Maria Roussou

Ph.D., MFA, M.Sc.

Personal Homepage:
http://www.makebelieve.gr/mr/
Current place of employment:
makebelieve design & consulting

Dr. Maria Roussou is an interaction and virtual reality designer engaged in combining innovative technology with education and culture. She is founder and co-director of makebelieve, an experience design and consulting company. Previously, she established in the Fall of 1998 and directed (for four+ years, 1998-2002) the Virtual Reality Department at the Foundation of the Hellenic World (FHW), a cultural heritage institution based in Athens, Greece. At FHW she was responsible for recruiting a team of artists and programmers, setting up the VR exhibits & infrastructure, and managing the research, design and development of the VR programs and the overall visitor experiences. Maria teaches the New Technologies & Museums course at the interdisciplinary Master of Arts program in Museum Studies of the University of Athens. She holds a PhD in Computer Science (VR/HCI) from the University of London (UCL), a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Electronic Media from the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago, a Masters of Science (M.Sc) in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from the same university, and an undergraduate degree in Applied Informatics from the Athens University of Economics and Business.

Publications by Maria Roussou (bibliography)

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Roussou, Maria, Kavalieratou, Elina and Doulgeridis, Michael (2007): Children Designers in the Museum: Applying Participatory Design for the Development of an Art Education Program. In: Bekker, Mathilde, Robertson, Judy and Skov, Mikael B. (eds.) Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children June 6-8, 2007, Aalborg, Denmark. pp. 77-80.

Roussou, Maria, Oliver, Martin and Slater, Mel (2007): Exploring Activity Theory as a Tool for Evaluating Interactivity and Learning in Virtual Environments for Children. In Cognition, Technology & Work,

Drettakis, George, Roussou, Maria, Martinez, Alex Reche and Tsingos, Nicolas (2007): Design and Evaluation of a Real-World Virtual Environment for Architecture and Urban Planning. In Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 16 (3) pp. 318-332

Christou, Chris, Angus, Cameron, Loscos, Celine, Dettori, Andrea and Roussou, Maria (2006): A versatile large-scale multimodal VR system for cultural heritage visualization. In: Slater, Mel, Kitamura, Yoshifumi, Tal, Ayellet, Amditis, Angelos and Chrysanthou, Yiorgos (eds.) VRST 2006 - Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology November 1-3, 2006, Limassol, Cyprus. pp. 133-140. Available online

Calder, Jo, Melengoglou, Alexander, Callaway, Charles, Not, Elena, Pianesi, Fabio, Androutsopoulos, Ion, Spyropoulos, Costantine, Xydas, Gerasimos, Kouroupetroglou, Georgios and Roussou, Maria (2005): Multilingual Personalized Information Objects. In: Stock, Oliveiro and Zancanaro, Massimo "Multimodal Intelligent Information Presentation". Springer pp. 177-202

Roussou, Maria (2004): Examining young learners' activity within interactive virtual environments. In: Proceedings of ACM IDC04: Interaction Design and Children 2004. pp. 167-168. Available online

Roussou, Maria (2004): Learning by doing and learning through play: an exploration of interactivity in virtual environments for children. In Computers in Entertainment, 2 (1) p. 10

Loscos, Celine, Widenfeld, Hila Ritter, Roussou, Maria, Meyer, Alexandre, Tecchia, Franco, Drettakis, George, Gallo, Emmanuel, Martinez, Alex Reche, Tsingos, Nicolas, Chrysanthou, Yiorgos, Robert, Luc, Bergamasco, Massimo, Dettori, Andrea and Soubra, Souheil (2003): The CREATE Project: Mixed Reality for Design, Education, and Cultural Heritage with a Constructivist Approach. In: 2003 IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality ISMAR 2003 7-10 October, 2003, Tokyo, Japan. pp. 282-283. Available online

Roussou, Maria (2001): The Interplay between Form, Story, and History : The Use of Narrative in Cultural and Educational Virtual Reality. In: Balet, Olivier, Subsol, Gérard and Torguet, Patrice (eds.) ICVS 2001 - Virtual Storytelling Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling, International Conference September 27-28, 2001, Avignon, France. pp. 181-190. Available online

Changes to this page (author)

21 May 2010: Added a picture of Maria Roussou
21 May 2010: Added a picture of Maria Roussou