SpaceTimeCraft: A Strong Concept for Designing and Analyzing Embodied Movement in Virtual Environments
Abstract
Virtual navigation—embodied spatial movement in interactive digital environments—is a distinct interaction gestalt and a core aesthetic form of digital media, prevalent across videogames and VR applications. Despite its cultural ubiquity and the resurgence of movement-intensive gaming, unifying foundational research bridging theoretical analysis, empirical inquiry, and design practice remains scarce, leaving researchers without shared analytical frameworks and limiting actionable design knowledge available to practitioners. To address this, we implement exploratory gamemaking as a knowledge-generating method, integrating insights from diverse literature with the study of media artifacts, to probe the fundamental and invariant components of virtual navigable experience (VNX) through the edge case of non-Euclidean navigable environments. With SpaceTimeCraft, we contribute a ‘strong concept’—a form of intermediate-level knowledge that bridges theory with the design space. It frames virtual navigation as a spatiotemporal enactive process emerging from the synthesis of three heterogeneous components: a spatial construction, an environmental simulation, and a vicarious phenomenological intentionality (an interactive avatar). This minimally elegant model integrates diverse theoretical perspectives, providing a flexible framework for conceptualizing, analyzing, and comparing instances of VNX, and a generative design pattern for novel applications—a capacity we demonstrate through a configurable prototype.
