Tag Archives: design

IVE interns

Academic, augmented reality, Digital Humanities, Virtual Reality, , ,

There are intern (unpaid, sorry) projects available at IVE UniSA (and at University of Auckland).

I’m excited to announce the launch of the 2024 virtual intern program for the Empathic Computing Laboratory and IVE AR/VR research centre.

We have 21 great projects in AR/VR/XR, brain computing interfaces, AI, etc that you can do without leaving home.

Apply now and get the chance to work and publish with some of the best researchers in the world. See https://lnkd.in/g-WFSeJ

by Mark Billinghurst

I have 2 projects listed (at the end of the PDF):

VIP Project List- March 2024

Project 20: 3D and panoramic interactive viewer

Review software (preferably open access and low cost) that can offer interactive and interesting ways to combine 3D models and panoramic backgrounds. Ideally the 3D model or aspects of the panorama can communicate with the viewer and / or with each other. Ideally the software can be modified and works across a variety of platforms. To give you an idea of recent related work, this paper examines software for historic architecture “Outside Inn: Exploring the Heritage of a Historic Hotel through 360-Panoramas” MDPI Heritage 2023, presentations using 3D: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/6/5/232

Student Skills and Background:

● Essential:
○ Experience with 3D media, panoramas and html scripting

● Desirable:
○ JavaScript

Expected Deliverables:
● Project leading to an academic publication and working proof of concept

Project Duration: 3 – 6 months IVE collaborators: Ear Zow Digital

Project 21: Augmented Reality Workflows and Prototype Tools for Museums

Develop a simple and clear visual workflow or software wizard to provide non-programmers from the museum sector a way to visualize how their historic collections can be interacted with via AR phone-based software, ideally software that does not require downloading specialised apps (for example, works in the browser). It is ideally useful for android or apple phone-based operating systems, and allows for interactivity. The aim is to use this tool or schema in workshops with museum (GLAM) people to help them develop AR-based games even if they don’t have programming or interaction design experience. A way to gather data on how the tool or examples could be used would be an added benefit.

Student Skills and Background:

● Essential:
○ Skills in diagrams or mockups

● Desirable:

  • ○  Interest in Augmented Reality for Android or Apple or other.
  • ○  Interest in interaction design/user experience design Expected Deliverables:

● A workflow, a demo, and material for possible academic paper for a conference or a journal.

Project Duration: 3 – 6 months IVE collaborators: Ear Zow Digital

Applied Research-Digital Humanities Kryptonite?

Academic, Digital Humanities, , ,

Should humanities academics be more open to applied research rather than just pure research?

I was asked by a director of a digital humanities centre overseas my thoughts on pure or applied research for Digital Humanities academics.

The following is an edited and slightly bridged reply.

Quite a few Australian universities seem to be moving to industry-driven research, especially if they are not the Group of 8, or feel geographically disadvantaged. Australian universities may feel this helps guard against reduced federal funding and diversifies income streams, perhaps they think they are more likely to gain large research centres, Centres of Excellence and other funding and prestige if large companies join them.

For humanities, this can be quite dangerous because those few companies with major clout related to humanities interest (especially in social media) can be difficult to deal with in terms of IP or how they treat their market or very conservative because they don’t want to scare off their client base. (Caveat: for Australian GLAM sector-related research that I am connected with, this does not yet appear to be such a problem).

Sadly, the Australian national priorities are not even aimed at pure (scientific) research https://www.arc.gov.au/grants/grant-application/science-and-research-priorities let alone NZ, UK or EU Horizon2020-type engagement and impact (communities etc). Let alone how to teach critical thinking. Shouldn’t educational research be a national priority? Is learning how to live together in an extremely diverse society where nearly one in four is born overseas, worthy of research? I think so!

But I wonder if humanities academics do not like the idea of applied research or industry-driven research to them (I don’t think the terms are completely synonymous). Industry-driven research is very interesting, actually, wasn’t Aristotle an industry-driven researcher, in the sense of being asked to solve things? I suspect Leonardo was, partly, as well. The more DH approaches design questions, the more I suspect it will be industry-partnered if not industry-driven. Because much design research is industry-driven.

This gets back to the paradox that many humanities content creators were design-brief driven, or patron-influenced; more so than the academics who study them in the humanities.

When I worked in a design school in a Creative Arts College (faculty), the brief and the client were seen to separate designers from artists. I do believe DH needs more interaction design and evaluation skills, but I have bias here, I work with design problems and match them or try to with philosophical insights and luckily so far don’t have to worry about appeasing clients. For many designers, applied research is bread and butter. Their typical problem is showing how that is research!

So, in a roundabout way to answer this question, I do question why academics think working with industry is bad, I don’t question that they are wary in terms of being overly influenced, swayed to consider income rather than meaning, or loss of intellectual property. But these challenges are perhaps solvable as separate issues. And industry can provide people, test subjects, prototype development technologies, and metrics to measure against.

Sorry for the long blogpost, I actually have much more to think/write about, this is the starting and abridged version!

paperback of ‘Organic Design in 20th C Nordic Architecture’ Book

Announcements, Architecture, Book, heritage, , , , , , ,

Arrived last week, I think the paperback version may be nicer to hold and read than the hardcover version! Definitely cheaper.. available in Australia or internationally.

Organic Design in Twentieth-Century Nordic Architecture presents a communicable and useful definition of organic architecture that reaches beyond constraints. The book focuses on the works and writings of architects in Nordic countries, such as Sigurd Lewerentz, Jørn Utzon, Sverre Fehn and the Aaltos (Aino, Elissa and Alvar), among others. It is structured around the ideas of organic design principles that influenced them and allowed their work to evolve from one building to another. Erik Champion argues organic architecture can be viewed as a concerted attempt to thematically unify the built environment through the allegorical expression of ongoing interaction between designer, architectural brief and building-as-process. With over 140 black and white images, this book is an intriguing read for architecture students and professionals alike.

Notes to self: Parkour History and Assassin’s Creed

archaeology, Architecture, game, heritage, ,

Notes to self on the above game.

How can the parkour mechanic of Assassins Creeed be better utilised?

  • The game does not have an editor
  • You cannot export assets
  • Can you game play with an avatar
  • Can you have reflection in the game
  • Can you explore interpretation
  • Can you understand East West transfers of knowledge and culture

References
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/253678/The_world_design_of_Assassins_Creed_Syndicate.php

Chris Kerr (2015, September 18). The world design of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. Gamasutra, http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012306/Designing-Assassin-s-Creed. During the production of Assassin’s Creed 2, the design team faced the challenges of an enormous scope, one of the biggest development teams ever assembled and a limited time frame. This session is about sharing our best practices to ship high quality games through a focused and rigorous Design Process while maximizing the output of production.
Patrick, Ploude. This talk demonstrates why identifying core game mechanics is critical to improving the quality of your title. It also shows how a solid Documentation process can made sure that your team follows a clear path throughout production. GDC 2010. URL: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012895/Designing-Assassin-s-Creed

Book in preparation “Designing The ‘Place’ Of Virtual Space”

3D and game editors, Announcements, Book, Digital Humanities, visualisation, ,

Indiana University Press just approved the contract for the following book in their Spatial Humanities Series. The chapters may change slightly over the next half-year, and final publication is of course dependent on a full final academic review, but here is my plan for it (and I would appreciate suggestions, links, readings to add to the final product).

Title: Designing The ‘Place’ Of Virtual Space

Despite the many architects talking about virtual environments in the early 1990s (Novak, 2015, Novak and Novak, 2002, Packer and Jordan, 2002, Wiltshire, 2014), there is relatively little publicly accessible research on making, experiencing and critiquing virtual places is only in conference papers, book chapters and edited collections. These forms of academic literature are also more likely to be found in the computational sciences, and are not often or easily accessed by humanities scholars. So I have an overall purpose here: to communicate with humanities scholars the importance of understanding how digital and virtual places are designed, experienced and critiqued.

I suggest that technology is not the fundamental problem in designing virtual places. Are there specific needs or requirements of real places that prevent us from relying on digital media and ‘online worlds’ experts? Or is it not so much that the new tools are currently too cumbersome or unreliable, but instead it is our conventional understanding of place design and platially situated knowledge and information that needs to change?

Secondly, I will review concepts in various space and place-related disciplines, both historically and in terms of digital media, to examine where they converge or diverge, and which methods and tools are of relevance to digital (and especially virtual) place-making. Here I suggest the terms Place, Cultural Presence, Game and World are critically significant. Clearer definition of these terms would enrich clarify and reveal the importance of real-world place design but also for virtual world design in terms of interaction, immersion and meaning. I will then apply these terms and concepts to virtual worlds, virtual museums and online game-environments to see if the theories and predictions match what happened to the various digital environments.

Thirdly, I will describe recent development in neuroscience and how they may help our understanding of how people experience, store and recollect place-related experiences. Can these discoveries help our design of virtual places? The chapter on learning and especially place-learning will benefit from this survey of recent scientific research.

Fourth, this book will cover game mechanics, and how they can be used in virtual place design to make digital environments more engaging and the learning content more powerful and salient. The importance of interaction design is typically underplayed, under-reported and under-evaluated. We still have not truly grasped the native potential of interactive digital media as it may augment architecture, and that is why debate on the conceptual albeit thorny issues of the subject matter is still in its infancy. I believe that understanding game mechanics is of great relevance to virtual place designers and I will put forth an argument as to why, a clear definition of game mechanics and an explanation of different types of game mechanics suited to differing design purposes.

The fifth aim of this book is to give a brief introduction to new and emerging software and devices and explain how they help, hinder or replace our traditional means of designing and exploring places-is technology always an improvement here?

The last subject chapter will then explore evaluation methods (both traditional and recent), which address the complicated problem of understanding how people evaluate places, and whether this knowledge can be directly applied to the evaluation of virtual places.

Chapters

  1. Place Theory Applied to Virtual Environments
  2. How Mind Remembers Space, How Places are Meaningful and Evocative
  3. Dead or Dying Virtual Worlds
  4. Place Affordances of Virtual Environments Learnt From Affordances in Real Places
  5. Place Interaction and Mechanics
  6. Learning from Place
  7. Place-Making Devices, Place-Finding Devices
  8. Evaluation
  9. Conclusion

Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism (ETC Press)!

design, Digital Humanities, game, virtual heritage, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Erik Champion (Ed). (2012). Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism

Are games worthy of academic attention? Can they be used effectively in the classroom, in the research laboratory, as an innovative design tool, as a persuasive political weapon? Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism aims to answer these and more questions. It features chapters by authors chosen from around the world, representing fields as diverse as architecture, ethnography, puppetry, cultural studies, music education, interaction design and industrial design. How can we design, play with and reflect on the contribution of game mods, related tools and techniques, to both game studies and to society as a whole?
Contributors include: Erik Champion, Peter Christiansen, Kevin R. Conway, Eric Fassbender, Jun Hu, Alex Juarez, Friedrich Kirschner, Marija Nakevska, Natalie Underberg.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

Purchase from Lulu.com, or Download for free

For more information, and to purchase or to read the chapters, visit

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/game-mods

The ETC Press is an academic and open-source publishing imprint that distributes its work in print, electronic and digital form. Inviting readers to contribute to and create versions of each publication, ETC Press fosters a community of collaborative authorship and dialogue across media. ETC Press represents an experiment and an evolution in publishing, bridging virtual and physical media to redefine the future of publication.

Visit   http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/

reminder: I need book chapter proposals for GAME MODS (ETC Press)

design, game, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Call For Book Chapters: Game Mod Design Theory and Criticism

This will be both a practical and reflective book on game-mods, designing, playing and evaluating the quality, success and effectiveness of game engines for modding, individual game mod levels, related tools and techniques, and the social and cultural issues related to the design and use of game mods.

The type of book chapter content I am looking for:
· An overview of what is possible and what is commendable or admirable with exemplars.
· Critiques of game mods and game mod/engine technologies (and reviews of mods as creative and critical and reflective extensions of games and game audiences).
· The ethical and social implications using commercial game engines and the content supplied · A comparison of game mod technologies.
· Case studies (Unreal, Source, Panda 3d, Blender 3D, Neverwinter Nights, Marathon, XNA, Oblivion, Cobalt, Crystal Space, WoW, Halo, Far Cry and Crysis etc, Sims, Jedi Academy, Ogre 3D) etc.
· Feature art and aesthetics.
· Machinima features hindered and helped by mods.
· Review of terrible experiences trying to build game mods. · A feature list to help people choose the right game engine for their mod.
· Some sample chapters on how to get started, tips, quick step tutorials as simple 3D, animation, lighting, behaviors, interface customization.
· The social and cultural implications of using and designing game mods (issues with violent content, cultural empathy, copyright, educational issues and so on).

The publisher will be ETC Press, an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in partnership with Lulu.com The book will be published under a Creative Commons license. For more details about ETC Press refer http://www.etc.cmu.edu.

Time Line

· March 18 2011 Please send me a title and 300 word abstract, the earlier the better! Please email your submission to gamemodbook AT gmail DOT com

· March 25 2011 you should have heard back from me.

· June 10 2011 draft chapters to me.

· And after many drafts and checks and proofs later…by the end of 2011 (optimistically speaking), publication!

Editor:
Associate Professor Erik Champion
Auckland School of Design, Albany Village Campus
College of Creative Arts
Massey University
Auckland New Zealand
email: nzerik AT gmail DOT com OR e dot champion AT massey DOT ac DOT nz for general questions.
Send submissions to gamemodbook AT gmail DOT com

CFP: Game Mod Design Theory and Criticism

design, game, , , , , , , ,

Call For Book Chapters: Game Mod Design Theory and Criticism

This will be both a practical and reflective book on game-mods, designing, playing and evaluating the quality, success and effectiveness of game engines for modding, individual game mod levels, related tools and techniques, and the social and cultural issues related to the design and use of game mods.

The type of book chapter content I am looking for:
· An overview of what is possible and what is commendable or admirable with exemplars.
· Critiques of game mods and game mod/engine technologies (and reviews of mods as creative and critical and reflective extensions of games and game audiences).
· The ethical and social implications using commercial game engines and the content supplied · A comparison of game mod technologies.
· Case studies (Unreal, Source, Panda 3d, Blender 3D, Neverwinter Nights, Marathon, XNA, Oblivion, Cobalt, Crystal Space, WoW, Halo, Far Cry and Crysis etc, Sims, Jedi Academy, Ogre 3D) etc.
· Feature art and aesthetics.
· Machinima features hindered and helped by mods.
· Review of terrible experiences trying to build game mods. · A feature list to help people choose the right game engine for their mod.
· Some sample chapters on how to get started, tips, quick step tutorials as simple 3D, animation, lighting, behaviors, interface customization.
· The social and cultural implications of using and designing game mods (issues with violent content, cultural empathy, copyright, educational issues and so on).

The publisher will be ETC Press, an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in partnership with Lulu.com The book will be published under a Creative Commons license. For more details about ETC Press refer http://www.etc.cmu.edu.

Time Line

· March 18 2011 Please send me a title and 300 word abstract, the earlier the better! Please email your submission to gamemodbook AT gmail DOT com · March 25 2011 you should have heard back from me.
· June 10 2011 draft chapters to me.
· And after many drafts and checks and proofs later…by the end of 2011 (optimistically speaking), publication!

Editor:
Associate Professor Erik Champion
Auckland School of Design, Albany Village Campus
College of Creative Arts
Massey University
Auckland New Zealand
email: nzerik AT gmail DOT com OR e dot champion AT massey DOT ac DOT nz for general questions.
Send submissions to gamemodbook AT gmail DOT com

cfp: Nordes 2011 Conference

Conference, design, , ,

http://designresearch.fi/nordes2011/

Nordes invites you to the 4th Nordic Design Research Conference “Making Design Matter!”

Location: School of Art and Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

Date: May-June 2011 at the Department of Design at Aalto University, which is physically located in the Arabia neighborhood in East-Central Helsinki.
Deadline: January 10, 2011: Submission system is closed.

Nordes calls for perspectives on ‘Making Design Matter’. In the 2011 Nordic Design Research Conference, you are invited to present and discuss how design matters today.

Nordes 2011 in Helsinki is the 4th in a series of biannual conferences, which has included conferences in Copenhagen in 2005, Stockholm in 2007 and Oslo in 2009. Organized by Nordes – an open network of people interested in design research in the Nordic countries – the conference is attended by about 200 people and has rapidly been established as an important venue for design research. It serves several constituencies in design, ranging from design studies, history and management to professional design and practice-based research in art, crafts and design.

Participation is also open to people from outside the Nordic countries.

This website will be continually updated with information about the conference. Click above or here to read the Call for Participation!

DRS | 2010 : MONTREAL 7-9 JULY EXTENDED DEADLINE

Conference, design, ,

Extended Deadline

We invite you to present your research at the Design Research Society 2010 conference. Contributors are invited to submit long or short papers that deal with different facets of the contemporary approaches to design research, education or practice.

All propositions will be independently peer-reviewed by at least two members of the DRS 2010 review committee.

ABSTRACTS
Proposals of no more than 800 words must initially be submitted for review. They may be in English or in French, should describe the context of the research, questions addressed, hypotheses, how the research has been developed including research methods, findings or conclusions, and be supported by a sufficient number of bibliographic references. Clear indication must be provided whether the proposal is for completed research or work in progress. Images are not requested at this time.

Abstracts will be submitted in the form of an electronic submission directly HERE.

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: MONDAY OCTOBER 12 2009.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS:
Following peer evaluation, authors of accepted proposals will receive an invitation to submit a full paper, accompanied by reviewers’ remarks and suggestions. Full papers, in either English or French and between 3000 and 5000 words long, should be in the form of original contributions that present completed research (specifically the objectives, issues, hypotheses, conceptual framework and methodology), describe work in progress demonstrating the relevance or the innovative nature of the object of study or develop a theoretical reflection about an issue relevant to design research, education or practice.

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their work at the 2010 Design Research Society (DRS) International Conference. They will be allowed 20 minutes for presentation and a further 10 minutes to respond to questions. The conference will be held in English with simultaneous translation of French presentations.

Since DRS 2010 will be held in a French speaking city and university, DRS 2010 will exceptionally welcome contributions in French.
Pour information, consultez ici.

For questions and queries, contact us at drs2010

Website: http://www.drs2010.umontreal.ca/cfp.php

Keynotes

Erik Stolterman
Professor and Director of Human Computer Interaction Design
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

Anne-Marie Willis
Editor of Design Philosophy Papers and Design Philosophy Politics
Co-director of design consultancy Team D/E/S

Can complexity be contained?
To speak of “design AND complexity” suggests design can be held outside complexity. From an instrumental perspective, it implies the designer’s task is to overcome or manage complexity. However, from the point of view of enquiry, the binary relation has to be refused and complexity recognised as the inescapable condition of design. To cast complexity pragmatically is to reduce it and thus negate the complex, while to fully embrace it is to create an unbounded exploration leading to chaos and madness. The challenge then is to find an appropriate mode of thinking, practice and a language to engage complexity.