places' for heritage, featuring our WIP "propositional model" for focusing public knowledge towards architectural features, and a period landline phone interface for oral story contribution. I also designed and developed the companion website at velab.cloud/nic/en. Deployed in a public exhibition at the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, the project captured over 3,200 play sessions and 300 oral story recordings, generating new qualitative data that enriches, expands, and challenges the site's limited documentation. See the development timeline for in-progress screenshots and photos.
The People's Sky 2
The fifth iteration of the People's Tree project series, developed as the centerpiece for the 2025 Madvent launcher. I was invited by the junior team—who had taken over the launcher technology and coordination—to contribute this game for continuity with the series. My contributions focused on technical refinement: redesigning and optimizing the input system for significantly improved panning and zooming controls, recoloring and reskinning the visual aesthetic, and optimizing data serialization and loading sequences. The project marks my transition from lead developer to technical consultant, supporting the next generation of Haunted PS1 organizers.
Generative Ambiguity in Heritage Visualisation
A conference presentation arguing that moving beyond photorealism to embrace representational abstraction and ambiguity can create richer, more participatory works in digital cultural heritage. I presented this research, a core component of my dual PhD dissertation work, at the DARIAH Annual Event 2025 in Goettingen, Germany as part of the Digital Storytelling session. The full presentation materials, including slides and abstract, are archived on Zenodo.
Paphos Gate: Nicosia
Multiple VR applications (using Oculus DK2 and HTC Vive) to visualize archaeological findings and a proposed architectural intervention for an urban archaeology project in Nicosia. I prototyped and built the applications as a research assistant, developing systems for locomotion, interaction, and gaze-tracking analytics to understand how stakeholders focused on the virtual site. These tools engaged everyone from the public to the Department of Antiquities. The gaze-tracking data directly informed the design of the final public walkway and was integrated into the permanent VR exhibit at the museum. The project spanned a decade and opened to the public in 2024.
Quantum Itineraries Live Visuals
A suite of tools and visualizations in Unity for live-generated 3D visuals projected behind performers at 8K for dome or classical displays, using procedurally generated meshes and shaders. I built the system for the Quantum Itineraries music performances, a festival featuring quantum computer music where quantum simulations are core to composition and instrumentation. The system used WebRTC to route Unity's output to a mixer, while artists on stage built custom controllers with OSC to drive the visual-state in Unity, all powered by the same data from the quantum computer simulations that created the music.
The People's Sky
The fourth iteration of the People's Tree project, The People's Sky is an experimental game exploring community building by enabling players to design items, append messages, and place them in a shared digital space. For this iteration, I developed several key features, including data-transfer optimizations, new 'trace' visualizations to show player exploration paths, comprehensive analytic logs for post-experiment analysis, and a web application for content moderation.
MESH AIRFLOW Visualization
An AR visualization of airflow patterns for a secondary facade system designed by the Cyprus Institute. I took the researchers' 2D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations (heat and flow maps) and UV mapped them onto a 1:1 scale 3D model of the facade, then built a shader to animate these maps with particles, inspired by how *Portal 2* visualizes fluid dynamics. In the final application, users scan a QR code on the test building and see the internal 'stack effect' in action, with callouts indicating sensor locations.
Unité d'Habitation Wikisurvey
A wiki survey tool implementing methods from two previous wiki survey systems (All Our Ideas and POLIS) with new innovations. I developed this web application as part of the MetaFraming research. See the MetaFraming paper for more details.
MetaFraming: A Methodology for Democratizing Heritage Interpretation through Wiki Surveys
A participatory methodology to democratize heritage study through AI-assisted wiki surveys, a technology from the computational social sciences that allows the survey itself to evolve as people interact with it. I developed MetaFraming using three distinct GPT-3.5 pipelines: one generates hundreds of 'seed' propositions from background research (controlled for tone and topic), another interprets user-submitted comments by providing contextual history of their interactions, and a third automatically codes comments for sentiment and topics to speed qualitative analysis and aid abuse detection. The methodology was developed through a case study on Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation and published as a conference paper. Read the full paper here.
Are Surveys Necessary? Designing Virtual Environments for Participatory Research
A prototype Virtual Environment (VE) designed as an immersive online 'guest book' where hundreds of users could asynchronously decorate a shared virtual space and leave messages for one another. I developed this VE for a workshop on the intangible cultural heritage of Córdoba's communal patios, introducing key design strategies for asynchronous interaction ('claims' and 'traces') and a novel workflow using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate qualitative coding and moderation of text contributions. Published as a book chapter in the 2025 Bloomsbury Academic volume, Clever Design in Critical Times: Conceptualizing the Callidocene, arguing that interactive VEs can serve as powerful tools for participatory research, moving beyond the limitations of traditional surveys in the Digital Humanities. The book is available from Bloomsbury Academic.
Córdoba Court
Córdoba Court is an innovative social game I designed and developed to foster community building. Modeled after the communal patios of Córdoba, Spain, the game invites players to cultivate a shared virtual environment, expressing their individuality by designing personalized totems from millions of possible combinations. The project serves as a social experiment in digital placemaking and community greening practices. A report is also available, which analyzes player content and observed behaviors.
BEEP Energy Sim
An AR energy-use visualization showing expected energy loads for every room in a heritage building over the year, taking into account climatic comfort. I built the visualization to explain green infrastructure investments for the adaptive reuse project. More information on the project can be found here.
Eva Schlegel
Public AR installations for artist Eva Schlegel's studio, featuring complex custom shaders developed by her team. My role was to provide the technical education and platform support to make this possible. I extended the Wikar platform with new capabilities specifically for this project, including support for stencil shaders, UI compositing, and safeguarding access to camera textures and other rendering features that Unity would typically strip from a build.
Other Matter
An AR exhibition with Valerie Messini and her students at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. To support the students' creation of interactive and reactive sculptures, I extended the Wikar platform with several new features. This included more robust QR code scanning (improving reliability for inverted codes), expanded UI customization options, and a set of "interaction primitives" that students could use for proximity-based events or custom user controls. A video of the exhibition can be seen here.
Augmented Dreams: AR Sculpture Park
An AR sculpture park for a public exhibition in Graz, Austria, layering digital works by MFA students onto an existing physical sculpture park. As the selected technical producer, my Wikar platform was chosen for its openness and spatial accuracy. The students created site-specific works, some of which extended existing physical sculptures in interesting ways. To meet the high demand for documentation from both students and visitors, I improved Wikar's performance and added new photo and video recording capabilities to the app.
"Patio Walk": Córdoba
A pair of web applications for a Dariah Udigish Working Group project on the intangible cultural heritage of Córdoba's communal patios. The first was a site-specific recording tool for field workers that automatically linked photos, texts, audio interviews, and surveys to their GPS locations in a GIS database. The second was an interactive map-based visualization that displayed all collected materials overlaid on the city's patios. As a member of the working group, I was responsible for the design and development of both the data collection and final visualization tools.
"Scan To Ar": Palermo
A co-design workshop using rapid 3D site capture and an AR design tool with a library of design primitives (akin to Lego bricks). The goal was to repurpose abandoned industrial heritage in Palermo. I collaborated with Federico La Russa to facilitate the workshop, using Wikar (my augmented reality platform) to swiftly mock up and review architectural proposals with stakeholders over a single weekend. The public space opened in October 2022. Conference presentation and publication documented the methodology.
The Peoples Tree 2
The second iteration of the People's Tree project, an experimental game exploring community building in networked spaces. I created this application to allow participants to design ornaments and leave messages on a communal tree, offering a unique blend of interaction and shared digital space. The project served as a valuable opportunity to develop new technology, establish policy frameworks for user-generated content, and conduct comprehensive analytics on player behavior.
Where's Home?
An experimental prototype that successfully translated the unshaded, minimalist aesthetic of Rococo into a more complex, architecturally descriptive style. The concept was a sequel to the People's Tree project set in an abstracted Union Station, Chicago. For the prototype, I developed a custom Rhinoceros plugin to optimize and export modular architectural elements, and created a system to randomly place around 100 unique characters and their luggage throughout the scene. While the core technical art was a success, the project was paused to allow for more design iteration on its complex dialogue system.
CryoLumens
An AR artwork representing the strength and location of Earth's magnetic fields using NASA's real-time sensor network, overlaying data-driven particle systems on an original painting using image tracking. I developed the coding and visuals for Eli Joteva, including data-reactive shaders, VFX-graph particles, real-time web monitoring, and full AR integration.
Puzzle Generation
A dungeon generator where monsters trawl on fixed and cyclical paths, creating a looping temporal structure where an agent attempts to reach the end in the shortest amount of forward steps. I developed this using Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to solve for a sequence of moves in time rather than a shortest traversal path in space, as a final project for a course in algorithmic design.
ICT For Urban Heritage: Palermo
A co-design workshop in Palermo to envision the future of an abandoned warehouse, serving as the first field test for my dissertation research on propositional modeling. I designed two competing architectural proposals (conservative and radical) and used my AR platform, Wikar, to allow local stakeholders to view them on-site. By testing the proposals at different scales (a 1:500 map vs. 1:1 walkthroughs), the process surfaced the community's deep attachment to the site's recent, unwritten history as a local park. This visualization work made their tacit knowledge empirically grounded, and the feedback directly informed the final design, which preserved the area as a public plaza.
Minotaur
Minotaur is a simple game experience that served as my earliest experiment with embedded analytics. For this project, I built a system that records play sessions and sends summary data back to a Clowder server. This work enabled long-term data collection, and the results from over three years and thousands of play sessions are analyzed in this report.
The Peoples Tree
The People's Tree was the first in a series of experimental games I created to explore community building in networked spaces. In this project, players design ornaments and leave messages on a shared tree. It was my first opportunity to build the underlying technology, develop content policies, and run analytics for a live, public-facing application. A key finding from this and subsequent projects was an unexpectedly high player return rate of 15-30%, suggesting that players felt a personal stake in the collectively-designed artifact and returned to observe its evolution.
Earth Vis
An experiment in converting NASA climate data into a real-time VFX graph visualization. For this project, I built a system in Unity where particles sweep over a globe, using a flowmap to determine wind speed and direction, while their trails change color based on temperature.
Timeline Atlas
Two AR data-visualization sculptures visualizing datasets too complex to depict through physical sculpture: the home locations of all female senators over the past century. I collaborated with artist Stephen Cartwright, known for meticulously logging personal data over decades and crafting it into acrylic sculptures that exhibit spatial-temporal patterns. We used AR to surpass the limitations of his traditional manufacturing techniques. Debuted as part of a faculty showcase in 2019.
Quipit Student Survey
A participatory table installation in the school's atrium that challenged passersby with the question: What would you change if you ran the school? Designed as a platform for dialogue and collector of viewpoints, the table became adorned with students' handwritten responses, evolving into a mirror of collective sentiment. After a month-long response collection, QUIPIT—a student group in the University of Illinois' School of Architecture, with Ray Majewski, Christian Pepper, and Robert Prochaska—held an exclusive student event to discuss the gathered insights, culminating in a presentation to the school's director. Part of our broader initiative using tongue-in-cheek installation art and events to foster open dialogues among students, faculty, and administration.