Emma Westecott, Tyler Beatty, Ryan Boyd, Kahani Ploessl

"The presented Multi-player VR experience is the result of workshops and a game jam hosted by the Bodies in Play research group, a collaboration between DMG, and OCADU's Game:Play and Social Body labs. The virtual environment starts in a dressing room where the facilitators designed different ways of altering players' avatars. Additionally, six portal worlds were created by the game jam participants. About Bodies in VR: Virtual Reality is an embodied experience, both physically limiting a player within a restrictive technological apparatus as well as offering a creator more freedom in imagining ways to express and extend their identity without real world reference. What if we could use VR technologies to re-imagine and re-empower ourselves by being in control of how we represent ourselves in virtual worlds? “Bodies in Virtual Reality” was a series of hands-on events dedicated to exploration of how virtual reality creation practices can be used to support embodied expression of identity, experience, and self. Two workshops focused on the development of virtual reality skills including world design and the creation of game bodies for a social VR experience. The Bodies in VR Jam supported the development of fully developed interactive and/or dynamic VR projects. Through these activities we to co-imagined, co-fabulated, co-designed, and co-created ways potential relationships between bodies, technologies, and means of expression."