CCS Collective Voice

Viveka (10 unread)

Live twittering from the ASID conference today.

Posted: October 24th, 2008, 12:08pm EST by viveka

#asid - Twitter Search
Cool toys at the Games Studio

Posted: October 16th, 2008, 12:21pm EST by viveka

I’m in the UTS Games Studio, the denizens of which are demonstrating the cool toys we have there. First is Leena who has embedded various i-cubex sensors in a teddy bear (well, a dog, but she admonishes us to ignore that), a tennis racket any glove. All of these are generating audio at the moment. Greg and Daniel have been playing with our MERL Touchtable. This is a multi-user multitouch display table; its special capability is that it can distinguish between four users. Other touch tables can support lots of users and touches, but can’t tell who is who. They’ve made a simple but very engaging game called Ball Fight that used this capability nicely. The CCS mob is getting quite excited by the artistic possibilities ^_^
Slide decks - Second Life in Context / Responsive Environments for INteractive Arts

Posted: September 4th, 2008, 12:58am EST by viveka

A couple of slide decks for talks I gave recently: last Wednesday a guest lecture for the Interactive Arts class on Responsive Environments as an art form.
Then the previous Wednesday, a presentation to UTS staff on Second Life, in the context of other available metaverses and with some focus on its uses in education.
My slides tend to be all pictures - there’s enough text with me talking over them without writing it all out again so you can read what I’m saying. It does mean though that they don’t stand alone when I stick ‘em on the web. You’ll just have to look at the pretty examples
Mondrian’s Atelier and the 場 (ba) Principle

Posted: August 5th, 2008, 12:39pm EST by viveka

In this precis of Mondrian’s work, amongst the paintings is an image of this most personal creation; his atelier. A useful word to think about; an artist or designer’s studio or workshop, from the middle french astelier (woodpile). Images of this place are preserved: it has been reconstructed as well. With the reconstruction perhaps a little neater than the original - no loose parts there. This brings to mind my own virtual reconstruction of Utzon’s studio - with a similar result. The reconstruction is interesting, but sterile. It historicises its subject; you can’t inhabit it. And without an inhabitant it cannot be a 場 (ba).

Consider: if I had all the resources in the world, and could create a perfect reconstruction of Mondrian’s atelier in which to work, I would not want to. Nor Utzon’s, Hundertwasser’s, Tufte’s. They all produce wonderful work, and their studios are surely part of the process of its production; but these things are intensely personal. Once again: it’s not the result, it’s the principles that matter.
Magic Hopscotch

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 2:47pm EST by viveka

We’re live! Just in time for the start of the school holidays, Magic Hopscotch is up and running and open to the public at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. The timing is important because this is a prototype of an interactive artwork designed for children. Doreen Ee, my collaborating technologist, put in a magnificent effort to reconfigure the code for the floor pads that control the piece, after we were compelled to rewire them last week.Shan Weiley, my partner and constant collaborator, has started participant observations and we are already getting some wonderful insights. More later, because i’m writing on my phone and more than a few words is painful The launch is on thursday the 10th of July from 2-4 pm, email me if you’d like an invitation. Heartfelt thanks also to Deborah Turnbull our erstwhile beta space curator and Matthew Connell at the phm.

Update: now tracking this project at Sky Blue.
Permeating the Magic Circle

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 3:46pm EST by viveka

The inimitable Doug Easterly addressed CCS today on Permeating the Magic Circle - exploring “the physical and conceptual boundaries that demarcate work and real-life from play and game activity”. He’s well known for his artistic practice with SWAMP addressing these very issues. Doug’s research looks into play, drawing on Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Caillois‘ critiques of it, and of course Czikszentmihalyi on Flow. On that last Doug has formed a beautifully clear exposition of the standard critique of games: that they draw users into a state of Flow not for the high-minded goals of learning or self-actualisation, but instead for the baser purpose of merely keeping them in the game for its own sake, or for the sake of “coin drop” (in the parlance of the video game arcade industry). By drawing out a distinction between flow and device mesmerism, Doug shows that it’s not games, their holding power, or flow itself that is evil - but rather the purposes to which they are put.

The depth of his research is compelling him to dive down into evolutionary psychology, just to find a place to stand… bringing in references from Leda Cosmides [wp], Jared Diamond [wp] and Stephen Pinker [wp]. A PhD is certainly a great excuse to do some absorbing reading.

After the talk we got into an engrossing discussion of hermetically sealed virtual realities (silly) vs. mixed reality (marvellous), mind/body dualism (outmoded) vs. holism (somewhat more sensible) and absolute transhumanism (fun but overblown) vs. whatever is actually going on (much more complicated, and even more fun). Doug saw an early sketch of the mixed-reality piece I’m currently installing down at the Powerhouse Museum, so I’m hoping to get the computer vision part of it working properly before he heads back to NZ at the end of the week. More about that in another blog post
Virtual Gardens for Prototyping

Posted: May 21st, 2008, 11:44am EST by viveka

While looking for images of Donkey Kong (historical research for the UTS Games Studio, dontcha know) I stumbled across this gem:

Prototyping for Game Feel (v.2)

Including the faboulous step 3:

• Be Shigeru Miyamoto

There’s a nice thoughtful post here (and the rest of the site looks worth a read as well). What caught my eye was the description of Miyamoto’s virtual garden:

“Before any of the levels had been created Mr. Miyamoto had Mario running around and picking up objects in a small ‘garden’ which he uses in all his games to test gameplay elements.”

Miyamoto is noted for finding inspiration for his game designs from his other interests: playing the guitar and gardening. The gamecube game “Pimkin” was based directly on Miyamoto’s actual garden. So for him, it seems that the virtual and real garden are his ba - his own place, a creative source.
Design Transformations at CHI 2008

Posted: May 7th, 2008, 9:33pm EST by viveka

I arrived in Florence last week fairly alert, considering the time difference from Sydney. I’d done the right thing and stayed awake for the last 20 hours of the flight, crashed at my hotel on arrival in the evening and got a good 10 hours sleep before the opening plenary.

It was worth it. I hadn’t heard of Irene McAra-McWilliam (Head of the School of Design at the Glasgow School of Art) before but I’m a fan now. Her speech was uplifting. She wove a tapestry of design history and theory, to come elegantly to the conclusion that designers in a connected world have a responsibility to enable others; to come to some problems not with a solution but with a box of tools.

This is just what I hope to do with my research into creativity support tools, and it’s what I’m seeing in my studies of creative place. I don’t need to design the perfect virtual studio; I need to design an environment with the right parts and the right affordances, to enable inhabitants to configure the perfect studio for their task.
A Pale Shadow of Reality: Virtuality as a Second-Best Option

Posted: March 14th, 2008, 6:15pm EST by ba

This rant kicks off with a Tech Republic article on telepresence that was linked in the February ‘08 Litmus. I’m reading Litmus because the lovely people at ACID have been kind enough to chip in on my research, and they went to the trouble of putting it together, so it’s clearly something I ought to be doing. Fortunately it’s an interesting read, at least to someone of my peculiar interests.

The linked article on the other hand, while being bang-on to my research topic, only serves to annoy me. It’s not that the article is wrong; it’s more that it expresses a widely-held but misconceived view of what telepresence is for and how it should be developed.

The headline sums it up nicely: Telepresence: The next best thing to being there. This reminds me of the early Virtual Reality hype. The idea is that the aim is to perfectly replicate what we already have - perfect photo-realism! Stereo vision! Touch! Taste! It’s what Baudrillard might call the simulator’s obsession with reality. And since we’ll never quite perfectly simulate reality until we have Gibsonian neural interfaces, then whatever we make will always be second best.

No need to draw this out. I am tired of this obsession. Reality is interesting, but human minds do not need to be tricked into a full sensory illusion in order for a technology to be useful. Text is immersive, when well written. Bodies moving in space is part of it, but it’s not the whole ball of wax. We construct our everyday mixed realities as we inhabit our own minds while simultaneously modeling the minds of those around us; considering our own context and the other contexts available to other people and systems that we are connected to. And not only in the moment; we include the potential availability of other connected realities, for example when we plan to pick up the phone when we get off an aeroplane.

Telepresence is its own thing; augmenting and interoperating with our other modes of communication and interaction just like the telephone and the post. It does not need to perfectly mimic reality, any more than virtual environments must be “virtual reality” (in the sense of realism). This conflation with realism is why I don’t use the term VR. I prefer VE, or even Ivan Sutherland’s “virtual worlds” when talking about a self-contained virtual place. But really the key for me is that unless you’re planning to wipe your users’ brains and create for them an entirely new self-contained context then you’re never making a new reality, you’re just making something that will be part of the rich and multifaceted realities that we already inhabit.
Local knowledge

Posted: February 27th, 2008, 10:59am EST by ba

So - looking into the Design Creativity Workshop to be held at this year’s Design Computing and Cognition conference, I notice that the information is on the web page of my CCS colleague Yukari Nagai, who is also on the program committee. Her research into design creativity is of course all deeply relevant to me.

I am reminded that I’m surrounded at CCS by a fascinating group of researchers and practitioners. So since I have a lot of reading to do, I’ve decided to start at home.

← Julien

CCS Collective Voice » Viveka

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Viveka (10 unread)

Live twittering from the ASID conference today.

Posted: October 24th, 2008, 12:08pm EST by viveka

Cool toys at the Games Studio

Posted: October 16th, 2008, 12:21pm EST by viveka

Slide decks - Second Life in Context / Responsive Environments for INteractive Arts

Posted: September 4th, 2008, 12:58am EST by viveka

Mondrian’s Atelier and the 場 (ba) Principle

Posted: August 5th, 2008, 12:39pm EST by viveka

Magic Hopscotch

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 2:47pm EST by viveka

Permeating the Magic Circle

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 3:46pm EST by viveka

Virtual Gardens for Prototyping

Posted: May 21st, 2008, 11:44am EST by viveka

Design Transformations at CHI 2008

Posted: May 7th, 2008, 9:33pm EST by viveka

A Pale Shadow of Reality: Virtuality as a Second-Best Option

Posted: March 14th, 2008, 6:15pm EST by ba

Local knowledge

Posted: February 27th, 2008, 10:59am EST by ba