Publications: research
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 co-constructive virtual places for heritage, featuring a "propositional model" for directing public knowledge toward 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 expands and challenges the site's limited documentation. See the development timeline for in-progress screenshots and photos.
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 before the site and its permanent VR exhibit opened to the public in 2024.
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.
Córdoba Court
Córdoba Court is a social game I designed and developed as the third iteration of the People's Tree series, modeled after the communal patios of Córdoba, Spain. Players cultivate a shared virtual environment by designing personalized totems from a combinatorial system of parts. The project was released simultaneously through the Haunted PS1 community and as part of the DARIAH Udigish Working Group's survey on Córdoba's communal patios, serving as a social experiment in shared digital space and community greening. A report is also available, which analyzes player content and observed behaviors.
BEEP Energy Sim
An AR energy-use visualization that lets stakeholders view expected energy loads for every room in a heritage building over the year using a phone or tablet. A slider scrubs through a full year of data, built to explain green infrastructure investments for the adaptive reuse project. More information on the project can be found here.Technical: I baked 3D room volumes into an optimized mesh whose vertex UVs encode positions on a packed lookup texture for GPU-driven animation without CPU overhead. The project also showcased Wikar's 3D section slicer, which recomposes standard shaders into slicable equivalents using 3D SDF intersections with a stencil pass for back-face fill.
Minotaur
Minotaur is a digital marble maze inspired by the classic BRIO Labyrinth board game, where players tilt a board to navigate a ball around holes. It also served as my earliest experiment with embedded analytics—I built a system that records play sessions and sends summary data to a Clowder data repository. This work enabled long-term data collection, and the results from over three years and thousands of play sessions are analyzed in this report.