2002 Scholarship Winner: Ilda Ladeira

In my Computer Science Honours year I undertook course work in the areas of Computer Science that I wish to specialise in. These involve mainly advanced high-level computer graphics, virtual reality and computer usability.

My main focus, however, was my Honours project, which will explored African storytelling in a Virtual Reality environment. This will involved preparing a distinctly San/Bushmen story and implementing it on a Virtual Environment (VE) platform. Once implemented the storytelling environment was tested for perceived reality and overall effectiveness. Thus, this project is a combination of Computer Graphics as well as Psychological evaluation. Through this project I was able to create a rich and distinctly African virtual story and investigate what contributes to a virtual environment being perceived as believable and compelling. The results of this project were published and presented at the 2nd International Conference on Virtual Storytelling 2004 in Toulouse, France. I will be extending this work during my MSc.

I wish to express my gratitude to SAWISE for all their help during my Honours.

2003 winner >