Presentatation about visual storytelling in virtual worlds at IED, Immersive Education conference in Boston 4.6.2013

1. Virtual Worlds as Visual Storytelling
Environments
PhD.st. Anna-Kaisa Sjölund
University of Turku, Finland
ankasj@utu.fi
tel.+ 358401993501
IED Boston 4.6.2013

2. Virtual worlds as visual environments
• Virtual worlds are always visual environments.
• Storytelling is a very human way to communicate and it is
widely used among educational services.
• Information visualization as innovative storytelling technology
can be useful for the next-generation of educational dynamic
environments for learning.
PhD.st. Anna-Kaisa Sjölund
University of Turku, Finland
ankasj@utu.fi
tel.+ 358401993501
IED Boston 4.6.2013

3. Theory behind the story
• Qualitative visual analysis offers through open immersion for
images, photographs, videos, digital images opportunity to tell
us stories from their own premise.
• Open immersion means observing images openly, ‘listening’
overtones and discovering connecting and converting patterns.
• After more structured and more detailed analysis, images will be
reviewed as a whole and search their meanings and
signification.
PhD.st. Anna-Kaisa Sjölund
University of Turku, Finland
ankasj@utu.fi
tel.+ 358401993501
IED Boston 4.6.2013

4. Digital Storytelling
• Digital storytelling is shown as combining the art of telling
stories with variety of multimedia, videos, manchimas, audio
and images.
• Visual storytelling could be seen as a process, where
information visualization is used to tell complex stories.
• Through information visualization data, information and
knowledge transforms into visually embedded form to observe,
understand and make sense of the information.
PhD.st. Anna-Kaisa Sjölund
University of Turku, Finland
ankasj@utu.fi
tel.+ 358401993501
IED Boston 4.6.2013

5. Augmented reality and visual storytelling
• AR is technology which allows computer generated virtual
imaginary to exactly overlay physical objects in real time”
(Zhou, Duh and Billinghurst, 2008).
• Technological demands for AR are much more higher than for
VR (virtual reality).
• Visual displays are more developed than aural (sound), haptic
(touch). Olfactory (smell) and gustatory( taste) displays are so
far almost unknown.
PhD.st. Anna-Kaisa Sjölund
University of Turku, Finland
ankasj@utu.fi
tel.+ 358401993501
IED Boston 4.6.2013

6. Information Dynamics and Visual Storytelling
• Information dynamics in this context refers to production,
sharing and connecting students not only to information
resources, but also wider professional online communities.
• Information dynamics is seen as behavioral process to produce
and share information as well as creating social networks.
• Linking language with dynamic visual information, like visual
AR-displays in virtual worlds makes possible in the future to
reinforce the multimodal fusion of information sources and the
communication with end-users.
PhD.st. Anna-Kaisa Sjölund
University of Turku, Finland
ankasj@utu.fi
tel.+ 358401993501
IED Boston 4.6.2013