Walk-in Theater: Interaction Design for a Miniature Experience with Peripatetic Cinema

is a portable virtual cinema for the display of spatially distributed multichannel movies (“walkies”). The miniature experience engages participants’ proprioceptors and spatial memory, allowing them to orient themselves as they navigate a field of scattered video streams and localized sounds reproduced on a handheld computing device. Departing from one-way linear cinema played on a single rectangular screen, this multichannel virtual environment pursues a cinematic paradigm that undoes habitual ways of framing things, employing architectural concepts in a polylinear-video polyphonic-sound construction to create a kind of experience that lets the world reveal itself and permits discovery on the part of beholders. Interaction design for supports approaches to cinematic construction that employ the ambulatory, multiple and simultaneous viewpoints that humans exercise in everyday life.