Profile summary
Gareth is a part-time PHD student who began studies in October 2019. He is exploring the benefits of combining Diegetic Innovation Templating (DIT) with Virtual Reality (VR) to promote academic enterprise and foresight innovation.
DiT is a new approach to supporting foresight innovation that was researched and developed by Dr. Ping Zheng and Dr. Vic Callaghan. DiT enables organisations to create descriptions (templates) of products or services that have the potential to become reality in the distant future. These templates can support visionary planning, enabling organisations to identify a given templates ability to be developed and whether it is a good fit for the organisation’s future. This is known as the ‘diegetic gap’. If there is a low diegetic gap, organisations are more likely to be able to research and develop the template into a product or service and strategically plan how this could potentially take place.
This long-term planning approach requires a high level of collaboration which presents logistical challenges for large organisations that theoretically can be supported using VR. VR can also provide specific tools to support the DiT process that might not be feasible in the real world.
Gareth has worked in the education sector for over 12 years, with 6 years specifically working at Canterbury Christ Church University. Alongside his full-time employment, he has also worked on a wide range of videogame development projects (both paid and voluntary), which has provided him with the ability to build virtual environments that can be explored using VR. His main interest centres on gaining a greater level of understanding in the way that we, as humans, perceive the real world, and how that reality compares to how we experience virtual environments through modern immersive VR technologies.