ACE2004 Day 1.

Keynote 1 - Takashi Totsuka (Sony, Director of Content Application Lab). This was a good talk - Totsuka spoke about the need to develop WHAT applications, instead of HOW applications. He used examples from Sony's history, remarking that HOW applications such as the trinitron displays were going to break companies while WHAT apps like the walkman and the eyeToy would lead to success.

Full Paper Session 1

Composition of Gaze-triggered display: saccade detection technique/eye tracking to display unique 2D images to different users. Sounds like it may result it cool things / apps for new AR displays, but just a piece of tech now. THis talk is super-dry, lots of graphs and charts and awkward silences - the crowd is stunned - this would be a good example of one of those HOW apps Totsuka was chastising. I think I'd like a pastry.

Fancy a Schmink? : A Novel Networked Game in a Cafe HP LABS, UK: Sound based interactive game tested in a week long public trial in the Waterched Cafe in Bristol, England. Participants played a sound game where they had to identify a sound that was NOT in the mix - the missing sound. More and more sounds are added as the level increases, making everything harder. but this was really a social experiment, seeing how people reacted to playing a game socially and how collaboration occured, etc. my question was: why test social interaction using a game where you have to use headphones.

How Can Entertainment Improve Workers Motivation This was completely preposterous. the idea was that each worker has an avatar (a tree in an aquarium) that grows the more productive they are. the problem is that the most important part of this -- how 'productivity' is measured -- is completely ignored. Basically, working constitutes key strokes. Hmm... problematic maybe? I won't go into this one anymore.

Compelling Experiences in Mixed Reality Interactive Storytelling Superimposing players in a virtual world where their actions and speech controls part of the story. Of course, 'interactive' is used loosely here, as basically the user has to go through a set of plot actions in a linear Bond story in order to get anywhere. Ahem. Good tech., for sure -- not sold on the current implementation of 'interactive stories.'

Free viewpoint video synthesis and presentation of sporting events for mixed reality entertainment Pretty cool 1st step: allow users to control the camera at a sporting event, zooming, panning etc. They then went downhill by making the display AR, superimposing the soccer players on a piece of paper that looks like a field -- aren't the soccer players already on a field? ( I believe the correct term is pitch). Unnecessary.

Keynote no.2 Mainly talked about AR, and the relationships between Stapleton's Physical, Virtual, and Imaginary Realities. Big advocate of objects, and the combination of TUI (tangible user interface) with AR display to produce a 'best of both worlds' scenario. He gave many examples of collaborative AR spaces, including a project called MagicBook, a AR book that allows multiple users to interact in a public view of this virtual book space. This all looks great, and is really good research, but the content still seems highly lacking (perhaps due to current issues of delay between the physical / virtual world causing a disconnect). THeir book Jimmy Jones was done w/ a New Zealand based illustrator and was by far the best example of how something like this could be integrated w/ useful and engaging content.

Short Paper Sessions 1
Unfortunately, not much here. Mostly AR applied to the old standards like bowling and tennis. These are ok tech pieces that work nicely, but very uninteresting.

Short Paper Sessions 2
I chaired this one, and was freaking out that I was being rude or something the whole time. They provide you with this bell (ring for assistence style) that you're supposed to ring if time goes over 15 minutes. yeah right: all these eminent figures sitting in the room and I'm going to ring a bell? So we went a little over, so what? There were 2 / 3 cool things here. THe 1st was this "system for creation of fond memories." THe presentation itself was slow, relatively poor english (but still 100% better than my japanese so I give credit to the presenter), but presented this nice idea for a music resonator upon which little genre boxes of music are places. These genre boxes wander about playing music until they come into contact with another box -- the system then checks a database for some similarity between the two songs. If there is one, then it plays whatever song is the link. Mainly prelim research I think, but pretty neat. The other decent one was a saw type 3D interface thing were you had to collaboratively rock this thing back and forth by using your weight in order to advance through a virtual world. THe 3rd one (that was pretty bad) was this music synthesis thing based on dance. a) it wasn't synthesis b/c it was just playing back MIDI controlled sounds b) it wasn't real time, so what's the point? c) the presenter was on crack and d) there have been a lot of great interactive dance systems done, and this project clearly was not aware of any of them, acting like it was the first thing to try and generate music from movement... ick.

that's basically it for today. it is very hot here.