An Online Immersive Reality Innovation-Lab

This paper introduces the concept of online ‘Innovations-Labs’ (iLabs) as location-independent collaborative ideation spaces. We highlight the challenges and opportunities that disruptive innovations present to companies and society, and discuss how Science Fiction Prototyping and Diegetic Innovation Templating can provide a means to explore that space by acting as ideation process and a language for capturing and communicating innovations. A core hypothesis of this paper is that there are significant gains to be accrued from integrating Virtual Reality, Science Fiction Prototyping, Diegetic Innovation Templating and Innovation Labs to form an online immersive reality innovation-lab which both offers better affordances and access to people wishing to undertake innovation related activities. We present details of our initial implementation of an online innovation-lab (Our HEX) which takes the form of a virtual-reality space-station. We then conclude the paper by describing future directions of our work, principally, a venture which uses ‘Our HEX’ space-station platform, plus a supporting textbook published by Tsinghua University Press, to teach ‘English, Computing and Creativity’ to Chinese students. Finally the paper concludes with a summary and reflections on our work to-date.