IM Forum 4/27/05: The Interactive Media Division Blog's Greatest Hits LIVE!

Location: USC Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, Room 201
3131 South Figueroa Blvd
Los Angeles CA 90089-7756
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 4/27/2005

For the final meeting of this year's CTIN511 seminar, all students, faculty and staff are invited to:

• browse through the last two years of the the division blog
  
• pick out your favorite posts and/or comments
  
• come prepared to perform them LIVE at this week's 511 seminar.

Present the material any way you want: read it, set it to music and sing it, dramatize it, process it, present it in or out of context, with or without visuals, laugh track, commentary, etc. Have fun, go wild.

Each presentation five minutes or under please.

ICT tour, Wednesday April 20

The ICT tour for 1st year grads will be from 1:30 to about 5pm tomorrow afternoon, 4/21. Please be at the ICT before 1:30 so we can get registered and start promptly. This is in Marina Del Rey on the Westside and will take approximately 30 minutes from campus. Directions are on the ICT website here

IM Forum Speaker on 4/20/05 - Naomi Spellman

Interpretive Site Specific Media: Considering the experience of places, the interpretation of places, and the reframing of places through digital tools and media.

Location: USC Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, Room 201
3131 South Figueroa Blvd
Los Angeles CA 90089-7756
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 4/20/2005


Naomi Spellman is a transmedia artist and educator. Exhibited work includes networked art, video, computer-based interactive works, and graphic prints. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad. Venues have included Futuresonic <04>, the LA Freewaves Festival, the Art in Motion Festival, ASCII Digital 2000, The Harvard Map Collection, and the DART IV Symposium on Digital Arts and Culture. She has lectured on her work and on the use of locative media for interpretative content at the Joint Ventures Conference for the Stewardship of America's National Parks (Los Angeles, 2003), at the YLEM Forum at the Exploratorium (San Francisco, 2004), and will be a featured artist at the second annual Floating Points speaker series at Emerson College in March 2005. (http://institute.emerson.edu/floatingpoints/). Naomi also has over 20 years experience in commercial work, including art direction, graphic design, photography, illustration, and internet content development. Naomi teaches in the Interdisciplinary Computing Arts Program at University of California, San Diego and in the Design and Media Arts Program at the Orange Coast Community College in Costa Mesa. She was a Visiting Artist at The Evergreen State College in Washington in 2003, and has taught in the Design|Media Arts program at the University of California Los Angeles and at Parsons School of Design in New York. This past summer Jeff and Naomi were the Digital Research Unit Artists in Residence at the Media Center in Huddersfield, UK, where they developed the interpretive engine, which was shown at Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City a three-day event in Lower Manhattan in October 2004.

IMSC tour

The IMSC tour for 1st year grads will be from 10 to 12 tomorrow morning (4/13). Please be at the Powell Hall Lobby before 10 so we get registered and start promptly at 10. Campus map is here and Powell is marked as PHE - located at section B6.

IM Forum Speaker for 4/13/05: Bob Stein

IM Forum Speaker for 4/13/05: Bob Stein (in conversation with Michael Naimark, Peggy Weil, and Scott Fisher).

Title: Discursions
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 4/13/2005

From a recent post by Bob on Future of the Book:

"Some of the most important early work in interactive media took place at the Architecture Machine Group Laboratory at MIT (now the Media Lab). twenty years ago the lab made a videodisc, Discursions, containing videos of several key experiments. this early work at MIT was crucial in terms of fueling and defining my ideas about interactive media (see books unbound article).

Yesterday i met with a group of freshman in the interactive media honors program at the University of Southern California who signed up to work with the institute on presenting the Discursions material in some as-yet-to-be-decided form. the response was fantastic. (remember, these are young kids — none of whom were even born when Discursions was made). i know "awesome" is an overused word today, but that's a good description of what the students thought of what they saw. many of the experiments seemed as if they could have been done yesterday and they grasped the importance of making the work available to young people working in the field now. any fears i had that my interest in the Discursions material was merely an oppty. to walk down memory lane disappeared immediately.

We're planning to interview as many of the original researchers as possible, hoping that they can contextualize the work in terms of both its origin and its trajectory over the past twenty years".

BIO: Bob is Director of the Institute for Future of the Book, co-located at Columbia University and The University of Southern California. He was the founder of The Voyager Company. For 13 years he led the development of over 300 titles in 'The Criterion Collection', a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 'Who Built America', and the Voyager edition of 'Macbeth'. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. Seven years ago, Stein started 'Night Kitchen' to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. That work will be continued at the Institute for the Future of the Book.

IM Forum Speaker for 4/6/05: Bernie DeKoven

"Forever New - from New Games to Junkyard Sports"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 3/30/2005

Brought to you in part by the USC Game Design Community

Bernie DeKoven, New Games pioneer, author of The Well-Played Game and, most recently, Junkyard Sports, will be leading a three-part seminar, exploring the underlying principles of open-ended games that have guided his work for the last 40 years.

Click on the extended entry to read more details about this workshop, beginning this Wednesday night with the 511 Seminar.

Wed April 6: 6-8pm, Zemeckis Center Interactive Media Lab, Room 201
Bernie will present an overview of his work and his exploration of games, from the theater to the classroom, and one-on-one competitions to large-scale, collaborative, community events.

Thurs April 7: 6-8pm, Zemeckis Center Interactive Media Lab, Room 201
Workshop on open-ended games - games that are played largely for the sheer fun of it. There will be some discussion about facilitation and design and their roles in maintaining a community that is created for the purpose of sharing fun.

Fri April 8: 11am - 3pm, Lawn outside the Annenberg Center Institute for Multimedia Literacy
Junkyard Sports Workshop. This final session will explore games that use equipment, like parachutes, an earth ball, and assorted junk. We will discuss the affordances of the different materials and their impact on the development of a social contract.

Sat April 23: 11am - 3pm, Lawn outside the Annenber IML
The USC Game Design Community sponsors another New Games Day, Experiment in Cooperative Play. We will take what Bernie has taught us and experiment in group play in the outdoors. (6' Ball and Giant Parachute included)

IM Forum Speaker for 3/30/05: Ray Zone

"The Binocular Paradigm: Reflections on the History and Future of the Stereographic Image"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 3/30/2005

Stereographer and historian Ray Zone presents an overview of the past and future of the 3-D image in all its forms from art, photography, motion pictures and the computer-generated image. The interactive nature of binocular stereopsis, the perceptual basis for the stereographic image, will be discussed along with the new possibilities digital technology presents to the stereographer and stereoscopic filmmaker.

Zone is the author of the recently published Scarecrow Press book "3-D Filmmakers: Conversations with Creators of Stereoscopic Motion Pictures," creator of over 130 3-D comic books, producer of a short IMAX 3-D film called "A Better Mousetrap" and a widely published film historian whose articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and American Cinematographer.

Zone's website is viewable in anaglyph 3-D at: www.ray3dzone.com

EXTRA!!! This just in!
544 Experiments in Interactivity students
present their projects from the Stereo 3D Module!
Just before Ray's talk, right at 6:00pm sharp!
Be @ or be flat!

IM Forum Speakers for 3/23/05:Dannenbaum, Hodge & Mayer

Title: "Embedded Values"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 3/23/2005

This week's speakers are three esteemed colleagues from CNTV's Production Division. They are the co-authors of a text on "Creative Filmmaking From the Inside Out" (available here and here). Their presentation will explore how the powerful effect of films (and other media) on audiences also brings with it complex questions of responsibility for the images we create.

Recent review:
"If I were a film or television student starting out, it's the book I'd want to read, because it tells you to create from your gut and your heart and your spirit." — Norman Lear

Bios:
Jed Dannenbaum is an award-winning writer, producer, and director of nonfiction films and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television,where he teaches film production. His programs about the making of Hollywood movies have appeared often on HBO and Showtime, and have been released on video and DVD.

Carroll Hodge is an independent producer, documentary filmmaker and editor. She has taught film production at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television since 1987, following ten years as a producer with Alaska Public Television. She also travels to give workshops on the impact of film images and the development of self-awareness and creativity in student filmmakers.

Doe Mayer is the Mary Pickford Professor of Film and Television Production at the University of Southern California. She teaches documentary and narrative filmmaking, often functioning as the head of the Documentary Program for the Production Division. She has been working in film and television for the past twenty-five years and has produced, directed, and provided technical support for hundreds of productions in the U.S. and numerous developing countries. Much of this programming has been in the area of family planning, basic education, health and nutrition promotion, HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention, population, and women’s issues.

IM Forum Speaker for 3/9/05: Anne Balsamo

IM Forum Speaker for 3/9/05: Anne Balsamo

Title: Overview & Tour of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy
Location: 746 West Adams Boulevard (directions)
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 3/9/2005

The USC Annenberg Center's Institute for Multimedia Literacy conducts and supports pioneering research and development efforts designed to embrace the transformative potential of today's literacy - an expanded, multimedia literacy in which the ability to read and write in images, sound, interactivity, and movement is held to as high a standard as learning the reading and writing of text. To this end, that the Institute's scholarly projects and academic programs examine and articulate the social, cultural, and practical implications of what it now means to be literate in the twenty-first century.

IML Website
Anne's Bio

IM Forum Speakers for 3/2/05: Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki

Our speakers this week will be Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki.

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 3/2/2005

Jonah will discuss his work in the theme of "Deconstructing Networks" in both physical and online instantiations. He will discuss his projects that attempt to challenge accepted notions of network interaction from software manipulation and rule-based systems to translating virtual processes and conventions into the physical world. Projects he will discuss are BumpList, an email community for the determined, Alerting Infrastructure!, a website hit counter that destroys a building, PoliceState a fleet of radio controlled policecars who's movements are dictated by keywords sniffed on a local network, and SimpleTEXT a performance that is controlled by participants through texting messages from their mobile phones.

Personal URLs:
Projects and Work: http://www.coin-operated.com/projects
Personal site and Blog: http://www.coin-operated.com/
______________________________________________________________

Katherine will discuss her work on "socially fashioned" networks, utilizing a combination of wearable technologies, varying degrees of network infrastructure, and social behavior for deployment and propagation. Unlike fixed networks, spontaneous ad-hoc networks rely upon mobile and flexible infrastructure which can dynamically reconfigure based on necessity and circumstance. As these communication devices are integrated into intimate personal objects, into accessories and clothing, the statement that "the people are the network" becomes increasingly resonant. This presentation focuses on the project "RECOIL", "Inside/Outside", "Oscillating Windows" and "Umbrella.net." These projects serve as examples of "socially fashioned" networks.

Personal URL:
Projects and Work: http://www.kakirine.com

IM Forum Speaker for 2/23/05: Scott Kim

Title: THE ART OF PUZZLE DESIGN: PRINCIPLES, CASE STUDIES AND DESIGN PROCESS
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 2/23/2005

Abstract: From casual web games to 3d action games, puzzles are an important part of many electronic games. Whether you are designing or producing games for the web, mobile phones, computer, arcade, or console games, you need to know how to create good puzzles. In this talk, veteran puzzle designer Scott Kim explains the principles of puzzle design, shows a wide range of examples from both electronic and nonelectronic games, and describes the design process behind puzzle design.

ALSO: Scott will also do a PUZZLE DESIGN WORKSHOP for IMD students on Thursday, 2/24 from 6-9pm:

After a brief overview of the theory behind puzzles, veteran puzzle designer Scott Kim takes you through a series of design exercises that teach you how to invent and refine puzzles for games. All design exercises will be on paper. Topics include: Stealing ideas from physical puzzles. Ripping puzzles out of today's headlines. Level design for puzzle games. Translating a puzzle from one medium to another.

Scott's website

IM Forum Speakers for 2/16/05: Smith, Caudell, Paniotis

IM Forum Speakers for 2/16/05:
Steve Smith, Los Alamos National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley Labs
Tom Caudell, University New Mexico, EE, CE, CS
Paniotis, University New Mexico, EE, Music

Title: Immersive Perceptualization for Exploration, Discovery and Analysis of Extreme Dataspace
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 2/16/2005

Abstract:
Los Alamos National Laboratory, in collaboration with University of New Mexico and George Mason University have been building tool sets and frameworks with the general intention of supporting information visualization (perceptualization) solutions.

Immersion
We believe that a "sense of presence" and an identification with the data being explored and analyzed is important.
Perceptualization
We believe that "Visualization" is the correct archetype for the larger, more encompassing and useful concept of "Perceptualization".
Reification
This term means "to make the abstract real". In this case, we refer to the act of binding perceptual/representational elements (location, layout, color, shape, time, sounds, etc) to abstract data in a way that gives it a "reality".

References:

Position Paper from the Workshop on "Information Visualizaiton Software Infrastructures" at IEEE 2004 Visualization

Scientific Visualization and the Homunculus Project webpage.

Immersive Information Visualization, Supercomputing 2004 LBNL Visualization Group Demos/Projects/Presentations

IM Forum Speaker for 2/16/05: Bob Stein [POSTPONED]

IM Forum Speaker for 2/16/05: Bob Stein (in conversation with Michael Naimark, Peggy Weil, and Scott Fisher).

Title: Discursions
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 2/16/2005

From a recent post by Bob on Future of the Book:

"Some of the most important early work in interactive media took place at the Architecture Machine Group Laboratory at MIT (now the Media Lab). twenty years ago the lab made a videodisc, Discursions, containing videos of several key experiments. this early work at MIT was crucial in terms of fueling and defining my ideas about interactive media (see books unbound article).

Yesterday i met with a group of freshman in the interactive media honors program at the University of Southern California who signed up to work with the institute on presenting the Discursions material in some as-yet-to-be-decided form. the response was fantastic. (remember, these are young kids — none of whom were even born when Discursions was made). i know "awesome" is an overused word today, but that's a good description of what the students thought of what they saw. many of the experiments seemed as if they could have been done yesterday and they grasped the importance of making the work available to young people working in the field now. any fears i had that my interest in the Discursions material was merely an oppty. to walk down memory lane disappeared immediately.

We're planning to interview as many of the original researchers as possible, hoping that they can contextualize the work in terms of both its origin and its trajectory over the past twenty years".

BIO: Bob is Director of the Institute for Future of the Book, co-located at Columbia University and The University of Southern California. He was the founder of The Voyager Company. For 13 years he led the development of over 300 titles in 'The Criterion Collection', a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 'Who Built America', and the Voyager edition of 'Macbeth'. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. Seven years ago, Stein started 'Night Kitchen' to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. That work will be continued at the Institute for the Future of the Book.

IM Forum Speaker for 2/9/05: Larry Gertz

Title: Beyond Home Games: Interactivity in location based entertainment and museums.
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 2/9/2005

Abstract: With the exploding popularity of home computer games and the introduction and immediate success of massively networked internet games, a less well known and divergent interactive market continues to develop somewhat behind the scenes. More and more, location based entertainment venues like themeparks and sports bars are developing unique interactive experiences in an attempt to capture both the youth market and adults in search of more personalized, engaging entertainment. In addition, many museums and other public institutions are realizing that they must not only compete with entertainment venues for their visitor’s, but that by inviting participation in the exhibits, visitors have a more compelling and memorable museum experience, often translating into repeat visitation. This presentation will focus on these less well known interactive markets, how they differ from more traditional interactive venues, what works and doesn’t work in location based interactives, and an overview of successful economic models.

Bio: Larry spent twenty years at Walt Disney Imagineering during which time he was a Producer and Creative Vice President of Epcot, as well as heading major interactive initiatives for the Walt Disney Company. During his tenure at Disney, Gertz creatively directed the development of DisneyQuest, a 100,000 sq. ft. indoor, interactive themepark in Florida and Chicago. His most recent museum work includes The Science fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

IM Forum for 2/2/05: Jim Banister

Title: "Narrative for Networked Media: Form vs. Function, and the Nature of Story in the Age of Digital Networks"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 2/2/2005

Developing content to engage audiences in the digital age requires a deeper understanding of the nature of forms of digital media. Both as creator and consumer of media, we are communicating and entertaining from entirely new perspectives. From the fundamentals of media creation to the secrets of producing "hit" web and wireless programming, seminar participants learn the fundamentals of networked media (such as web and wireless) and how these emergent media differ from static or traditional linear media (such as television, film, print) and interactive media (such as games); and how engaging audiences radically differs between them. Learn to employ the "four Cs" of programming (content, community, commerce, and code) and explore the primary colors of narrative: storytelling (telling a story); storyforming (designing engines that allows a user to form stories); and storydwelling (designing experiences that allow participants to "live" a story, actually or virtually). Special emphasis is given to networked media-- media that allow one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many interactions between creator and audience, such as the Web, wireless, and all forms of broadband Internet; and to "enginets," a form of narrative that is native to networked media, and which has fueled the phenomenal success of virtually all "hit" web and wireless sites/services.

Presented by Jim Banister, author of "Word of Mouse: The New Age of Networked Media," and Managing Director of Spectrum MediaWorks.

IM Forum for 1/26/05: Bing Gordon

Bing Gordon will be speaking to us at tonight's 511 seminar in the ZML. He is Executive Vice President and Chief Creative Officer at Electronic Arts.

Bio from the EA site:

Mr. Gordon has served as Executive Vice President and Chief Creative Officer since March 1998. Prior to this, he served as Executive Vice President, Marketing since October 1995. From August 1993 to October 1995, he served as Executive Vice President of EA Studios and as Senior Vice President of Entertainment Production since February 1992. He also served as Senior Vice President of Marketing, as General Manager of EA Studios, as Vice President of Marketing, as Director of Advertising and as Vice President of the former entertainment division while employed by the company. Bing holds a B.A. degree from Yale University and an M.B.A. degree from Stanford University.

IM Forum for 1/19/05: Interactive Panoramic Cinema

Title: "Experiments in Interactive Panoramic Cinema"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 1/19/2005

Steve Anderson, Susana Ruiz, and Scott Fisher will give a summary of the work done over the past year with Sony's Fourth View panoramic video camera system. This will be a runthrough of a paper to be given by Steve tomorrow in the annual SPIE conference in San Jose on "The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2005" chaired by Mark Bolas.

Paper abstract: For most of the past 100 years, cinema has been the premier medium for defining and expressing relations to the visible world. However, cinematic spectacles delivered in darkened theaters are predicated on a denial of both the body and the physical surroundings of the spectators who are watching it. To overcome these deficiencies, filmmakers have historically turned to narrative, seducing audiences with compelling stories and providing realistic characters with whom to identify. This paper describes several research projects in interactive panoramic cinema that attempt to sidestep the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema and instead are based on notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship rather than just storytelling. Example projects include interactive works developed with the use of a unique 360 degree camera and editing system, and also development of panoramic imagery for a large projection environment with 14 screens on 3 adjacent walls in a 5-4-5 configuration with observations and findings from an experiment projecting panoramic video on 12 of the 14, in a 4-4-4 270 degree configuration.

IM Forum Speaker for 1/12/05: Bruce Damer

Title: "Virtual worlds beyond games: From your street corner to the dunes of Mars"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 1/12/2005

Abstract:
Bruce Damer will give a sweeping review and demos of the virtual worlds medium from its beginnings in VR and the first multi user spaces on the Internet to some of his current projects in industrial simulations for NASA's return to the moon and learning spaces for children with autism. During this talk, Bruce and Biota.org will make a special announcement involving a NASA/DigitalSpace sponsored global initiative which will involve USC.

Bio:
In 1995, Bruce founded DigitalSpace, the Contact Consortium and Biota.org, three organizations dedicated to pushing the envelope of the virtual worlds medium. Bruce is a 1986 graduate of the USC School of Engineering.

Links:
DigitalSpace Corporation:
http://www.digitalspace.com

Contact Consortium and Biota.org
http://www.ccon.org
http://www.biota.org

About Bruce Damer:
http://www.damer.com

IM Forum for 12/1: 3++

For our final IM Forum, we are pleased to have 3 mini-presentations, 30 minutes each:

Marientina Gotsis - "The Everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to the thesis show and life before and after INSIDE_OUT"

Kellee Santiago - “Interactive Theatre: Participation, Choice, and Implications”

Justin Hall - “Compulsive Oversharing”

PLUS - dinner at 6pm

PLUS - end of the semester after party at the Figueroa!

As usual Wednesday eve, Dec 1, in the USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201

IM Forum Speaker for 11/17/04: Michael Naimark

This week's speaker will be Michael Naimark, Visting Associate Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television.

Title: "Globalism and Interactive Media"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 11/17/04

This presentation explores how interactive media facilitates global connectedness and speculates about its aesthetic and cultural impact as interactive media technologies continue to evolve. Lots of examples will be shown, loosely organized around multimedia community “sweeps,” pop-geography publications, map hacking, global databases, and (duh) placed-based immersion.

A rough (but dated) explanation is here.

IM Forum Speaker for 11/10/04: Mark Bolas

This week's speaker will be Mark Bolas, Visting Associate Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television. The presentation will consist of a quick and broad overview of projects and papers Mark has helped to create. Depending on how it goes, Mark is hoping to give an overview of topics, and then have the students decide on the direction of the presentation. Here is a rough outline to allow the students to get up to speed on the topics: View image

Title: "But I Don't Want to Pick a Title"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 11/10/04

Related references:
- Fakespace Labs website
- The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2005 (SPIE conference).
- Research at Keio SFC
- Virtual Brewery Adventure installation.

IM Forum Speakers for 11/3/04: Erik Loyer & Steve Anderson

This week's speakers will be Erik Loyer, Adjunct Professor and Steve Anderson,Visting Assistant Research Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television.

Titles: Eric Loyer: “Vectors Journal”
Steve Anderson: “Visual Research”
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 11/3/04

Additional references:
Bios here:
The Vectors Journal is here.
One of Erik's Sites is here.
One of Steve's sites is here.

IM Forum Speaker for 10/27/04: Tracy Fullerton

This week's speaker will be Tracy Fullerton, Visting Assistant Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television.
And Co-Author of Game Design Workshop

Title: “Game Studies”
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 10/27/04

IM Forum Speaker for 10/20/04: Julian Bleecker

This week's speaker will be Julian Bleeker, Visting Assistant Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television.

Also including a presentation by the IM Division's Mobile Media Research Group on current projects Patholog and Chojo.

Title: “Mobile Experiences”

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 10/20/04

Recent interview in "ON" magazine (pg.45)

Julian's project website, Techkwondo.com

IM Forum Speaker for 10/13/04: Chris Swain

This week's speaker will be Chris Swain, Visting Assistant Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television and Co-Director of the EA Game Innovation Lab.

Also following, a presentation by the IGF team on their "Dyadin" game prototype.

Title: Game Play Innovation

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 9/22/04

IM Forum for 10/6/04: Advanced Interactive Project Briefs

This week Mike Brinker, Will Carter, Todd Furmanski, Kurt MacDonald, Tripp
Millican and Stephanie Weinstein will be describing their Advanced
Interactive Projects, followed by a break-out session which will allow for one on one demonstrations and discussions for all who can attend.

IM Forum Speakers for 9/29/04: Jim Rowson & Kurt MacDonald

This week's speakers will be Jim Rowson,Prinicpal Scientist in HP's Consumer Applications and Systems Lab, and Kurt MacDonald, 3rd Year MFA student, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television.

Title: Custom Television and the Phiz Network

Abstract: One of HP Lab's new projects, custom television, is attempting to look at consumer digital entertainment beyond TIVO. Being a new project, we'll be largely framing the problem and outlining our social, business, and technical approaches. Kurt MacDonald will be summarizing his summer intern work designing and mocking up custom television shows and entertaining discovery methods for the (fictional) phiz network. He will be illustrating his approaches with example video and showing how to configure custom shows, generate them using templates, and build effective photo videos using tried and true cinema techniques.

Bio:
Jim Rowson is a Prinicpal Scientist in the Consumer Applications and Systems Lab within HP's corporate research lab. Jim is currently investigating applications and technology to support HP's intentions in the consumer digital entertainment area. Prior to HP, Jim spent about 20 years building software tools for hardware, semiconductor, and software engineers. He has a BS in engineering and an MS and PhD in computer science from Caltech.

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 9/29/04

Related Readings:

1. Marc Davis @ UC Berkeley has some interesting ideas about metadata for video

2. Paper on "virtual channels"

3. Personalization of TV workshop series
[Workshop on Personalization in Future TV, 2001]
[TV'02: the 2nd Workshop on Personalization in Future TV]
[TV'03: the 3rd Workshop on Personalization in Future TV]
[TV'04: the 4th Workshop on Personalization in Future TV - Methods, Technologies, Applications for Personalized TV ]

IM Forum Speaker for 9/22/04: Peggy Weil & Scott Fisher

This week's speakers will be Peggy Weil, Adjunct Professor, and Scott Fisher, Chair, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television.

Title: First Person Media

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 9/22/04

Further Readings:
1. “What’s Your Perspective”
By Richard Rouse III in SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Newsletter, August, 99

2. Lifelog

IM Forum Speaker for 9/15/04: Michael Lew

IM Forum Speaker for 9/15/04: Michael Lew
Title: “What is happening to the film form as the medium becomes computational?”

This week's speaker will be Michael Lew, Adjunct Professor and Visiting Scholar, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television.

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 9/15/04
Abstract:
As media-reading devices are all starting to have computational power, the vision machine (camera) and the Turing machine (computer) are converging. Recorded media comes along with code or behaviour that defines how to read it. The editor becomes an interaction designer. The problem with film was that the time flow was imposed. But now that footage has freed itself from the one-dimensional linearity of the celluloid or tape substrate, film has exploded as a constellation of shots on a multi-dimensional narrative space that can be explored at the viewer's own pace. Elastic timeline, multiple windows, levels of depth allow interactive narration to achieve cubism in cinema. We will discuss the implications of these ideas on interactive film for one or two users, video on stage in theatre and live improvised cinema in performance.

His work " Office Voodoo" is an interactive film installation for two people.
More info here.
Bio here.

IM Forum Speaker for 9/8/04: Perry Hoberman

IM Forum Speaker for 9/8/04: Perry Hoberman
Title: “Recycling Post-Consumer Media Content”

The first speaker for this semester will be Perry Hoberman, Research Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television.

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:30pm-9pm, 9/8/04

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.

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

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 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

Visiting Speakers for 3/31/04: Alan Kay & David Smith

Alan and David will talk about their respective work on Squeak and Croquet and summer intern opportunities.

More about Alan here and here.
More about David here and here.

David Smith and Yoshiki Ohshima navigating the Croquet virtual space.
(Alan couldn't make it this time due to illness).

Visiting Speaker (and Workshop) for 3/10/04: Pete Barr-Watson

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time:
Lecture 3pm-5pm, 3/10/04
Workshop 7pm-9pm, 3/10/04

Title: "Skip Intro"

Abstract:
Flash takes some stick for being the pinnacle of web 'fluff'. Superfluous, bandwidth hungry and pointless. But there's a quiet revolution happening and Flash is getting serious. Rich Internet applications, mobile device content and produced for TV animation are all within the scope of this $500 application. Come and see why the days of 'skip intro' buttons are over...

More from/about Pete here.

CTIN 511 Field Trip 3/10/04: IMSC

First Year IM Grads will visit the Engineering School's NSF funded Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) next week on 3/10/04. IMSC is located inside the USC campus in building EEB (Electrical Engineering Building), Suite 131, at the corner of McClintock Avenue and West 37th Place. The visit will start promptly at 10am, so please meet there about 5 minutes before.

Visitng Speaker for 3/3/04: John Underkoffler

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

Title: SCIENCE GOES TO THE MOVIES
Abstract:
There is now an unprecedented degree of interplay between science
and the cinema which (though lamentably not much manifest at the
script level, yet) sees the migration of ideas from the science
and technology community into films; while the influence of movies
on science and engineering minds is more palpable than ever. At
the same time, the sudden computational and financial accessibility
of digital production tools -- specialized originally for the needs
of the filmmaking world -- offers the scientist and engineer new
means for prototyping and communication (though -- again a 'though'
-- these opportunities are to date far from fully known,
acknowledged, or seized). In a third interbraided strand, the
filmmaking process is itself emerging as a unique human
organizational structure with the promise of application to other
unsuspecting fields.

In contrast to these abstractions, the seminar itself
will be rife with specificity and examples, drawn
from the production of the films Minority Report and
The Hulk, from two decades of research at the MIT Media
Laboratory, and from recent efforts at hybridizing those
disparate worlds.

From a recent interview in Salon "Will the future really look like "Minority Report"? Jet packs? Mag-lev cars? Two of Spielberg's experts explain how they invented 2054.":

"John Underkoffler, of the left-brained variety, spent the better part of his pre-Hollywood years as a researcher at MIT's prestigious, multidisciplinary Media Lab. There, he toiled on a myriad of intellectually minded projects encompassing everything from holography to computer graphics to electronic publishing. Having survived his virgin foray into the film industry with "Minority Report," Underkoffler now finds himself a wanted man, serving as a science and technology consultant on Ang Lee's anticipated comic-book opus "The Hulk.""

His work at the Media Lab:

"The I/O Bulb and the Luminous Room are the two central ideas in a project whose goal is the pervasive transformation of architectural space, so that every surface is rendered capable of displaying and collecting visual information.."

CTIN 511 Forum 2/25

The plan for CTIN 511 on Wednesday, 2/25 is a fieldtrip to the John Klima exhibit "Toy World" at the Bank in downtown LA. The gallery closes at 5pm, so we should try to leave by 3pm at the lastest from the ZML parking lot.

Will posted more info about it here.

Visiting Speakers for 2/18/04: Steven Drucker & Curtis Wong

Location USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 3pm - 5pm

Title: "The Next Media Research Group and Microsoft Research"

Microsoft Next Media Research group focuses on exploring what new
consumer media experiences are possible with the growth in computing
power, connectivity and storage in a compelling, elegant and transparent
way in the 3 to 10 year timeframe. The group envisions consumer
information and entertainment experiences not available today and builds
or combines technologies from other Microsoft Research groups and crafts
intuitive user interfaces and compelling scenarios to deliver that
experience. Rather than focus on old media or new media, the group
attempts to develop working prototypes of the Next forms of media
possible from new convergent technologies, hence the name.

Next Media's research focus spans the linear and interactive media
spectrum from television, broadband, and gaming to combinations of
traditional media forms or emerging media forms too new to have a name.
The group partners with product groups within Microsoft and select
outside content partners such as museums, and public broadcasting to
develop conceptual and working prototypes which best demonstrate the
functionality or vision for media that can anchor new businesses,
services and consumer experiences.

We'll talk about the group and show some of the recent projects.

SPEAKER BIOS:
Dr. Steven M. Drucker has been the lead researcher for the Next Media
Research Group in Microsoft Research for the last 4 years where he has
been looking at how the addition of user interaction transforms
conventional media. He is particularly interested in database
visualization for consumers or where art meets technology for user
interfaces. While in the group, he has filed an additional 18 patents on
technologies as diverse as remotely operated personal video recorders,
spectator oriented gaming, and new visualization techniques for media
databases.

Previously he was the lead researcher in the Virtual Worlds Group also
in Microsoft Research. During his tenure there he helped architect a
platform for multi-user virtual environments, filed 12 patents, and
published papers in subjects ranging from architectures for multi-user,
multimedia systems to online social interaction.

Before coming to Microsoft, he received his Ph.D. from the Computer
Graphics and Animation Group at the MIT Media Lab in May 1994. His
thesis research was on intelligent camera control interfaces for
graphical environments. Dr. Drucker graduated Magna Cum Laude with
Honors in Neurosciences from Brown University and went on to complete
his masters at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT doing
research in robot learning.
His published papers have been in such areas as multi-user environments,
online social interaction, hypermedia research, human and robot
perceptual capabilities, robot learning, parallel computer graphics, and
human interfaces for camera control.

Curtis Wong is Group Manager of Microsoft’s Next Media Research group responsible for envisioning where Microsoft’s future interactive media technologies can enhance the consumer media experience. His recent external collaboration with WGBH Interactive to produce the broadband enhanced documentary Commanding Heights ~ The Battle for the World Economy, won a 2002 International BAFTA and was nominated for the first Interactive TV Emmy. His group has built strategic prototypes which have influenced key functionality and features across the company for upcoming products.

Prior to Microsoft, Curtis was Director of Intel Productions creating www.artmuseum.net the first Broadband blockbuster art museum exhibition network in 1997 with its first exhibition being the Van Gogh's Van Goghs show at the National Gallery of Art. Curtis also led the production of the first enhanced digital television program to be broadcast in the United States - The Poetry of Structure that accompanied the broadcast of the Ken Burns film Frank Lloyd Wright.

Prior to Intel, Curtis was General Manager of Corbis Productions where he was responsible for the creation of a critically acclaimed series of CD-ROM's. Curtis produced and directed
A Passion for Art which Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal called “The greatest art appreciation software I’ve ever seen and one of the best CD-ROM titles of any kind since the multimedia revolution began.” Curtis brought together the creative teams that he would direct to create 4 additional titles culminating in the critically acclaimed FDR and Leonardo da Vinci. These titles collectively garnered four Codie awards (the Software Publisher’s Association highest award), MacUser’s Eddy and the coveted 5-Mice award, eight Gold New Media Invision awards including the Award of Excellence, four New York Festivals Gold Medals, Washington Software Association’s highest award - Consumer Product of the Year, and the Communication Arts Award of Excellence 1995, 1996 and 1997.

At the Voyager Company he produced Multimedia Beethoven, the first multimedia CD-ROM for the PC. Curtis produced feature films on laserdisc for Criterion Collection which has been acknowledged by the New York Times (Aug 16, 2003) as the pioneer in letterboxing, commentaries and supplementary content common on today’s DVDs. Criterion’s work continues to exemplify the best quality of such work in the industry. His laserdisc films have twice won Video Magazine’s highest award - the VIVA Gold for Best Video Product of the Year, and gotten two thumbs up from Siskel and Ebert in 1992.

He is included in Richard Saul Wurman's 2002 publication, Who's Really Who: 1000 Most Creative Individuals in the USA as well as “Interactive Week’s roster of the 50 most powerful people in the interactive industry”.

Curtis serves as the technology advisor to the Seattle Art Museum, the Barnes Foundation and the Universal Leonardo museum consortium. He has in the past served on the advisory boards of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS Online, The Canadian Film Centre, The American Film Institute, and Ovation the Arts Network.

CTIN 511 Fieldtrip: ICT

The field trip to Institue for Creative Technologies for CTIN 511 this week has been rescheduled by ICT staff from Wednesday Morning to Friday afternoon (2/13) . The current plan is to meet there at 3pm sharp. Latecomers may not be admitted through security. Before the visit, please browse their website here.

There is a map to the location here

Visiting Speaker for 2/11/04: Dan Winters

Speaker: Dan Winters, VP Product Development Buena Vista Games
Title: "The Business of Interactive Entertainment"

Location: USC Zemeckis Center
Time: 3-5pm

Visiting Speaker for 2/4/04: S. Joy Mountford

Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 3pm

Title: " How to find out what users really say about products?"

S. Joy Mountford, Founder and Principal, idbias, CA.
Joy Mountford has been designing interfaces for over 25 years on applications from aircraft to personal computers to consumer devices and has become an internationally recognized leader in user-centered interaction design. She has led design efforts creating interfaces to audio and visual devices, interfaces between the electronic world and the physical world of printed materials, and for toys, as well as interactive music creation and generation. She pioneered the Interface Design Project sponsoring interdisciplinary design at universities around the world, and continues to lead this effort for various sponsor companies. She headed the Human Interface Group at Apple Computer for 8 years and then moved to Interval Research to lead a series of consumer music product teams. Her interaction design firm, idbias, works for a range of clients to design, redesign, prototype and evaluate interfaces to help people be more effective with their technology.

511 Forum & Field Trip Topics

Scott is asking everyone to suggest topics for the 511 Forums and TBD Field Trips (see 511 syllabus). Below are a few that came up in (non-blog) conversations over the last couple days. Please contribute your ideas and/or respond before class this Wednesday.

GREEN SCREEN PROCESS:
How does one prepare for this? What digital camera equipment is required? What is the post process? Can we see a demonstration in RCZ?

360 CAMERAS & QUICKTIME VR:
What is the advantage of the 360 cameras over a program like Stitcher? What equipment and/or software do we have? Can we see a demonstration?

FOLEY & MUSIC:
Can we see the Foley and sound stages at work? How does one compose a musical score for an interactive project? What resources do we have at USC?

MULTIPLE CAMERA SHOOT:
Can we see a live multiple camera shoot that may apply to a web cast? Are there any events that we can participate in to test this technology?

THEME PARKS & LBE ATTRACTIONS:
Visit Disneyland, California Adventure, and/or GameWorks and (If possible) get a behind the scenes look.

Visiting Speaker for 1/21/04: Erkki Huhtamo

Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 3pm

Title: "Hand-cranking toward Cyberspace: an Archaeology of Interactivity"
Abstract:
The development of interactive media is usually associated with the
emergence of the computer as a major social, technological, economic and
cultural force. A sharp cultural rupture has been posited, dividing the
"passivating" media of the past from the "empowering" (inter)active
experiences of the present, made possible of the omnipresence of digital
applications. But can the situation be so clear-cut? Did interactive media
really appear so abruptly, without any cultural precedents? This lecture
argues against such simplified polarities, demonstrating that interactivity
has a rich and multi-layered "pre-digital" cultural background that needs
to be explored.

For more information please visit :
http://www.design.ucla.edu/people/faculty/erkki_huhtamo
and
http://www.mediamatic.net/cwolk/view/16160
and
http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/huhtamo/huhtamo_e.html

Visiting Speaker for 1/14/04: Michael Naimark

Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 3pm

Title: "(Re)Presenting Place"
Abstract:
"Place representation" has a rich history, a complex mix of media technology and quality of expression. Advances in new media such as immersive capture and display, computer modeling, and the Internet have raised the bar. And, with our increasing understanding of psychophysics and cognition, many believe that the dictum "just like being there" may finally be fulfilled.

But place runs deep: we "know" we are "here." This knowledge is cultural and political as well as technical and perceptual. It's also deeply personal. Placing cameras everywhere and building 3D computer models have their implications, and it's no surprise that technological enthusiasts and social critics hold differing (and often uninformed) perspectives. The arts community can play an important role both as bridge-builder and provocateur.

Naimark will present his past and current projects in this context. He has "moviemapped" Aspen from the street, Paris from the sidewalk, San Francisco from the air, Karlsruhe from the rail, and Banff from hiking trails, and has filmed panoramic experiments in Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Angkor, and Timbuktu. He is currently exploring live Internet applications for immersive place representation.

For more information please visit <http://www.naimark.net/>.

Visiting Speaker for 4/24(@UCLA): Mark Davis

Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology

Marc Davis
UC Berkeley

Thursday, April 24th, 2003, 3pm-5pm
GSE&IS Building, Room 111
(just west of the Research Library)

Abstract: Over the past five hundred years, we have seen the development of technologies and social practices that enable the educated populace to read and write text. However, with video (including motion pictures and television), millions of people "read" it everyday, but very few are able to effectively "write" it. The changing of this asymmetry will require research and innovation that more intimately integrate video and computation. This presentation will address the theoretical issues, core technologies, and applications that will enable video to become a computational data type that people can easily create, access, share, and reuse. Specifically, the research challenge is to develop technologies that create metadata about the semantic content and syntactic structure of video, and that use that metadata to automate the production and reuse of video. Addressing this challenge requires a methodology that interleaves the construction and analysis of artifacts and theories, and that combines ideas and technologies from multiple disciplines: information science, computer science, film theory and production, media studies, and human-centered user interaction design.

Marc Davis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley where he directs the Garage Cinema Research group. His research and teaching encompass the theory, design, and development of digital media systems for creating and using media metadata to automate media production and reuse. From 1999 to 2002, he was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Amova, a developer of media automation and personalization technology. He earned his BA in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his MA in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his PhD in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.

Hosted by: UCLA Information Studies Seminar

Map to IS dept.: http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/about/contact.htm#map

Visiting Speaker for 4/17: Hisham Bizri

Our speaker for CTIN 511 on 4/17 will be Hisham Bizri, currently a Research Fellow (artist in residence) at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he has also taught a number of classes in the Media Arts and Sciences Department at MediaLab. Seminar will meet in the IML at 2pm.

He is a filmmaker and visual artist and has created a number of experimental and digital films in the fiction, documentary, and experimental genres. He has also created interactive art pieces for the CAVE which have shown at Ars Electronica among others. More info: http://web.mit.edu/~bizri/www

Fieldtrip Thursday!

This is just a reminder about the fieldtrip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology this Thursday, 4/10. Let's all meet at the museum at 2:30pm. There are directions on the website: http://www.mjt.org/