Biography
Ágnes Karolina Bakk, PhD is the head of the Immersion and Interaction hub at the Innovation Center of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.
She is also its lead researcher. She focuses on immersive storytelling and the science of magic, and is currently leading two research projects: one on romantic relationships in Metaverse-like environments and another on psychological restoration in a specific VR prototype.
She is the founder of the Zip-Scene conference, which has been running since 2018, the cofounder of Random Error Studio, and the co-curator of Vektor VR section, Hungary’s first VR-focused event. She teaches immersive storytelling and speculative design, and she presents at various conferences and festivals from Moscow to Montreal.
She is currently involved in several video game productions as a narrative designer, as well as creating her own artistic VR production. She is the author of several articles dealing with the psychology of magic in VR, immersive theatre, and the ethics of interactive digital storytelling. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming book Enchanting Spaces: Theorising and Designing Immersive Environments published by Palgrave Macmillan (expected in 2024). She has also contributed to several video games as a narrative designer. These include 1986 (commissioned by Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archive), Follow the Crown (available on the Steam platform), and the Szövegvilág mobile game, which is all about the poetic universe of the Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi. She is a board member of COST Action INDCOR - Interactive Digital Narratives for Complexity Representations.