Sinfonía Biótica is a virtual reality piece where landscape, plant signals, and sound intertwine—an environment to explore that invites a different kind of relationship with vegetation and place. After a long production process, any authored work risks losing the view from outside: the people building it no longer see it the way a newcomer does. We ran a usability and experience evaluation not to pass final judgment on the piece, but to listen to audiences and give the team a grounded, honest reading of where the project stands today.
The report, by Joaquín R. Díaz Durán (i_mBODY Lab, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) in collaboration with MolinoLab (Sancti-Spíritus · Salamanca, Spain), asks specific questions: how the experience affects empathy toward other forms of life, how it shapes emotions and bodily perception, how its artistic dimension is read, and how usability of the interactive world is rated.
Twenty-one people took part across two contexts: students from the Bachelor’s in Audiovisual Engineering at UC3M and members of the general public around Ciudad Rodrigo, including residents of Sancti Spíritus. Sessions took place at Molino Lab with individual VR sessions (up to 12 minutes, with the option to stop sooner), a pre-questionnaire and post-experience questionnaire via Google Forms, informed consent, and facilitator notes during immersion. We used Meta Quest 3 headsets (referred to in the report as Oculus 3) and one of the piece’s three open-world levels, giving only the minimum information needed to start—closer to a real visitor than a tutorial. The analysis combines quantitative description with qualitative interpretation of comments and behaviour, aligned with grounded-theory and thematic-analysis approaches.
The study’s findings—ecological empathy, exploration, visual and sound design, VR comfort, emotional and bodily impact, and creative activation—are laid out in full in the document, together with charts and an appendix of participant suggestions (“wish list”) for future iterations.
