makebelieve design & consulting
2003 - present

In 2003 I founded makebelieve, an interactive immersive experience design and consulting company. makebelieve has since engaged in a number of projects concerning the use of innovative user-centred technological exhibits and installations in museums, cultural exhibitions, and advertising events.

http://www.makebelieve.gr

Foundation of the Hellenic World VR projects
1998 - 2003

For four+ years ('98-'02), I directed the Virtual Reality department at the Foundation of the Hellenic World, a cultural heritage institution/museum, where I was responsible both for the establishment of the virtual reality infrastructure and the creation of the educational and exhibition content. For descriptions of the projects, see: 867KB English, 890KB Greek.

http://www.virtualreality.gr/ and http://www.fhw.gr/

The Virtual Playground
2002 - 2006

The Virtual Playground is an engaging simulation environment for children between 8 and 12 years old. In this playground, the child user assumes the role of a designer that must carry out tasks, such as planning the layout of the playground by modifying, resizing and placing its various elements. These tasks require solving mathematical fraction problems. The VP is used for my current research in evaluating interactivity in VEs for learning.

see 'research' for more info
Virtual Playground project page

CREATE
2002 - 2005

I was responsible for initiating the IST-funded research project CREATE (Constructivist Mixed Reality for Design and Education), which included two case studies of learning/training environments, for cultural heritage education and for architecture & urban planning design.

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/create/

Medi@terra art & technology festival & symposia
1999 - 2006

I have served as scientific advisor to the Fournos Center for Art & Technology and member of the organising committee of the yearly International festival on art & technology Medi@terra.

Medi@terra 2006: "Gaming Realities"
6th Medi@terra: "From text to hypertext"
Medi@terra 2002: "New Platforms"
Medi@terra 2001: "De-Globalizing / Re-Globalizing"
Medi@terra 2000: "Neo[tech]nologisms"
Medi@terra 1999: "Pendulum"

Integrated Arts Information Access & artsconnected.org
1997-1998

I have been involved in the design and development of on-line interactive educational activities for grades K-12, as part of the Integrated Arts Information Access project at the Walker Art Center, a contemporary art museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The activities were developed for the ArtsConnectEd website, a highly successful and awarded art resource.

http://www.artsconnected.org
http://www.walkerart.org/ace/ed_activities

Mitologies
1996 - 1997

Mitologies is a collaborative virtual reality artwork for the CAVE(tm). It is loosely based on the Cretan myth of the Minotaur, Dante's "Inferno", the revelation of St. John, Durer's woodcuts after the revelation, and Borges' Library of Babel. Mitologies derives from the Greek word "mitos," the thread Ariadne gave Theseus to help him find his way out of the Cretan labyrinth. The participants in Mitologies re-experience allegorically Theseus' journey, in an imaginary maze which experiments in combining this common element from different historical references. The connections between the above sources are central to the unfolding of the "labyrinthine medieval narrative" employed.
Mitologies was presented at ISEA 1997 as part of my Master in Fine Arts thesis (along with 'cleanse'). MFA committee: Daniel Sandin (video artist, chair), Irene Siegel (visual artist), Dana Plepys (video artist), Inigo Manglano-Ovalle (visual artist).

http://www.evl.uic.edu/mariar/MFA/MITOLOGIES

cleanse
1997

cleanse is a video and mixed media installation on visual literacy. The physical structure is composed of a circular concrete well. When looking down into the well through the body of water, the viewer can see an eye being cleansed. The viewers of cleanse are able to drop water in the well and participate in the cleansing process. cleanse (along with Mitologies) was presented as part of Virtual Spaces, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory's exhibition for the annual meeting of the International Conference for the Electronic Arts (ISEA '97), held in September 1997 in Chicago.

http://www.evl.uic.edu/mariar/MFA/CLEANSE

The NICE project
1996 - 1997

The NICE Project (Narrative-based, Immersive, Constructionist / Collaborative Environments) is an interactive virtual reality learning environment for young children. I have led the design, production, and evaluation of this collaborative project, which started in January 1995 and is continuously being enhanced. As a learning environment, NICE combines educational theories of constructivism, narative development, and collaborative work. NICE has been featured extensively in national and international press, including the Chicago Sun Times (12/14/97) and Graduating Engineer (Nov/Dec '97). A whole chapter of the book Understanding Virtual Reality by W. Sherman and A. Craig (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers 2003) has been dedicated to the NICE project.
My Master of Science thesis work was entitled Issues in the Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Learning Environment." The NICE project provided the virtual reality learning environment for my studies. I completed preliminary evaluation studies with 52 children between the ages of 6 and 10. M.Sc. committee: Prof. Thomas A. DeFanti, Prof. Thomas G. Moher, Dr. Mark Gillingham.

http://www.evl.uic.edu/tile/NICE/

handprints
1996

handprints (1996) is a work of interactive fiction which lives on the web. The first few pages establish the beginning of a narrative which is then left to the visitors to continue. A second story, contributed by Paul Brenner, was added to handprints when it was exhibited at Gallery 312. As a gallery installation, handprints was part of a group exhibition of Chicago artists called Untitled, June 14 - August 3, 1996, Gallery 312, 312 N. May St., Chicago IL.

The Psychotunnel
1995

I created the Psychotunnel tent in the Great Sandini Family Circus (1995). This Virtual Reality Circus was a collaboration between several electronic artists led by Jim Barr. The Circus was first exhibited in the CAVE as part of EVE4 (Electronic Visualization Event IV) at Gallery 400, Chicago IL. It has also been shown at SIGGRAPH '96 and the Ars Electronica Festival '96 in Linz, Austria.

CitySpace
1995

I worked briefly on the CitySpace project, a virtual city environment built collaboratively by children, with the help of educators and media artists across the Internet. I ported the CitySpace virtual world to the CAVE (tm) technology for the GII Testbed at SuperComputing '95 (December 3-8, 1995 in San Diego). The experiment used the I-WAY(Information Wide Area Year), a high performance network based on ATM technology.

The File Room
1993 - 1994

The File Room is an illustrated archive of cases of cultural censorship on the WWW, conceived by artist Antonio Muntadas and developed by a large group of artists, researchers and technologists. It was presented as a public interactive installation at the Chicago Cultural Center (May - Sept., 1994). I served as Production Coordinator for the File Room project - I designed and implemented the archive in early 1994 and customized it for the public art installation site, which was visited by approximately 80,000 people in a period of 4 months. The File Room is considered one of the pioneering art works on the web, it has been widely featured in the press and has won numerous international awards. It continues to exist as a WWW project, now housed and maintained by the National Coalition Against Censorship.

http://www.thefileroom.org/

VROOM
1994

In 1994, I worked for ACM SIGGRAPH 94's VROOM exhibition, which involved the demonstration of over 40 virtual reality projects in immersive VR installations. I was part of the team that developed the multimedia and internet-based public kiosk exhibit that documented the projects. The exhibit, comprised of an array of SGI workstations that were specially-programmed to withstand extensive use, was visited by approximately 40,000 conference attendees in one week.

The Urban Sherpa
1994

The Urban Sherpa was a prototype multimedia architectural tour guide of Chicago intended for use as a kiosk or a portable "walk along" system. A physical handheld prototype was constructed, while the multimedia production included many images, drawings, video, and sound and was implemented on the Macintosh using an early version of MacroMedia Director & Lingo.

The Mathhopper
1993

The Mathhopper (1993) was an interactive educational math program to teach the basics of the number line and multiplication concepts to 3rd graders. It was based on the public school education program T.I.M.S (Teaching Integrated Math and Science) and was developed for a Macintosh using SuperCard.