Does Hollywood use consumer-level cameras?

Conference

I was telling how Ian Mune a famous director down under, once said in a public talk to budding young film directors to bypass the film commission, buy a good DSLR camera (at consumer not prosumer prices), plus a hard drive, and just start filming.I was interrupted by a ‘strategic project consultant’ who apparently had not heard of Ian Mune and did not believe me that Hollywood could ‘stoop so low’.

Anyway I found the whole topic quite interesting, and so without further ado, here are some references:

Hollywood movies using DSLR cameras
http://www.videomaker.com/videonews/2012/02/hollywood-shows-what-can-be-done-with-a-prosumer-dslr
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/shoot-a-movie-on-dslr-this-australian-film-shows-how-its-done/
http://petapixel.com/2011/07/29/shooting-a-big-budget-hollywood-film-with-canon-dslr-gear/
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls059550382/ Movies Filmed with Canon and Nikon DSLR Cameras
http://nofilmschool.com/2010/01/10-examples-of-stunning-dslr-cinematography

Image Recognition / Search Applications

Conference, tracking, visualisation, , , ,

I was asked yesterday if there are applications that can recognise and catalogue images, particularly of buildings.

Years ago I proposed a simpler (ontology reductive) system for tourism so I have an interest in uses for this technology but I am not in this field.
Nevertheless, a quick search found these links. No guarantees but some of the tools look very interesting indeed:

Firstly, an overview:
List of 14+ Image Recognition APIs

Most famous applications that as far as I know only search (and don’t categorise) from your photograph to what may match on the Web:
Google Goggles

More details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Goggles
Of course the way forward for entire scenes courtesy of Google + Stanford:
NB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Vision does not appear suitable here

For general purposes this looks promising

If you wish the app to automatically sort and tag images (so that adatabase can automatically order them) do you have a developer?

Besides http://www.recognize.im/ you can also check out (and thanks to Quora):


NB Diego Jiménez-Badillo, Mario Canul Ku, Salvador Ruíz-Correa, Rogelio Hashimoto-Beltrán have created a 3D version: “A machine learning approach for 3D shape analysis and recognition of archaeological objects“

Interactive Fiction, Cultural Tourism, Archaeology and Gaming

3D and game editors, archaeology, Conference, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, summer school, , , ,

 Interactive Fiction

Over 4-5 April I attended the Interactive Pasts conference in Leiden, the Netherlands. It was organised by Archaeology PhD students, and they also created a gamified kickstarter project to get the funding required for an open access book publication of the proceedings. If you missed the conference (which was also on twitch), the presentations are on YouTube.

How does this relate to Interactive Fiction? Tara Copplestone and Angus Mol ran a workshop in the last session on interactive fiction.

Figure 1: #TIPC Interactive Pasts Conference Summary-Erik and Lennie photo by Tara Copplestone

Four of us (myself, Lennart Linde, Catherine Flick, B. Tyr Fothergill) used Twine (Mac version 1.42, PC is version 2.0), to develop the beginnings of an Interactive Fiction (IF) game, called A Career In Ruins, which is an archaeology conference simulator, where the student or junior researcher has to attempt to maximise their reputation while maintaining other important functions (such as phone battery and regular toilet breaks) without missing important sessions.

twine a career in ruins

FIGURE 2: IF PROTOTYPE DEVELOPED WITH TWINE 1.4.2-A CAREER IN RUINS

Like many in the digital humanities, I was a fan of Steve Jackson Adventure Books in the 1980s (yes I was young then) and I had developed my own interactive fiction/D n D game on a 1628 byte CASIO FX-702P Programmable Calculator (around 1982?) I was very keen on expanding my knowledge of what these interactive writing tools can do.

Firstly there is a wide range of these tools: Google Docs.

Secondly, open source HTML-based TWINE and application INFORM are perhaps two of the most widely known tools (and TWINE is perhaps best to start with for beginners), but Squiffy (Mac, PC, Linux) looks most to interesting to me, and I was happy to discover that Adobe’s Phone Gap Application can port the Squiffy interactive fiction / games to mobile phones. I think HTML is a big advantage over those formats that require readers to download a specialised executable and HTML 5 also has other possibilities such as extending to JavaScript (three.JS, Angular.js Node.js or WebGL exported UNITY etc.). There are a variety of ways to create the 3D model for JavaScript and there are good tutorials online, the main challenge is how to incorporate 3D with interactive fiction.

There have even been IF-isometric driving games! The other possible advantages of the JavaScript that I mentioned are that they can offer videos, panoramas, and possibly 3D models.

About 10-15 years ago a program called RealViz allowed you to create 3D layers to panoramas, allowing movies and 3D objects to co-exist (would love to refind the Embarcadero example). Some exciting work and examples was done (via Shockwave 3D) with the imagemodeler but RealViz was bought out by Adobe and no longer exists. I don’t know of a comparable software application today.

However, using the above software I mentioned, I think we can link interactive fiction, panoramas, 3D models, and possibly even 3D panoramas with JavaScripted riddles (there are similar existing applications, like Pannellum).

It would be even more interesting to create these interactive-fiction panoramas for the new head mounted displays like the HTC Vive.

htc vive

FIGURE 3: HTC VIVE, DEMO, LETS MAKE GAMES, PERTH

The possibilities for creative writing and also for archaeological story-making and cultural tourism really interests me and with European partners I hope we can propose a summer workshop. Possibly we would propose two workshops, one for creative writers and cultural tourism (using people’s own holiday snaps and other media, or drawing from digital archives of local heritage) and a second for archaeologists to create interactive fiction/fact/riddles/hypotheses. The first might combine lectures on Nordic Noir and its influence on cultural tourism. If the workshops actually take place, I think they would probably be in Denmark or Greece, or both. Best to start working on the proposal, then!

UPDATE: Inklewriter also looks promising according to this post of its use in a Choose Your Own Witchcraft Trial course.

abstract for 2016 East-West Philosophers’ Conference, Hawaii

Presentation, virtual heritage, visualisation, ,

Conference website: http://hawaii.edu/phil/2016-east-west-philosophers-conference-update/

Paper Title: Philosophical Issues of Place and the Past in Virtual Reality

There are indisputably many good reasons for finding and restoring heritage sites and artefacts with the most impartial and accurate scientific methods and technological advances. Yet the ICOMOS Burra Charter defines cultural significance in terms of the value of a place as it helps people understand the past, as it enriches the present, and educates future generations, these values can be aesthetic, historic, social or spiritual, (and thus not just scientific). Therefore it does not necessarily follow that the best user-experience for members of the public is purely based on a rigorous scientific perspective, because such a perspective does not fully explain the cultural significance of a place as experienced by the originators of the locally situated culture.

On the other hand, evoking cultural significance may be helped by a philosophical consideration of how specific human experiences can be understood and conveyed. The Dictionary of Philosophy says (on p.464) phenomenology “is the attempt to describe our experience directly, as it is, separately from its origins and development, independently of the causal explanations that historians, sociologists or psychologists might give”. While hermeneutics, it says (on p.274-5), “explores the kind of existence had by beings who are able to understand meanings, and to whom the world is primarily an object of understanding (rather than, say, of sense-perceptions)”.

I wish to investigate whether an approach that would best utilise multimedia and the differing multimodal ways in which we learn and experience the outside world would be phenomenological and hermeneutical. In other words it would attempt to understand how the way individual societies experience the world, how they interpret the world to themselves and to each other, how their cultural signs are made, modified, and learnt. It would also attempt to discover how the horizons of current visitors could be nudged out of balance by being either overwhelmed by encounters with genuine alterity (that is, sense of otherness), or by gradually learning how to be accepted in this totally different phenomenological world.

A further pressing issue in the design of virtual places and especially in the design of virtual heritage environments is to avoid the ‘museumization’ and ‘Western’ viewpoint as forewarned by Ziauddin Sardar and others. Can this technology help provide an appropriate sense of alterity and an appropriate situated sense of place?

References

ICOMOS, (1999).‘The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS charter for the conservation of places of cultural significance’, http://www.icomos.org/australia/burracharter.html.

Mautner, T. (2005). Dictionary of Philosophy (Penguin Reference, 2nd edition, Suffolk United Kingdom: Penguin, Books, p. 464 and p.275.

Sardar, Z. (1996). alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West. In Cyberfutures: culture and politics on the information superhighway, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome Ravetz, 14-41. London: Pluto Press.

VH has to be realistic? Not Necessarily

Digital Humanities, heritage, virtual heritage,

In Ancestor Veneration Avatars, by William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation, USA, he writes:

Some scholars of human-centered computing believe that virtual architecture must be visually very realistic to achieve psychological immersion (Champion, 2011), but in this project the emphasis was placed on realistic function

No, I never said that! I have seen this several times by academics, but I only referred to others who said that the lack of photorealism is an issue in Virtual Heritage (VH). But where in Playing With The Past do I argue for photorealism?

What I actually said, in Chapter 2, (page 20-23), was

Without content relating directly to how we perceive the world, an emphasis on formal realism is not creating a virtual reality, but a storehouse of visually represented objects…Meaningful interaction seems to be a crucial issue here. Research surveys indicate that when presented with realistic visual fidelity users also expect highly realistic interaction in order to be engaged (Mosaker 2001). While others have indicated that meaningful interaction is preferable to photo-realism (Eiteljorg 1998).

Grr.

EDIT: Found an earlier reference to the passage that so irked me, it was in

Archaeology, Heritage, and Civic Engagement: Working Toward the Public Good

By Barbara J Little, Paul A Shackel, page 45.

CFP: Conferences for 2016-2017

cfp, Conference
START*DUE*CONFERENCETHEMELOCATION
05-Sep-1615-Mar-16TPDL2016Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL)Hannover Germany
06-Oct-1617-Mar-16ecgbl2016Games-Based LearningUni WS Scotland
07-Sep-1625-Mar-16VS-GAMESVirtual Worlds and Games for Serious ApplicationsBarcelona Spain
18-Oct-1618-Apr-16Chiplay2016Austin Texas
31-Oct-1602-May-16euromeddigital heritageLemossos Cyprus
05-Oct-1602-May-16GCH2016Graphics and Cultural Heritage (tbc)Genoa Italy
28-Sep-1610-May-16ICECEntertainment ComputingVienna Austria
26-Sep-1616-May-16JCSGJoint Conference on Serious GamesBrisbane Australia
10-Oct-1619-May-16DCDCCollections, connections, collaborations:from potential to impactManchester UK
17-Oct-1601-Jun-16VSMM2016Virtual Systems and Multimedia (tbc)Kuala Lumpa Malaysia
03-Apr-17?www2017World Wide Web 2017Perth Australia
30-Jul-17?SIGGRAPH 2017SIGGRAPH 2017LA USA

Centres that engage in virtual heritage, archaeology and games research

heritage, PhD, Postdoc, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality

I get asked this by people quite often and while this is by no means a definitive list, it might help those interested in game-focussed archaeology/heritage PhD opportunities and postdocs:

USA:

Europe:

Asia-Pacific:

As I said, this is by no means a definitive list (and very English language-biased) but I have noticed the above often promote PHD and Postdoc opportunities. I will have some opportunities in PhD positions and a postdoc that I will put on this site, hopefully before June.

Game Mechanics Part II: Roger Caillois

3D and game editors, archaeology, game, virtual heritage, , ,
Forms of Play really elementsStimulates because it isArchaeology games
Competition Agon (competition / strategy)Compete against people, long-term decision makingCivilization? All those build empire games..
Chance AleaHandling unpredictability, humourCould Spore be an archaeoogy game?
Vertigo IlinxMastery of commitment, mental focus, multi-taskingThe extreme parkour of Assassin’s creed?
Mimicry mimesisObservation, control and humour and roleplaying ? Maybe if the Sims 4 was used as anthropological machinima?

Roger Caillois wrote about four forms of play (a spectrum ranging from free play to the rules-based essence of games). He wrote about non-digital games but his work has been reviewed and critiqued by many game theorists (and anthropologists).

I still find it useful myself, but I would modify it as per the above table (not so much as forms of play but as motivators for mechanics)* and with the following comments:

  1. Competition motivates people for two reasons, they love competing against others, and they also love long-term strategy making but these are often quite different, so perhaps this form of play is actually two forms of play?
  2. Chance stimulates people to play because of the above, but it is also frustrating unless handled well with suitable game balance (I don’t like playing snakes and ladders because it is all about chance so perhaps I am biased).
  3. Vertigo is an interesting one, in dance-based games, seldom in computer games (and perhaps even more dangerous in VR-Head mounted games due to the potential for nausea), and very very uncommon in games for archaeology! I will have to really investigate whether any archaeology-games use vertigo!
  4. Mimicry: despite so many cultural rituals and games using this, this is so rare in computer games (yes, I know, Spy Party but a 7 year development cycle does not give me confidence).

Actually there is another column (not in this article) where I will bullet point some ideas for leveraging these play forms to communicate archaeological significance, progress, and controversy. For another day!

*Motivators for mechanics, what I mean here are the motivators that mechanics try to leverage, the reasons people are stimulated to play games..I understand the MDA framework may attribute this to aesthetics, but I feel their three-part theory for game design (Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics) compacts too many different components into three overly simple concepts.

Article References:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_Play_and_Games
  2. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LuizClaudioSilveiraDuarte/20150203/233487/Revisiting_the_MDA_framework.php

 

 

game mechanics during the Iron Age in Yorkshire

Academic, archaeology, virtual heritage, , , , , , ,

‘Hugely important’ iron age remains found at Yorkshire site

The above is not really a picture of the beautiful artefacts, rather, my colleague Karen Miller’s snap of her class’s Lego schematic of Deakin Uni’s digital literacy framework, but you get the drift..

Hugely Important Iron Age Remains!

So says the Guardian (Nazia Parvenu, North of England correspondent,Thursday 17 March 2016 11.01 AEDT).

In the comments, however, quite a few don’t see the point, at all!

“The comments show a distinct misunderstanding of what archaeologists do & why, & basic archaeological chronology: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/17/hugely-important-iron-age-remains-found-yorkshire-site.. As archaeologists, it’s eye opening: these comments reflect a lack of basic but authoritative info we should have on Wikipedia, at least” tweeted @lornarichardson (Umeå).

Yes! We need to educate on process not only product (if a virtual heritage model is a product). Reading the comments to an article on a find in Yorkshire might lead archaeologists to despair. However a more optimistic (the glass of hemlock is half full) approach might lead us to conclude from the comments:

People are genuinely interested in process (how old are the beads and how did they get there and what happens to the bodies?

The answer might appear prosaic:

“Hello, anyone interested in learning more about the archaeological process in relation to this site can head to the East Riding of Yorkshire Planning Portal and search for application ref 13/02772/STPLF Documents logged there include the Desk Based Assessment by MAP Archaeology from August 2013 that predicted the presence of the barrows on site using aerial photos in the Humber Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) and a letter from the SMR clarifying details of the proposed excavation of the site, such as amount of the site to be sampled and the necessity for full publication.”

But it very distinctly shows the process of exploration, quest,  and of discovery as part of doing archaeology.

So how does this relate to mechanics?

Mechanics are used oh so confusingly (see a discussion on the MDA framework, and the comments, or this older 2006 article by Lost Garden with their definition below).

Game mechanics are rule based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms.

Thank you Lost Garden! But now we have another problem:

GM=Rules+PlaySpace/PossibilitySpace+Affordances+Feedback! Not much left over really (perhaps aesthetics, but aesthetics means more than appearance or taste).

And I could spend hours thinking about a more accurate definition of GM (Game Mechanics) but the issue here is really what sort of game mechanics would be of use to archaeologists and historians and heritage people who want to design, teach and experience such things?

Some definitions are more teleological
http://gamestudies.org/0802/articles/sicart:
“..I define core mechanics as the game mechanics (repeatedly) used by agents to achieve a systemically rewarded end-game state…
Primary mechanics can be understood as core mechanics that can be directly applied to solving challenges that lead to the desired end state.
Secondary mechanics, on the other hand, are core mechanics that ease the player’s interaction with the game towards reaching the end state.”

And yet Professor Sicart concludes the article with what to me seems to be a third and distinctly different definition:
“This article has defined game mechanics as methods invoked by agents for interacting with the game world.”

Notice the above don’t directly or primarily aim to influence the player’s mind or behaviour. Is there no space here for a little procedural rhetoric?

I’d like to keep it simple, but without attempting to destroy (completely) the useful vagueness of mechanics here are some working definitions as different flavours/aims of game mechanics:

  1. Game progression mechanics (mechanics to progress the player through the game)
  2. Performance mechanics / Rewards and skills mastery mechanics (mechanics to encourage the player to improve and extend their range of skills and judgement)
  3. Narrative mechanics (tools to progress /unfold or bring together one or more apparent story threads in relation to game play). Are dramatic mechanics a subset?
  4. Behavioural and Role assimilation mechanics (mechanics which become habit through repeated game play, and accustom players to see things in certain ways)
  5. Insight and reversal mechanics (mechanics that disrupt the in-game or real-world expectations and presumptions of the player acquired previously or during the game in order to reveal to them a viewpoint they may take for granted, or to supplant the view created by game play but a view the designer wants them to suddenly by alienated from).

I understand this seems counter-intuitive to the above definitions, especially the MDA framework (Hunicke et al, 2004, summarised on the Wikipedia, visualised as gameficational lenses by Jenny Carroll, described via 8 kinds of fun by Marc LeBlanc). However mechanics helps me when I think of the public approach/response to archaeology, the public don’t see product OR process in the same way the archaeologists do.

If digital simulations are to help archaeological communication (to simplify crudely: Why archaeology? What is archaeology? How to appreciate/do good archaeology?) then we need to think of mechanics beyond a mere advancement of game play per se.

This also ties in with another issue: the English language problem in defining and distinguishing model and simulation. I am now leaning towards thinking simulation is the more confusing term, it can be a model as in a crafted or digital object, a communicated process model that explains a predictive theory, or a hypothetical model turned into a systematic generator of potential scenarios not predicted by the system designer (a weather simulation can explain what weather has or will take place OR it can create a prediction of weather based on a conceptual, verifiable model of weather that isn’t normally a physical model of weather).

Mechanics don’t just help a model to take shape, for the wheels to spin around and pull a toy train. Mechanics helps progress a fictional world of complicit belief.

Depending on what you want to do with them, game mechanics are sometimes seen as digital tropes, or as what connects parts of a game together. They are techniques or they are components. And although they are apparently crucial to game design, the inability to distinguish them clearly from other parts of a game makes me wonder – so seldom do we hear of bad game mechanics.

Will return to this and expand on it a little more. Hopefully it makes sense, but your mileage may vary.

CFP VSMM 2016 Kuala Lumpur October 2016

Conference, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality

vsmm2016.org “Transdisciplinary – Transmedia – Transformations”
The 22nd International Conference on Virtual Systems & Multimedia VSMM 2016, will be held at Sunway University (SU), Kuala Lumpur, hosted by the Faculty of Arts, the Centre for Research Creation in Digital Media (CRCDM) and the Faculty of Science and Technology, in October 2016. Abstracts due: 16 May 2016.

VSMM2016_CFP.pdf

Cultural Presence

archaeology, digital heritage, heritage, virtual heritage

I have written quite a bit about the above in virtual heritage and this terms has since shown itself in quite a few papers (Flynn, Tyler-Jones, Tost et al.) but now I feel compelled to state

  • I wrote about cultural presence because it and social presence seem conflated in ISPR telepresence/presence literature and
  • UNESCO’s terms of culture and cultural heritage did not seem linked to the aims and results of many virtual heritage projects and
  • Culture and Society are not the same, and I wrote about that in the latest MIT Presence journal.
  • Archaeology and heritage sites don’t all have cultural presence that we could or should always try to simulate in digital heritage projects.
  • Cultural presence isn’t the sole criterion for virtual heritage but it is interesting when thinking about simulated designed places (and why virtual heritage and otherwise historic places seem so shallow compared to real places).
  • I should update my thoughts on this so people won’t think I believe cultural presence is the be-all and end-all!

If not DH what is it? (DH2015 presentation)

Digital Humanities, visualisation, ,

The below is the last slide from my Digital Humanities 2015 talk (“Seeing Is Revealing: A Critical Discussion on Visualisation And The Digital Humanities“) in Sydney
The paper is being reviewed for the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Journal.

Slide 48
title: If not DH what is it?

  1. More emphasis has been on scientific visualisation, on non-interactive calculation + presentation of quantifiable data but DH Vis not only about data, also interactive. vague, questioning & rhetorical.
  2. Visualisation not only pretty, (refer Baldwin, S. 2013. The Idiocy of the Digital Literary..)
  3. Visualisation has to overcome ocularcentrism as Virtual Reality reflects not only sighted reality but non-sighted reality, visualisation is more than just the visual (explain using cave paintings!)
  4. Game design is not typically part of DH but an interesting vehicle for community feedback, cultural issues, critical reflection & medium-specific techniques (procedural rhetoric). Also huge issues, HCI, authenticity, develop scholarly arguments in collaboration, preserve etc.)
  5. It employs research in traditional humanities, converts IT people to humanities research (sometimes), preserves and communicates cultural heritage and cultural significance through alterity, cultural constraints and counterfactual imaginings.
  6. History / heritage is not always literature! DH audience not always literature-focused or interested in traditional forms of literacy.

Revolutionary Woe: Notes on Assassin’s Creed III

archaeology, game, heritage, virtual heritage

Invalid Memory

1.

Against better judgment, I always felt compelled to give Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series the benefit of the doubt, an undoubtedly foolish errand motivated mostly by a long-standing craving for a decent blockbuster open-world action series. I consider these games a kind of equivalent to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, titillating a base desire for silly, undemanding madcap fun loaded with swashbuckling rogues and propulsive energy. The first few games are amusing at times, bolstered primarily by the easy charisma of Ezio Auditore in his narrative trilogy. At other times, these early games even touted what could be argued as thematic depth or artistic risk, sentiments that emerge when considering the first Assassin’s Creed’s allegory for a post-9/11 political landscape or the underappreciated Assassin’s Creed: Revelation’s Brutalist architectural abstractions.

But these instances are merely outliers that have more to do with capable critics than the games…

View original post 2,899 more words

CFP: JVRB Special Issue: Trackless virtual studio via actor reconstruction

Conference

The Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting JVRB will dedicate volume 13.2016 to the topic of Trackless virtual studio via actor reconstruction.

Virtual sets without camera tracking offer a great degree of freedom concerning camera moves: A virtual camera is not limited by physical constraints and visual effect (e. g. “bullet time”) or unusual camera positions can easily be produced. It is possible to achieve full interaction between the real and the virtual domain, including lighting, shadows and collision. Furthermore, a complete actor reconstruction results in easy actor modification (e. g. exchanging body parts with virtual parts).
The JVRB Special Issue 2016 focusses on how these new techniques influence entertainment, filmmaking and visual storytelling. It presents state-of-the-art approaches to trackless virtual studio via actor reconstruction and which technologies are necessary to achieve this. Topics include, but are not limited to:
– 3D object acquisition
– Volumetric surface reconstruction
– Image-based modelling
– Structure from motion
– Sensor Fusion
– Multi-view stereo
– 6dof-Tracking
– Depth camera
– Relighting
– Software approaches
– Mobile approaches

All submissions will undergo a peer-review process with at least three independent experts from the appropriate field of research.

Guest Editor: Graham Thomas, BBC Research and Development, UK

Submission:
Submission deadline: March 31st, 2016
Submission via: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jvrb2016 LaTeX-Template: http://www.jvrb.org/submission/tex-template/

More information about the Journal at: http://www.jvrb.org

VR / HMD / Game launches in Perth

Virtual Reality, , , , , , , , ,

On Thursday the new Perth chapter of the Australian Virtual Reality Network (AVRN: http://avrn.net.au/) met and were going to do demos of the HTC Vive.
They Skyped with the Sydney chapter who apparently have 80-100 attend the monthly meetings.
The Sydney speaker (leader of StartVR) showed his project and he and another developer ranked the VIVE their favorite, the Samsung Gear best of the phone-based VR (and I did not realize it comes bundled with the Samsung S7 phone, the phone acting as a form of external graphics processor to the display) and the Rift now showing its age and Google Cardboard (really just cardboard box around an android or iOS phone) good as $5 marketing/corporate handouts. They are most interested in the upcoming Playstation 4 HMD, as it works with existing Playstations (not the older version I assume) and hence will have a large ready market.

I instead then left this rather corporate group for the other meeting, a game developer launch -LEVEL ONE [http://www.levelone.org.au/[ at 167 Fitzgerald St Perth, a more indie game incubator/studio/community that has some connection to Film TV Interactive and the State Library.
A local game company had a music interface game in the VIVE which I played with and I quite liked the setup, good resolution, head tracking and very light responsive controllers I thought.
I did not ask how easy it is to develop for and am quite interested.

Virtual Heritage Article free to download until 21 April 2016

archaeology, Conference, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, game, heritage, virtual heritage, , , , ,

Elsevier have kindly let me and others download the below article from the Journal Entertainment Computing, (Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74) up until 21 April 2016. From 22 April it will be behind the Elsevier paywall again.

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Se406gYiZRYG4
No sign up or registration is needed – just click and read!

Title: Entertaining The Similarities & Distinctions Between Serious Games & Virtual Heritage Projects

Abstract:
This article summarizes past definitions of entertainment, serious games and virtual heritage in order to discuss whether virtual heritage has particular problems not directly addressed by conventional serious games. For virtual heritage, typical game-style entertainment poses particular ethical problems, especially around the simulation of historic violence and the possible trivialization of culturally sensitive and significant material. While virtual heritage can be considered to share some features of serious games, there are significantly different emphases on objectives. Despite these distinctions, virtual heritage projects could still meet serious games-style objectives while entertaining participants.

Int. Competition on Educational Games

Competition, game, , ,

The Fourth International Competition on Educational Games will be held this year in conjunction with the European Conference on Game-Based Learning (ECGBL), which is being held in Paisley, Scotland, UK on 6-7 October this year. The aims of this competition are:

  • To provide an opportunity for educational game designers and creators to participate in the conference and demonstrate their game design and development skills in an international competition.
  • To provide an opportunity for GBL creators to peer-assess and peer-evaluate their games.
  • To provide ECGBL 2016 attendees with engaging and best-practice games that showcase exemplary applications of GBL.

The closing date for submissions is the 17th of June.

Games submitted to the competition are expected to accomplish an educational goal. We welcome contributions relevant to all levels of learning (primary, secondary, tertiary or professional. Both digital and non-digital games are encouraged. Competitors should be prepared to explain their design and evaluation process, why it is innovative (the game itself or its educational setting) and how they achieved (will achieve) the impact they seek. The game should be in a development state that engages the player for at least 10 minutes. For further details see: http://www.academic-conferences.org/conferences/ecgbl/ecgbl-international-educational-games-competition/

In the first instance authors should submit details of the game using the online abstract submission form http://www.academic-conferences.org/conferences/ecgbl/ecgbl-international-educational-games-competition/ecgbl-games-submission/

The Spatial Nature of Archives

Academic, Architecture, Digital Humanities, ,

if we entertain the notion of a book as being distinct from text in an ‘universal’ library (http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3237/3416) and if we consider that early libraries could be spatially memorable forms of archives and churches to be early examples of walk-through books..

Refer The_Gothic_Cathedral_An_Immersive_Information_Visualization_Space

This has changed
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/entering-the-flow-museum-between-archive-and-gesamtkunstwerk/
“However, the relationship between internet and museum radically changes if we begin to understand the museum not as a storage place for artworks, but rather as a stage for the flow of art events..And on the internet, the museum functions as a blog. So the contemporary museum does not present universal art history, but rather its own history—as a chain of events staged by the museum itself. But most importantly: the internet relates to the museum in the mode of documentation, not in the mode of reproduction. Of course, the museums’ permanent collections can be reproduced on the internet, but the museum’s activities can only be recorded.”

Could it be possible that the spatial and physical even architectural organization and appearance of an archive could actually help organize, assist retrievability of the stored collection? I am sure research has been done on this throughout history, but knowing where to start is the question!

NB Please note I am not asking about archives of spatial data, I am asking if there are archives that were themselves physically, platially, spatially organized.

Post-doctoral contract offer : Collaborative mapping and geovisualisation of spatio-historical data sets

archaeology, Architecture, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, job, Postdoc, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, , ,

The MAP research unit offers a post-doctoral position for a period of 12 months starting on June 1st 2016. The position profile is related to the field of geovisualisation, but in an application to spatio-historical data sets, and in the context of a citizen science exploratory project.

The MAP unit, funded by CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and by the French Ministry for Culture, conducts interdisciplinary research activities focusing on the integration of computer science methodologies, formalisms and tools to applications fields like heritage architecture, history and archaeology, spatio-temporal dynamics (www.map.cnrs.fr).

The team is in charge of an exploratory research programme entitled Territographie (www.map.cnrs.fr/territographie), a programme the aim of which is to weigh the potential impact of the citizen science approach in the study of the so-called minor heritage (i.e. collections encompassing tools for agriculture, old occupations, unlisted edifices, etc.).
The team wishes to develop and test a customizable collaborative mapping solution, intended for use in collecting information as well as in browsing/selecting information.

You will find attached two PDF documents (one in French, one in English) presenting the details of the offer : context , mission, skills required , conditions, application procedures.

Contact:

Livio De Luca
Directeur de Recherche au CNRS
Directeur de l’UMR CNRS/MCC MAP _ Modèles et simulations pour l’Architecture et le Patrimoine
http://www.map.cnrs.fr

Email: livio.deluca

postDoctoralPosition_territographie.pdf

offrePostDoc_territographie.pdf