Marcella Mandanici

With the extensive utilization of touch screens, smartphones and various reactive surfaces, reality-based and intuitive interaction styles have now become customary. The employment of larger interactive areas, like floors or peripersonal three-dimensional spaces, further increase the affordances of reality-based interaction, allowing full-body involvement and the development of a co-located, shared user experience. Embodied and spatial cognition play a fundamental role for the interaction in this kind of spaces, where users act in the reality with no device in the hands and obtain an audio and graphical output depending on their movements. Starting from the early experiments of Myron Krueger in 1971, responsive floors have been developed through various technologies including sensorized tiles and computer vision systems, to be employed in learning environments, entertainment, games and rehabilitation. Responsive floors allow the spatial representation of concepts and for this reason are suitable for immediate communication and engagement. As many musical features have meaningful spatial representations, they can easily be reproduced in the physical space through a conceptual blending approach and be made available to a great number of users. This is the key idea for the design of my original music applications.
Particularly, I studied the relationship between the spatial disposition of music elements and musical knowledge and perception. A strong emotional flow happens when people realizes that changes in the environment depend on their movements. I tried to link this experience to musical cognition and to use immersion and engagement for learning, entertainment, training, and rehabilitation of people with disabilities.