World Wide Panorama

On Saturday, March 20, more than 180 photographers in 40 countries around the world celebrated the Equinox by creating VR panoramas. This site showcases the results of their efforts.

The Geo-Images Project

Center for Computer Games Research

Center for Computer Games Research IT University of Copenhagen

Center for the study of digital games - currently, most of the Ph.D. students have "backgrounds within the Arts and Humanities, Psychology and Sociology", with courses such as "Ludology Vs. Narratology? A Critical Investigation of the Essential Aesthetic Properties of Digital Media, led by renowned scholar Marie-Laure Ryan" - and many pioneers such as Jesper Juul, Espen Aarseth and Gonzalo Frasca seem to be affiliated with the center.

Playtesters for Sony PlayStation Games

Ariel Lawrence, a former CTIN 488 student, is now working over at Sony and has extended an opportunity for students to participate in playtests of new PlayStation games.

The first test is rather short notice: May 1. If you're interested, fill out this questionaire and send it to Ariel at ariel_lawrence@playstation.sony.com. If you have any questions, you can contact her at 310-829-6686.

Visiting Speaker for 4/28/04: Randy Pausch

The final speaker for this semster will be Professor Randy Pausch, Co-Director, Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center and currently on Sabbatical at Electronic Arts.

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 3pm-5pm, 4/28/04

Title: "Putting Artists and Engineers Together to Make Interactive Content"

Abstract: New forms of entertainment, training, and education are now possible due to advances in digital technology. Carnegie Mellon has created the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) [etc.cmu.edu], a joint initiative between the School of Computer Science and the College of Fine Arts. The ETC grants a two-year "Masters of Entertainment Technology" degree. We have seventy students in our Masters program; half are artists and half are technologists. Students from the ETC have been hired by companies such as Electronic Arts, Rockstar Studios, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Microsoft, PIXAR, Walt Disney Imagineering, etc. Electronic Arts alone hired almost 40% of our graduating class last year, and we have a standing agreement for a minimum of ten EA internships each summer. In addition to video games and other traditional entertainment forms, our students go on to create museum installations and other novel interactive experiences.

A fundamental intellectual challenge of the ETC is finding ways to share control between content authors and the audiences/users/players/guests of that content. A fundamental social challenge of the ETC is finding ways to get artists and technologists to work together. ETC students are continuously involved in project courses, where small teams of students from different backgrounds work closely under faculty guidance to create a technology-enhanced entertainment experience. A typical project might be to create an interactive theatrical piece, a robot who can sustain conversation, or a small scale educational video game.

This talk will describe what we believe is important in educating students for the entertainment industry, and how we do it. We will describe typical ETC student projects, including work in the "Building Virtual Worlds" course, where student teams build interactive, helmet-based virtual reality worlds on a two-week production schedule. We will also describe the lessons we have learned in how to most effectively put artists and technologists together into small teams that succeed.

BIOGRAPHY:
Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he is the co-director of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) and Electronic Arts (EA), and has consulted with WDI on the user interface design and testing of interactive theme park attractions and with Google on user interface design. Dr. Pausch is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, is the director of the Alice project, and has been in zero-gravity.

Self Organizing Systems Conference @ UCLA

Electronic Literature Organization

Friday, April 30, 8:30 am - 5:30 pm
EDA Room, UCLA Kinross Building
11000 Kinross Avenue
Westwood, CA 90095

Speculations about spontaneous creation - of awareness, self-organization and evolution - have recurred across cultures, through time, and over space. In the last half-century, we have developed the algorithmic and computational technologies that can bring life and form to these ideas - as digitally inspired reactive and intentional entities inhabiting galleries, laboratories, and literature.
The conference will bring together artists, humanists, and scientists for panel discussions about the present and future of these trends.

Organized by Nicholas Gessler and Katherine Hayles

Schedule:
8:30-9:00 am: Coffee, Juice and Pastries

9:00-9:30 am: Introductions
Katherine Hayles, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, UCLA (conference co-organizer)
Roberto Peccei, Vice Chancellor for Research, UCLA
Nicholas Gessler, Co-Director, Human Complex Systems Group, UCLA (conference co-organizer)
9:30-11:00 am: Panel 1 - Self-Organizing Processes
Moderator Nicholas Gessler, UCLA

Jean-Pierre Hébert, Artist in Residence, UCSB Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. “Art Is/As Algorithms: rEvolution of Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ from 1915 to the Present and Other Examples”
Additional examples include Jean Tinguely’s “Meta Malevich” and “Meta Kandinski,” sculptures and conceptual art, as well as current perspectives on these and other works.

Charles Ostman, Institute for Global Futures. “The Emergent Evolutionary Eventstreams of NeuroAesthetics: The Intersection of Biological Metaphors in Computing and the NeuroAesthetic Influences of Nature”

For millennia, in virtually every indigenous culture known to exist, humankind has probed, explored, and even amplified the apparent aesthetic potential of the natural world via the lens of artistic expression. Recently, this mechanism of “aesthetic nourishment” has been translated into the realms of computing, particularly in the arena of computation that utilizes biologically inspired processes and algorithms to manifest a new form of aesthetic nourishment, via the lens of exploration into the realms of “virtual nature.” This poses the question of a new realm of evolutionary influence upon our current and future cultures, catalyzed by aesthetic influence from realms beyond the boundaries of organic nature.

Nathan Brown, UCLA Dept. of English. “Imagining Materiality at the Limits of Fabrication”

From Derrida’s graphic materialist to more recent work by Johanna Drucker, N. Katherine Hayles, and Steve McCaffrey, the materiality of writing has been figured and refigured—tracked through its unstable modes of participation in an emergent medial ecology—over the past forty years. But what happens when we resituate scriptural materiality in relation to, and as an element of, condensed matter research at the “limits of fabrication”—at the intersection of physics, solid-state chemistry, and molecular genetics enabled by nanotechnology? I want to suggest that such a structural coupling of “art” and “science” constitutes the site of irritability at which the ethico-political stakes of technologically producing self-organizing solids” should be imagined.

Michael Dyer, UCLA Dept. of Computer Science. “The Death of the Static Visual Artist”

Evolutionary programs could remove the division between the artist (as producer of art) and the viewer (as consumer of art) by turning everyone into a producer of art through the application of selectional pressure (i.e., taste). This “death” won’t happen for literature or the visual performance arts because there are few artificial generators in these areas (and they are very primitive) and also the process of applying selection pressure in these areas is too slow and tedious.

11:00-11:30 am: Break

11:30 am-1:00 pm: Panel 2 - Evolving Systems
Moderator Margie Luesebrink, Electronic Literature Organization

Michael Chang, UCLA Dept. of Design | Media Arts. “Cellular Automata and Morphology”

Computers have become more and more capable of producing simulations. Future art, science, and research using evolutionary programming can take advantage of simulating “cellular morphogenesis.”

Casey Reas, UCLA Dept. of Design | Media Arts. ". . . ---. . ."

The creation of self-organizing systems as a contemporary artistic practice has roots in works dating back over forty years. Working with modern digital computers introduces new possibilities and methodologies for working within this domain. A range of current works based on scientific research and simple behaviors build a foundation for an exploratory and aesthetic approach to self-organizing systems.

Brian Attebery, Idaho State University Dept. of English. “Literature as a Self-Misregulating System”

Literary production and criticism all too often form a closed loop: writers write variations on what they have written before, and the critics praise them for meeting expectations. Generally these expectations have to do with writing about the moral dilemmas and psychological turmoil of characters that just happen to resemble those same writers and critics. To break out of the loop, literature needs periodic infusions of new ideas from history, politics, and especially science, which can question the most basic assumptions of human nature. The writers who have successfully integrated ideas from genetic engineering, nanotechnology, or neuroscience into science fictional narratives may be among the most important writers of our era, although you wouldn’t know it from most critical discourse.

Kate Marshall, UCLA Dept. of English. “Non-Productive Waste and Systemic Interrogation in
Contemporary Fiction”

Popular and critical accounts of contemporary fiction form a literary system inflected by the distinction between productive and non-productive forms of Bataillan “expenditure.” As a test case, Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis, panned by critics for its inability to escape the destruction it portrayed, both formally and thematically enacts a form of waste that refuses to reroute negative expenditure into productive meaning. While DeLillo has been considered a “systems novelist” by Tom LeClair for taking the principles of self-organizing systems as his thematic concern, Cosmopolis and the texts that surround and constitute it provide a way of examining how a work functions as, rather than merely describes, the system.
1:00-2:00 pm Lunch

2:00-3:30 pm: Panel 4 - Cultural Worlds
Moderator to be announced.

Simon Penny, UC Irvine ArtsComputationEngineering Program. “Living with Agents: Experiments in the Aesthetics of Behavior.”
Over the last decade, the technical complexity of intelligent or autonomous agents and their possible interactions has developed rapidly, yet by and large, HAI (Human Agent Interaction) is unexplored, the idea of the socially intelligent agent is underdeveloped, the concept of a culturally intelligent agent remains shapeless. Complex communities of agents ‘in silico’ remain, for the most part, graphical traces, images or text, locked behind the screen like fish in an aquarium, to be influenced by the mouseclicks and keyboard strokes of a solitary sedentary user. Modalities of human interaction with agent systems has remained constrained by conventional notions of interface and limitations of commercial sensor/effector technologies. I will present documentation of several works utilizing custom sensor scenarios, in which an agent or agents share physical space with a user, whose bodily gesture and dynamics perturb the system.

Bill Tomlinson, UC Irvine ArtsComputationEngineering Program. “Communities of Agents”

A lone autonomous agent may find out about its world by exploring; a community of agents, on the other hand, can exchange information among its members, thereby becoming a distributed learning system. This system breaks down, though, when certain agents provide incorrect or deceptive information. Computational social relationships can help agents remember the weak links and keep the distributed learning process on track.

Colin Milburn, Harvard Dept. of English. “The Horrors of Goo: Nanotechnology and the Logic of
Control”

Nanotechnology’s spectacular rise to prominence over the past several years has been accompanied by increasing concern over the potential dangers of self-organizing nanosystems, such as the emergence of hostile artificial intelligences or the worldwide destruction of the biosphere in an apocalypse of “gray goo.” These fears embody a cultural fantasy, endemic to modernity, that our technology will somehow get "out of control," run amok, and take over the world. Such fears negatively impact public moral support for nanoresearch, as well as the venture capital and governmental funding made available to nanoscientists. I will talk about some recent popular representations of nanotechnology that have contributed to public perceptions of nanotechnology as a science “in control” and in no danger of giving way to “gray goo.” Taking a psychoanalytic approach to these texts, I hope to briefly suggest that nanotechnology becomes a “safe” science not by any feat of intellection or engineering, but rather by a rhetorical logic of control that appeals to scientific authority.

Nicholas Gessler, UCLA Human Complex Systems Group. “Artificial Culture: It’s Agents All the Way Down”

Bertrand Russel was once confronted by a woman who claimed that the Earth is carried on the back of a giant turtle, standing on the back of another - “turtles all the way down.” Today, from nanoscience to cosmology we are confronted with the problem of how smaller “computational turtles” (John Smart) give rise to a pyramid of turtles of increasing sizes. “Old turtles in new shells” are reappearing in conferences on “computational synthesis,” “dynamical hierarchical synthesis” and “dynamic ontology.”

3:30-4:00 pm: Break

4:00-5:30 pm: Panel 3 - Emerging Minds
Moderator Katherine Hayles

Dario Nardi, UCLA Center for Governance. “Agents Are Systems Too”

Over 2,500 years in various cultures, similar patterns in individual behavior have been repeatedly identified. Until recently, people called these patterns “types”—essentially static boxes without scientific grounding in the reality of human diversity. But today we understand that a finite number of attractors—dynamic patterns—necessarily appear in many (all) highly complex systems. Agents, as individuals, self-organize within the systems of which they are a part. I will argue that psychology’s current trait-based ideology is hopelessly mired in 19th century statistical tools. A new understanding will add tremendously to the realism of our models and simulations, and also act as a critical counterpoint to our individual biases as model creators.

Brooks Landon, University of Iowa Dept. of English. “More Brains: The Magnificent Arrogance of Science Fiction”

A good part, if not the greatest part, of science fiction is not as much about science or technology or the future as it is about finding ways of getting smarter. Indeed, SF might be considered the literature of radical auto-didacticism with learning machines—of various shapes, sizes, ontogenies, and ontologies—the recurring subject of SF narratives, while those narratives also present themselves as learning machines. In these terms, the self-organization of knowledge, ideas, cognitive processes—always an important aspect of literary experience—becomes the organizing principle, defining characteristic, and primary agenda of science fiction.

Rudy Rucker, San Jose State University Dept. of Computer Science. “The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul”

The title embodies a dialectic triad: (thesis) we can computer-model a personality by an interactive super-blog that I term a lifebox; (antithesis) we feel like we have a soul or spark that can’t be captured by a program, but (synthesis) it may be that certain kinds of naturally occurring computation are in fact rich and unpredictable enough to behave like a mind. Examples of these rich computations are the cellular-automata-like rules that create the markings on cone shells and, more generally, activator-inhibitor rules which produce spots, stripes and scrolls. I would also submit that the textures of events within a novel are themselves driven by activator-inhibitor computations in the author’s mind.

Sue Lewak, UCLA Dept. of English. "'I'm sure those are not the right words': The Language of ‘No-Sense’and Self -Organizing Systems in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, approaches the idea of self - organization through the dissolution of macroworld rules. Indeed, it is through Alice's negation of conventional rules that she develops the ability to "form" a coherent microworld system. Thus, as Alice's gradual acclimation into the wondrous language of “no-sense” indicates, self-organization at the microscale lies in the ability to perceive an existing system, rather than in the creation of a new one.

Self-Organizing Systems: rEvolutionary Art, Science, and Literature is sponsored by a DiMI Grant from the University of California, UCLA Human Complex Systems, UCLA English Department, UCLA Design | Media Arts Department, Electronic Literature Organization, and the Center for Digital Humanities.

JSB on Storytelling and the Art of Science

John Seely Brown, the media innovator who helped make XeroxPARC such a center for creative thinking in the 1990s, has interesting things to say about games, narrative, and education in an interview conducted at the Smithsonian Institute and recently posted on his site. Brown has become involved in the new Institute for Media Literacy at the University of Southern California.
From Henry Jenkin's blog at Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation

And a related site with several additional viewpoints at "Storytelling: Passport to Success in the 21st Century" sponsored by the Smithsonian last weekend.

Takahata Reminder

Tomorrow and Saturday: Films of Isao TAKAHATA from Studio Ghibli.

The program includes a screening of three of Takahata's films on Friday April 23, and an academic symposium on "Animation and the Contemporary Japanese Imagination" on Saturday, April 24. Featured speakers include Mr. Takahata, Steve Alpert (Senior Vice President of Studio Ghibli), and Anne Allison (Chair of Duke University's Anthropology Department).

The Official EIN "End of The Year Party"

The Entertainment Industry Network is pleased to anounce...

The official EIN 'End of the Year Party' is coming next Thursday!!!

The Party will be from 8:00pm-2:00am on Thursday, April 29th, at Forbidden
City (1718 Vine @Hollywood Blvd.). It's an awesome place with an outdoor patio, two bars and a private upstairs area which is just for us! Show up before
10:00 for rapid admission and FREE FOOD! We are also extending an invitation to our future colleagues at AFI and UCLA, so if you have friends over there,
bring 'em (they may be rivals now, but we'll be working with them soon enough). MBA students from USC who plan careers in Entertainment will be there as well.

It's the perfect opportunity to create networking possibilities just before
the summer, as well as a great chance to let loose before finals!

See you all there!!

Will Wright speaking at OHE, 4/22/04

Rumor has it that Will Wright will be speaking Thursday in OHE 542 from 12:00 noon until around 1:30. Wright is Chief Designer and Co-Founder of Maxis, developers of the SimCity series and The Sims. For those of you who missed his speeches at the GDC, this is an excellent opportunity to meet one of the most interesting and unique game designers in the industry.

Wright explains the concept of a fitness landscape in terms of game genres.

Visiting Speakers for 4/21/04: XLT

Members of Extra Large Technology (XLT), will show their works and talk about "The Convergence of Games and Film : a look at game technology and how it will affect the film industry".

Speakers: David Koenig, Yoni Koenig, Robert Knaack
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 3pm-5pm, 4/21/04

"Toothing?"

bluejacking for random sex

"Toothing" is a new craze where strangers on trains, buses, in bars and even supermarkets hook up for illicit meetings using messages sent via the latest in phone technology.

Killer app for SPECK?

article

Calif. Video Game Bills Fail

Two bills designed to restrict the access of minors to violent video games on Tuesday failed to clear a committee of California's state Assembly, killing them for 2004 unless the committee changes its mind.

Quoted from e-mail by Jason Della Rocca, Program Director;
International Game Developers Association http://www.igda.org/

"AB 1792 failed on a 5-4 vote and AB 1793 failed on a 3-4 vote. Each
bill needed 7 votes to pass. However, both bills were granted reconsideration, which means they will be considered again on April 27th. If the bills are not amended, the bills will be heard for vote only with no testimony.
If they are amended, the committee may take additional testimony.

What this means is that we are not yet out of the woods on these
issues. We must continue to let our Assemblymembers know how these bills will hurt our industry. As a reminder, AB 1792 prohibits the sale or rental of video
games to minors that contain violent content that is vaguely defined
and clearly subjective which would include a wide array of "E", "T" as well
as "M" rated titles. AB 1793 mandates unwieldy segregation rules for
retailers to display games based on ratings issued by the ESRB.

AB 1792 would impose large penalties on our retail partners even though
full compliance with its requirements are virtually impossible to
fulfill due to lack of clarity in the definition of "violent" content. AB 1793
would create unfair burdens for retailers by requiring them to
refixture their stores, and treat video games differently under the law than
motion pictures, magazines and music."

sms tower

This 30-foot stainless steel beacon on display in Middlesbrough, U.K., will change its color by receiving text messages sent to a (sadly, not specified) special number. The 'Spectra-txt' will receive its first text message from Tahiti, a small tropical island off the coast of Wales.

link via Gizmodo.

AR Magic Story Cube

Download video
Magic cube conjures virtual reality kid's tales

A novel interactive way to relate children's stories has been developed by researchers in Singapore. The Magic Story Cube uses augmented reality technology, in which computer graphics are superimposed on the real world, to overlay an animated version of a story on top of a child's traditional "magic cube".

Read the article

Mixed Reality Lab, National University of Singapore

Simprov's Wedding Construction Kit for The Sims

Thursday, April 15
Simprov's Wedding Construction Kit for The Sims
with Don Hopkins

The Sims is a game about everyday life, like a virtual dollhouse populated with simulated people. You can build homes, decorate and furnish them, create families of characters, and direct their lives, and tell stories about them. Players can create their own character skins, object graphics and programmed behaviors. Simprov supports improvisational storytelling with The Sims. The "Wedding Construction Kit" is an independently developed set of specially programmed characters and objects, which you can add to the game. You can plug them together like Legos, to build your own dream wedding, or the shotgun wedding from hell. Don Hopkins, one of the original Sims programmers who worked with Will Wright at Maxis, will demonstrate the Wedding Construction Kit, as well as behind-the-scenes tools used to create and program Sims objects, including Transmogrifier, RugOMatic and SimAntics.

Don Hopkins programmed a multi player networked version of SimCity for Unix workstations, and developed The Sims character animation system, user interface, content creation tools, and ported The Sims Online to Linux for Maxis. He also programmed the robots for Will Wright's "Stupid Fun Club" studio, for two one-minute reality TV programs about a Broken Robot and the Robot Waiter.

http://www.TheSimsTransmogrifier.com
http://www.TheSimsTransmogrifier.com/Objects/simprov-scene.jpg
http://www.TheSimsTransmogrifier.com/Objects/simprov-moonlight.jpg
http://www.TheSimsTransmogrifier.com/Objects/simprov-bride.jpg

Location: Blue Bongo Cafe (Little Pedros)
901 E. 1st Street, 90012
One block east of Alameda...
plenty of free safe parking.
Donation :: $5.00 [for our dj's!]
Evening kicks off at 8pm

jabberwocky

cool project from intel's Familiar Strangers fold:

jabberwocky is a freely available mobile phone application designed to promote urban community connections and a sense of familiarity, anxiety, and play in public urban places.  It takes advantage of current Bluetooth device proliferation.  The application does not require seeding the population with initial users of the social network to function.  Even today in most urban cities, the existence of even the current Bluetooth mobile phones is enough to gather meaningful and useful data for visualizations of place and urban strangers.

via Smart Mobs

The Entertainment Industry Network (EIN) Executive Board Elections

If you want information on how to run for the EIN Executive Board seat representing the Interactive Media Department, please go to my blog site located here.

I would be very pleased and willing to serve again, but I welcome everyone who is interested to please read the information at the link above and respond accordingly to the parties listed therein.

IML Games Tournament, Friday 4/16/04, 3-7PM

The IML, Institute for Multimedia Literacy @ Annenberg (not the IML on campus under Carson), would like to welcome students from the Interactive Media Program to the first IML Games Tournament, on Friday April 16 from 3 to 7 pm. The event will be split into two different parts. The first event includes a series of warm-up matches. The games used will be varied, ranging from arcade racers to board games. These matches are open to anyone who wishes to compete. The second event will be a Halo Tournament, featuring two linked Xboxes. The winner of the Halo Tournament will receive two movie passes. Pizza will be served in between both events

For more, view the full invite.
For directions to the IML, click here.

Sky Ear

Sky Ear: May 4, 2004

Sky Ear will be a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky.
The cloud will be made of one thousand large helium balloons each responding to the electromagnetic environment (created by distant storms, mobile phones, police and ambulance radios, television broadcasts, etc.) with coloured blue, red and yellow lights.

Video Game Summer Camp

USC's old film school nemesis, New York University, looks like it might be starting it's own video game curriculum . . . (although it's being held in NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, not the Tisch School of the Arts, which is where their film school is):

"A new summer camp, dubbed Camp/Game: Intensive Video Game Creation, will get underway this July at New York University. The camp will last from July 6 to August 6 and focus on the "finer points" of the video game industry, according to a recent press release.

The program, created by the Division of Entertainment, Digital Arts and Design (ETDAD), part of NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, will explore 3-D animation, character and environment creation, and audio, among others.

'Camp/Game participants in the area learn the basic creative structure, development and production of video games as well as some business fundamentals in a fun, entertaining, yet structured environment,' said Robert Manuel, assistant dean, Division of Entertainment, Technology, Digital Arts and Design."

On a personal side note (don't I always add one?), NYU's SCPS is also the only non-trade or non-art school that we would be competing with on visual effects curriculum, but their entire visual effects program focuses on digital technology, not on the art, design, or integration into a filmmaking environment (for instance, see how it is not in their film school either). I believe that's a draw-back for its students.

Visiting Speaker for CTIN 511, 4/14/04: Dale Herigstad

This week's visiting speaker will be Dale Hergistad, Founder and Executive Creative Director of Schematic (Culver City). Dale will discuss interfaces for Television, focusing on new models for interactivity around FINDING CONTENT, as well as new models for INTERACTING WITH CONTENT. Dale has pioneered spatial navigation as a way to accomplish both of these, and will present working examples and prototypes.

Some projects covered:

Sony Surf Space
Japanese Broadband Portal
Battlestar Galactica Enhanced
TCM Movie Mogul Game
CSI Enhanced
Survivor Enhanced

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 3pm-5pm, 4/14/04

Visiting Speaker for CTIN 309, 4/12/04: John Rocco

John Rocco, Creative Director for DisneyQuest and Mission: Space Race, will talk about the design process and user testing for location-based entertainment.

Location: IML (G142 under the Carson Stage)
Time: 2pm-3:30pm, 4/12/04

Smell Cannon

From New Scientist

A new device can track an individual, shoot an aroma directly at their nose, and leave the person next to them completely unaffected.

The air cannon was developed by Yasuyuki Yanagi and his colleagues at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan, as a technique for directing evocative smells to people exploring virtual-reality environments. The driver of a car simulator, for example, might sniff petrol as they drive into a filling station or freshly cut grass as they pass a sports field.

CA Legislation on video game sales pending

On April 13th, the California General Assembly will consider two bills (AB 1792 and AB1793) regarding video game sales. AB 1792 prohibits the sale or rental of video games to minors that contain violent material by reclassifying games as "harmful substances" such as alcohol and pornography. AB 1793 mandates segregation rules for retailers to display games based on ratings issued by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

Full details on AB 1792 and AB 1793 can be found at the California State Legislature website.

A letter to the members of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences states that "These bills treat video games differently from other forms of media." And, that they "would frustrate new major efforts undertaken by our industry and retailers to voluntarily increase awareness of the video and computer game rating system and prevent the sale of M (Mature) rated games to kids under 17."

In another letter from the International Game Developers Association, Program Director Jason Della Rocca states that "The IGDA firmly believes that games are a medium of expression that should receive the same level of respect, and protection, as other forms of art and entertainment. These bill are one more step on the slippery slope of government regulation, oversight and control over our creative endeavors."

Photo recognition software gives location

"For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your destination.

You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do? Take out your cellphone, photograph the nearest building and press send."

more

from New Scientist, 10 April 04

[PS: I don't buy it.]

Takahata-san

"This special two-day event features and explores animation and its relation to traditional and contemporary Japanese culture and society. We are particularly pleased to have the participation of celebrated director Isao Takahata, who has been invited to USC as a Provost's Distinguished Visitor. Mr. Takahata is one of the founding figures in Japanese animation, and is co-founder, together with Hayao Miyazaki, of the celebrated Studio Ghibli."

Link.

Facial Motion Capture with Dave Blackburn

Dave Blackburn, a past speaker to SCFX and the Division of Animation and Digital Arts, will be presenting techniques and challenges of animating digital faces, with a focus on facial motion capture, on Friday, 23 April, 7:00pm. He will be joined by Kim Van Holden, a digital facial animator, and will be speaking in the Ron Howard Screening Room in the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts.

A Tribute to Ray Harryhausen

The Division of Animation and Digital Arts (DADA) is proud to present a special event honoring the stop motion animation and special effects legend Ray Harryhausen. A 75th Anniversary Event, it will be held on Monday, 19 April, from 3:00pm-6:00pm in the George Lucas Building, Room 108.

Seating for this event is limited. Priority seating is available to DADA students, students in the special effects classes and SCFX members. Students, faculty, and staff from other divisions are welcome. RSVP to animseminar@yahoo.com, subject line: Harryhausen Tribute. After those with RSVPs have been seated, seats will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

IMSC Student Council Presents Speaker Series VII

The IMSC Student Council Presents Speaker Series VII - "Human Activity Understanding from Video Sensors", held on Friday, 9 March, 12:00pm-1:00pm in SAL 101.

Isaac Cohen is a researcher at the USC Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems and IMSC. His current research interests in computer vision are video segmentation, detection and tracking of moving objects, and postures and gestures recognition.

The increasing availability of video sensors in daily life environments have motivated many applications related to human activity monitoring. Dr. Cohen will discuss the automatic inference of spatio-temporal constructs from video data in two contexts:
-Video surveillance, where human activity understanding relies on accurate detection and tracking of the moving objects in the scene
-Vision-based user interfaces, where human postures and gestures are important for understanding user activity and interaction

Everyone is welcome, and there will be free pizza and soda!

ALERT! SHAMELESS PLUG: tintin @ THE ROXY

Hey folks.

So this tiny music label I've been running for about a year now has a band out on tour now, and they are playing here this coming tuesday. We just released their new CD, which was recorded by Chicago prodcuer Keith Cleversley, who has worked with lots of notable 'alternative' players such as Flaming Lips, Spiritualized, Mercury Rev, Hum and the Posies. The record has being doing amazingly well. an mp3 sample is here or visit their site at tintinmusic.com

I'm really trying to motivate people to go to this show, so here's the deal:

Free copy of the new CD and half off the ticket price of $10.00 if you want to go.

Pay the $10 at the door, and I'll give you $5 back. And yes, I'm aware that I sound like a used car salesman.

::tin tin:: @the Roxy April 13. For directions, see here

Sorry for the shameless plug, probably inappropriate for this space, but eh... leave comments if you're interested.

CTIN 488 Speakers

Game designer/producers Stuart Platt and Stevie Case will be speaking in CTIN 488 on Tuesday 13th at 7PM in G142, under the Carson stage. All interested students are welcome to attend. Platt is Executive Producer at THQ Wireless and has produced ports of classic Intellivision games for wireless as well as the FPS Red Faction for N-Gage. Stevie "KillCreek" Case is perhaps best known for her skills as a professional cyberathlete.

output

so appropriate and relevent I can't handle it., esp. concerning the recent annenberg symposium and the collection of material for our submission of a Siggraph sketch. Taken from Micheal McDonough’s 10 Things They Never Taught You at Design School via archinect

9. It all comes down to output. No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you can’t output it, distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesn’t exist. Orient yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The Output.

Visiting Speakers for CTIN 511, 4/7/04: Peter Brinson & Eddo Stern

Peter Brinson and Eddo Stern, Adjunct Professors in the Interactive Media Division and founders of c-level will talk about their recent work, Waco Resurrection, its first chapter of Endgames, a new 3D multiplayer computer game series based on alternative utopias and apocalyptic moments.

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 3pm-5pm, 4/7/04

Annenberg Symposium, 4/5/04

The USC Annenberg Center for Communication and the USC Annenberg School for Communication will commemorate the legacy of the late Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg this spring as they host the fourth annual Walter H. Annenberg Symposium.
The event, which is scheduled for Monday, April 5th, features John Seely Brown – internationally recognized for his research and writing on learning and society in the digital age – as the keynote speaker. In addition to continuing an annual spring tradition at USC, this fourth symposium serves as a showcase of cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary communication research and education taking place at USC. [And featuring CNTV's Interactive Media Program and the CNTV/IMSC collaboration mobile game: chôjô.]
The symposium kicks off with a project exposition taking place in the Embassy Room at the Davidson Conference Center. Students, faculty, and event guests will have the opportunity to view projects ranging from interactive game design, to database narratives, to robotics.
In addition to the keynote presentation, speakers will include USC President Steven B. Sample, USC Provost Lloyd Armstrong, USC Trustee Wallis Annenberg, Annenberg School Dean Geoffrey Cowan, and Annenberg Center Executive Director/Cinema School Dean Elizabeth Daley.

Davidson Conference Center » Embassy Room
Monday, April 5, 2004
11:00 AM
Admission: Free
More info and online RSVP: http://www.annenberg.edu/calendar/invite/fourth_annual.php

Guest speaker for CTAN 502: Machiko Kusahara

Machiko Kusahara will present her research in CTAN 502 on Tuesday, April 6.

Abstract: Mobile phone, or "Ketai", has become a major platform for daily communication and information retrieval in Japan. However, it is much more than a communication tool. With attached camera, video, GPS, and all sorts of available applications and services, Ketai has already become a medium that represents the popular culture. This lecture explores the current status of Ketai Culture in Japan through a visual tour, and tries to analyze its background from cultural and historical aspects.

For more information:
http://www.f.waseda.jp/kusahara/

Biography:
http://www.f.waseda.jp/kusahara/aboutme.html

Gameboy Games Online.

Thought some of you might enjoy. click me

PowerPod!

;)