Film assembly using toy gestures

My full paper Picture This! Film assembly using toy gestures has been accepted as a full paper for the technical conference on ubiquitous computing: UbiComp 2008. With an acceptance rate of less than 19% for technical papers in the field, it is very encouraging!

Abstract
We present Picture This! a new input device embedded in children’s toys for video composition. It consists of a new form of interaction for children’s capturing of storytelling with physical artifacts. It functions as a video and storytelling performance system in that children craft videos with and about character toys as the system analyzes their gestures and play patterns. Children’s favorite props alternate between characters and cameramen in a film. As they play with the toys to act out a story, they conduct film assembly. We position our work as ubiquitous computing that supports children’s tangible interaction with digital materials. During user testing, we observed children ages 4 to 10 playing with Picture This!. We assess to what extent gesture interaction with objects for video editing allows children to explore visual perspectives in storytelling. A new genre of Gesture Object Interfaces as exemplified by Picture This relies on the analysis of gestures coupled with objects to represent bits.

Introduction

We connect to our world using our senses. Every one of our senses is a knowledge shopper that grounds us in our surroundings [1]: with touch, one feels the texture of life, with hearing one perceives even the subtlest murmurs of our existence, with vision one clarifies their instincts. But human senses are not only about perception. We use gesture to apprehend, comprehend and communicate. We speak to ultimately translate and exchange with others. We visualize, record, and playback events using our memory to reflect on our history and to be immersed in experience. We as children and adults are engaged in everyday pretense and symbolic play. We embed and later withdraw from the world, using imagination to project ourselves into situations [35]. Our mental constructs are necessary to reach a deeper understanding of our relationship with our environment [3]. Children are offered stories by adults and are driven into fantasy play. They use toys to externalize and elaborate their mental constructions [8]. With character toys they create interrelationships and plots, a means to expose their social knowledge: knowing about human beings and social relationships [33]. If the toy has an immediately accessible visual perspective, a new world is opened to the child. The toy brings her into exploring visual and narrative perspectives of character props, expanding the discovery of her environment.

We imagine a world in which people play, create and exchange visual narratives with ease and transparency. Motivated by the playful improvisational environment of child storytelling with toys, we have developed a new category of video editing tools progressing towards the child’s natural expression of play. In Picture This! we combine the activity of play with the video making process. Whereas play emphasizes spontaneity and improvisation, video making necessitates structure and composition. We were inspired by the theater play of Goethe’s childhood [35], investigating what technology could add to the narrative and play experience. We use technology to offer visual feedback regarding how the scene looks like from the point of view of an imaginary audience. The child storyteller enters the world of the movie maker. Cameras become part of a toy system showing how things look from a toy’s point of view. They can be integrated in Lego people, car drivers, and even coffee mugs! The video process, supported by gesture induced editing, benefits children in practicing social interrelationships and visual perspective taking.



More about the system ->here <-

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Light based communication networks

I attended the talk by the Talking Lights company at the MIT Media Lab. They work on light based communication networks associating information with specific locations in a building and then use that information to guide, monitor and get information to people as they move from place to place. I was fascinated by their inexpensive way to enable context aware computing and the idea of associating information in a building directly through the components already existing in the building, in this case a common light source.

So for instance, a person wears a box-link (basically a photodyode with Bluetooth) so that the system knows precisely where this person is located. The communication between the box-link and the building is created by modulating the light from an ordinary light fixture to encode information. Where GPS technology does not operate accurately and Wifi triangulation does not “detect” walls, the signal in Talking Light is constrained by walls, offering a more precise indoor localization. As the user moves in the building there is a discrimination between light sources in the area. It takes the maximum amplitude, e.g. last light, last amplitude. The light can also transmit radio quality audio, even thought this is can be done through power lines.

Also the company offers researchers the possibility to outfit lights with the communication capability or to create multi-light network for application -> here <-

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

The new MIT Media Lab under the 4th of July firework!

Happy independence Media Lab!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

What's next for fitness centers?

I read an issue of Art in America -featuring the amazing work of Janine Antoni on the cover and discovered a past work of Antal Lakner: home transporter (from the passive working devices series).

Skewering a vain leisure society that "labors" pointlessly on exercise equipment, Lakner designs workout machines like the "Forest Master" (a saw) and the "Home Transporter" (a wheelbarrow). Each is accompanied by a didactic photo of a worker using the prototype tool.

I find this work actually very marketable as a neat idea for making fitness centers more fun! I know it is not the point and the work is remarkable, but it is also an amazing interface design for transforming fitness centers. Instead of trying to hook up a rowing machine to a virtual boat in a video game, why not connecting the actions with meaningful activities!





Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Organic prosthesis

Grow On You by LucyandBart.

LucyandBart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body. They share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression. Unconsciously their work touches upon these themes, however it is not their intention to communicate this. They work in a primitive and limitless way creating future human shapes, blindly discovering low – tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement.

Playing with suggestive photography for high impact, they seem obsessed with the body metamorphosis. I call their work organic prosthesis, because they mainly use organic material in their body extension. For instance, they grow seeds on a fabric, which gives the impression of a body grown of grass and soil. The following pictures show the germination from day one to day eight.



I love their work with foam. The foam transforms the body in a gentle way. Here the artists embrace the prosthetic impulse ...




Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

The future of lasers

A laser, acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, emits a sharp light source. We find lasers now everywhere from optical storage, printers (2D printers), to cut & print in metal; they can be pretty dangerous so have to be handled carefully! The light is emitted in a narrow, low-divergence beam, with a narrow wavelength spectrum (usually monochromatic).



Jean Michel Jarre playing the laser harp, harp designed by Bernard Szajner in 1980.

This invention by Theodore Maiman in 1960 allows many applications. Designers integrate it widely, and now it become very common and unimpressive to use a laser as a mean of interaction. The laser has more interestingly leaded to some copy-cat applications. Getting the sense that a sharp light can easily be distinguished within the wavelength spectrum, designers use it as a tracking device. In the military, sophisticated lasers are used for range finding. In medicine for internal surgery. You can find sophisticated Green Laser Pointer through specialized companies. The usual 15mW laser is the one used to accompany a slide presentation, but lasers can remain portable while keeping intense power up to 500mW (thanks to heat sinking! ).

Wikipedia offers an extensive explanation on the differences between the continuous wave operation and the pulsed operation of a laser, thus offering quite a different use for the laser. Here we are working with visible wavelength, but creative applications using invisible wavelength are quite unexplored and are endless! As part of my PhD general exams, I am currently researching on how to use electro magnetic field and modulated light in background signals for adding context or helping localization in smart systems. More about this soon!

My contribution in the field of fashionable technology!

I had previously mentioned the book Fashionable Technology, edited by Sabine Seymour in which I present my work on fashion garments designed in the context of technology -including the Touch Sensitive apparel developed with Yasmine Abbas. The book is available on Amazon and I recently received my copy!

Here are the pages of my contribution and the book itself features outstanding designers. I will try to report about them soon !!!

Abstract: The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, wearables for short, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. The practical application is explained in detail and numerous illustrations serve as clarification. Over 50 well-known designers, research institutes, companies and artists, among them Philips, Burton, MIT Media Lab, XS Labs, New York University, Hussein Chalayan, Cute Circuit or International Fashion Machines are introduced by means of their latest, often still unpublished, project, and a survey of their work to date. Given for the first time is a list of all the relevant information on research institutes, materials, publications etc. A must for all those wishing to know everything about fashionable technology.

->Buy the book<-

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Media fabrics for media makers

Glorianna Davenport is currently giving a fabulous talk at Media Lab on her interactive media, story networks and media fabrics research! She is bringing along researchers who share the passion of realizing an expressive landscape for digital dialogues. I worked with Glorianna from 2002-2004 and her vision shaped my research since then ...

Live webcast of the talk->here<-

Glorianna Davenport is a filmmaker and technology innovator who has spent three decades at MIT, exploring the fundamental issues of digital media experiences, collaborative co-construction, and the role of the machine for documentary and entertainment forms.

One of her guest speaker, Nicholas Negroponte updated us with the status of the one laptop per child initiative. I must admit: I love the new laptop design: for its fantastic idea of prioritizing the laptop as a book, then a laptop as a shared device in a co-located space, then a laptop as a laptop. Offering this double metaphor is extremely powerful, unique and also daring. Most probably children will not use the laptop as a book, but the fact that the laptop can be handled as such is very sweet. It offers flexibility and connects with a culture, for instance in Brazil, where there is a govermental budget for books.



The laptop can also be handled as a shared device. This resonates particularly well with my own research on the sharing of media and the creating of ideas in co-located space.



The laptop that becomes a platform for co-located collaboration

More soon ...

A journey for the foreigner

All foreigners who have made a choice add to their passion for indifference a fervent extremism that reveals the origin of their exile – Julia Kristeva

I recently read a book, depressing and fascinating, Strangers to Ourselves, by Julia Kristerva.
This book is a journey through the notion of the stranger (the foreigner, outsider or alien in a country and society), and explores the idea of strangeness within the self (a person’s deep sense of being). In this book Julia Kristeva distinguishes the inside from the outside appearance and the conscious idea of self. She explains mostly the point of view of the foreigner, how he feels and perceives others in his welcoming foreign country. She attempts to analyze him and shows how this exile is nurtured by a deep inside exile. I share my notes because I know many foreigners who will resonate with this book.

In the first chapter, “Tocata and Fugue for the Foreigner”, the author explains her attempt to not turn the foreigner into a thing, but rather to “brush it” with no permanent structure. She presents a happy foreigner to the eyes of others, while the foreigner is actually away from his homeland because most probably he has lost his mother. As in Camus, his Stranger reveals himself at the time of his mother’s death: “One has not much noticed that this cold orphan, whose indifference can become criminal, is a fanatic of absence”. The foreigner is a devotee of solitude.

In the eyes of the foreigner those who are not foreign have no life at all: barely do they exist, haughty or mediocre. In contrast, the space of the foreigner is a moving train! As for confidence, the foreigner has no self. An empty confidence, valueless, which focuses his possibilities of being constantly other: “I do what they want me to, but it is not me. Me is elsewhere, me belongs to no one, me does not belong to me, … does me exist?”. Julia Kristeva concludes that the foreigner is a dreamer making love with absence, one exquisitely depressed. Happy? No one knows better than the foreigner the passion for solitude. “The paradox is that the foreigner wishes to be alone but with partners, and yet none is willing to join him in the torrid space of his uniqueness”.

The author proposes two categories of foreigner. The one who agonizes between what is no longer and what will never be, the advocate of emptiness, usually the best ironist, and the one who transcends, living neither before nor now but beyond, a believer and sometimes ripens into a skeptic! She explains how meeting balances wandering for the foreigner. The banquet of hospitality is the foreigner’s utopia with the brotherhood of guests who soothe and forget their differences … the banquet is outside of time!

The author shows how the foreigner constantly feels the hatred of others and how living with the foreigner (with the other) confronts people with the possibility or not of being an other, as in being in his place. Rimbaud’s psychotic ghost Je est un autre (I is an other) is the acknowledgment of this exile: to be foreign and live in a foreign country.
“Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking, the impetus of my culture.” Split identity? Should we recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because he is already a foreigner from within?

How strange is Camus’ Meursault (The Stranger, 1942), so anesthetized, lacking emotions, all passion having been eradicated, and not a scratch to show for it. One could easily take him for a borderline case, or a fasle self, in short for a quasi-psychotic, rather than for a prototype of the foreigner.

Julia Kristeva brings language into this exile. The foreigner does not speak his mother tongue nor he is filled with resonance from the body’s memory! The resurrection through a new language slowly appears superficial and meaningless. This new language appears like a prosthesis, it is superficial.

Apparently, nobody listens to the foreigner, because the foreigner is only tolerated. As the author explains: “Those who have never lost the slightest root seem unable to understand any word liable to temper their point of view”. And the foreigner’s friends, aside from bleeding hearts who feel obliged to do good, could only be those who feel foreign to themselves.

Nowhere does one find better somatization than among foreigners, so much can linguistic and passional expression find itself inhibited

The realm of the foreigner slowly becomes silence. “It is the silence that empties the mind and fills the brain with despondency, like the gaze of sorrowful women coiled up in some nonexistent eternity.” Instead of approximating words, the foreigner no longer says them. The foreigner has lost his own language in a foreign land …

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Web 2.0 for the gambling community

My new summer game: the backgammon

Web 2.0 keeps surprising me: we share information, create content, collaborate through communities, social networking sites, wikis and blogs. This production of content, for the most part decentralized, strongly impact our economy. Each area of the web is growing, borrowing open-source tools and peer production of content.

One area that keeps massively imposing itself but misses the point and annoys internet users, is the online casino and game communities. Not only these sites do usually not offer anything interesting, except low quality games, but they do not make use of existing tools that could truly enhanced the “casino player” experience.

Yet, I found a complete platform for the online game and gamblers community. It works as an online gambling guide. It makes use of web 2.0 technologies and provides, for instance, weekly news and tips in rich video format along with interviews of specialists. The site uses algorithms that scan the web to find the highest jackpots. They offer a community based website that includes personal blogs of players, discussions, and sharing options. Not only the design is clean and inviting (you will not find banners with glitters that pops up every two seconds), but also the site is useful for anyone who wants to learn about games: it will lead the future (or current) players from the beginner to the pro difficulty level. It is a self contained environment for the gambler and the player. Even though I am not a gambler, I am a dedicated game player and my current summer game is the super fun Backgammon and the tips I read about it are really exciting!