Tanssia ja liikettä virtuaalitodellisuudessa

Virtual Reality (VR) allows the creation of new types of unique, interactive, and immersive experiences. However, designing for the medium brings its own strengths and limitations. While a player in a virtual world can see and hear anything, their material body's movement is still limited by both their physical capabilities and the space they are in. Moreover, today's mainstream consumer VR devices still struggle to accurately capture subtle human movements or provide realistic force feedback when interacting with virtual objects. These limitations highlight the need for more advanced interaction methods tailored to immersive environments. This dissertation investigates these types of novel techniques for user movement in virtual environments and explores how motion can be guided in ways that are unique to Virtual Reality. From the five publications included in this dissertation, Publications I, II, and III focus on dance experiences. Publication I introduces and evaluates a new way of instructing choreographies, allowing the user to anticipate incoming moves in games and other experiences. Publication II explores solutions for creating multiplayer dance games in Virtual Reality with limited dance space and movement tracking. Publication III examines the dance experience in VR compared to Mixed Reality, where a virtual partner is embedded in the user's real surroundings and the user sees their own body similar to real-life. The remaining two publications IV and V examine how familiar ovement actions from traditional video games can be reimagined in more embodied forms that suit the physical and technical realities of VR. To achieve these goals, this dissertation employs a mixed-methods approach to exploring and developing novel movement- and dance-based game mechanics and interactions, describing the design processes and rationale, and evaluating the mechanics and interactions through user studies that combine quantitative data with qualitative interviews. This dissertation explores different novel VR experiences and highlights unexplored design space for movement-based experiences in VR. It also demonstrates how the medium's technological limitations and non-physical nature can serve as strengths, inspiring more creative approaches to movement design and a deeper focus on user experience in VR. The main contributions of this dissertation are the design insights gathered from the projects as well as the projects themselves that serve as groundwork for future dance-centered and movement-centered games, applications, and research in VR.