Interactive Space(S) – the CTSG: Bridging the Real and Virtual (original) (raw)
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Sharing the magic circle with spatially inclusive games
ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008 educators …, 2008
Four types of interactive environments explored ways to extend gaming beyond the limitations of the personal computer’s conventional desktop interface. These projects aimed to challenge John Huizinga’s notion of a “magic circle”, the imaginary boundaries of the fantasy world that players of a game occupy. By expanding and diffusing the “magic circle”, we believe we can more richly and thematically immerse the player, and more directly involve the audience. The projects were: surround projection environments (using a spherical mirror and warping code); surround projection in custom-built surround spaces with thematically designed tangible interfaces; arcade-style games; and bodily aware-games (using indirect and subconscious biofeedback that changes the music, “boss” monsters, and shaders). The working prototypes were considered successful by the students’ peers and by visitors, but were also successful in engaging the students with the interface possibilities and interaction issues of unconventional game design. We also intend to further develop and provide some of these tools to the wider academic community.
Surveillance, Locative Media and Global Networks
This chapter presents an investigation on how the ludic incorporation of locative media modifies the creation of meaning in urban spaces. In this sense, the authors try to understand how electronic games reinforce the relationship between the urban space and the digital media, allowing the creation of intelligent informational territories. The authors‘ hypothesis is based on the fact that these specific types of digital games – known as ubiquitous, pervasive games – develop new spatiality forms, producing – to the players – other types of use and appropriation of the urban space. In order to develop this discussion, they propose an analysis of some alternate reality games (ARGs) developed in Brazil.
Augmented places; Educational environments and the sense of play
Digital media could be considered a type of ‘play’; as creative and engaging tools to design and think with about architecture and designing processes. Within this paper, the digital media are considered as a tool that provides us with qualities equivalent to those of play. ‘Play’ is a notion easy to comprehend intuitively, but complex to analyse and define. Anthropologists and psychologists have examined the elements that make the play engaging and stimulating, and to function as such. Here, we will base our examination of play, and its relation to digital media, upon the three notions that Piaget describes as the three stages of play: (a) the element of surprise and the tendency to explore things through action, (b) the role-play, and (c) the complex rules and metaphors that make up the play. Through this paper, it is argued that these three elements are key aspects of the digital media, and reasons for which the often constitute engaging mechanisms to ‘play’ or design with.
Experimenting with Locative Media Games and storytelling in Fine Arts.
As teachers of art, we prepare our students to be artists in the 21st century while defining, along the way, what that might mean. This work takes place largely within our courses at the Fine Arts Department at the University of Murcia in Spain. Our courses make use of place, mobile technology, and the language of games to engage our students in new artistic modes. Some may see technology as something that distracts people from art, but artists are playing a key role in understanding, in a emotional and creative way, the potential for mobile technology in society. Specifically, this chapter describes our explorations with two significant affordances of the medium: (1) Geolocation—the ability to link place and media, and (2) distributed authorship—the common ability of many people to contribute to the creation of a single artifact or to remix existing content to fit their needs. We provide examples of student projects that model these affordances and demonstrate a merging of art and technology in order to begin to understand possibilities for art that intersects cinema, hypermedia, mobile, games, and public space. Much of our work builds on the concept of expanded cinema, as defined by Gene Youngblood in the early 1970s. He proposed the term to express his understanding that the traditional way of making cinema and its separation of the audience from the creator was over. Today, with this same understanding we use mobile technology and games, as well as other formats and genres, as means to ask students to approach broad themes of importance to the future of art and society. To expand cinema, we combine typical media formats, production, and performance. Additionally, we especially seek to take advantage of new formats like mobile games and the unique senses and aspects of the world—like public space, smell, sound, and/or energy—that these new media open up. We aim to create cinematic moments in the first person and first place across a variety of digital and analog formats. It is important to clarify that the projects we mention here are not finished creations. We are interested in the process of opening minds to new ways of thinking about art with digital media 124 and mobile. We consider these designs as ephemeral moments of creativity. They stay alive in the minds of students during their long and hard journey to the world of corporations and markets.
Hybrid Reality Games ReframedPotential Uses in Educational Contexts
Games and Culture, 2006
Hybrid reality games (HRGs) employ mobile technologies and GPS devices as tools for transforming physical spaces into interactive game boards. Rather than situating participants in simulated environments, which mimic the physical world, HRGs make use of physical world immersion by merging physical and digital spaces. Online multiuser environments already connect users who do not share contiguous spaces. With mobile devices, players may additionally incorporate interactions with the surrounding physical space. This article is a speculative study about the potential uses of HRGs in education, as activities responsible for taking learning practices outside the closed classroom environment into open, public spaces. Adopting the framework of sociocultural learning theory, the authors analyze design elements of existing HRGs, such as mobility and location awareness, collaboration/sociability, and the configuration of the game space, with the aim of reframing these games into an educational context to foresee how future games might contribute to discovery and learning.
How Virtual Spaces Re-render the Perception of Reality through Playful Augmentation
2012
In this article we are going to explore a fundamental problem of modern virtual spaces in so called location-based games: annihilation of space through augmentation. Augmentation reshapes the perception of the real object in space (which is not originally part of the game) by making it an active element of the game, i.e. it utilizes the object (and furthermore the surrounding space) and thus frees it of its original meaning and utility. Furthermore, it gets incorporated into the artificial (virtual) space and acquires two new properties: it becomes interactive and as a result, interchangeable. The perception of reality thus gets augmented at the same time as it gets reduced to the bare minimum of information needed to reach the goal of the game. Space becomes efficient and therefore loses its uniqueness and identity, with effects on the user's very own perception of reality.
INTERACTIVE SPACE: SEARCHING FOR A DUAL PHYSICAL - VIRTUAL WORLD
This paper discusses embodied interaction followed by a survey of examples in installation art and research projects that attempt to fuse physical space and digital technology. From studying the examples, we propose a categorization of types for a better understanding of interactive spaces. Design attributes are also identified from the examples. We hope this will be useful to designers in designing engaging interactive spaces.
Playful Blended Digital Storytelling in 3D Immersive eLearning Environments
Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Interaction Design in Educational Environments - IDEE '14, 2014
This paper presents the pedagogical design, the technical development and initial findings of the educational program "From the Ancient to the Modern Tablets". Targeting at primary and secondary school students, this project aimed at creating immersive multimedia eLearning experiences about the book history as well as its future. The main aims for the students were to: motivate and promote the early literacy and extracurricular reading; establish cognitive links between writing, books and acquiring knowledge with technology; and possess the basic digital skills when using a tablet. The project experience consisted of a playful library tour, an interactive game-based digital storytelling activity with game elements followed by a collaborative creative hands-on activity as an open-door two-week institution-wide initiative called "Schools go to the University". The advanced technologies combined with engaging pedagogical methods enabled a cost effective yet rich learning experience. Utilizing the avatar psychology power, the visualization and simulation affordances of 3D immersive eLearning environments and the appeal of storytelling and game-based learning, the "gamified" blended narrative on the book evolution enabled learning as embedded and context-generated. The students were asked to help a digital agent, an avatar, on his quest in the 3D computer-generated virtual environments. With the help of this avatar, which was controlled by an LIC staff member, the children travelled back in time. The realistic environments allowed students to immerse themselves and experience aesthetics, architecture, clothing and the culture of the time as well as explore spaces, see samples and experiment with interactive objects related with the respective studied technological advancement or milestone. At the same time, appropriated soundtrack scores enhanced the atmospheric tension and feeling of immersion. These virtual environments were developed cost effectively in Second Life. In each step, students were encouraged to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and critical thinking skills related to technological advancement through age-specific questions and quizzes grouped into large teams so as to actively participate in the game. In the second part, students worked in small groups of three to five pupils to discuss, decide and collaboratively create digital artefacts inspired by the book history. These groups used simple multimedia software in a modern tablet to produce impressive drawings. At the end of the program, the teachers evaluated their students' activities and performance by responding in an online questionnaire. The program proved out to be very popular among schools; the high engagement level created enthusiastic students' responses and learning behaviours that enhanced their perspectives on the book history.
Interactive Virtual Environments
1997
This work describes methods for content choreography for performance and entertainment spaces, using remote sensing technology for interaction, so that the user/performer is not encumbered with wires or sensors. Artificial Life programming methods are used to avoid rigid scripting of user and content interaction. This results in the design of active content endowed with intentionality and autonomous behavior (media creatures). By following this approach I created an Improvisational Theatre Space where autonomous media creatures react to the user's movements, speech etc., to create an improvisational dialog between the user/performer and the performance/entertaintment space's content (images, video, sound, speech, text). This space is the last of a series of experiments in the construction of Interactive Virtual Environmnents (IVEs) that include also DanceSpace and NetSpace. Each of these experiments aims at exploring a specific aspect among those that are essential to crea...