I3D 2006 - Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games

I3D 2006 - Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games

March 14 - 17, 2006
Electronic Arts Campus
Redwood Shores, CA

http://www.siggraph.org/conferences/i3d/

I3D is the leading-edge conference for real-time 3D computer graphics
and techniques that combine 3D computer graphics with human
interaction. The conference continues to focus on the hottest research
in 3D game technology, interactive visualization and visual depiction,
interactive modeling, user-assisted techniques, and applications. Its
early fall deadline provides the perfect outlet for your summer work!

NEW in 2006
===========

- We are adding a doctoral research seminar for selected PhD students
to discuss their ongoing research with each other and a panel of
experienced I3D researchers.

Submission deadlines (11:59 pm EST):
====================================

Paper abstracts: September 20, 2005
Paper submissions: September 27, 2005
Doctoral seminar submissions: February 4, 2005
Poster and demo submissions: February 4, 2005

I3D 2006 - Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games

March 14 - 17, 2006
Electronic Arts Campus
Redwood Shores, CA

http://www.siggraph.org/conferences/i3d/

I3D is the leading-edge conference for real-time 3D computer graphics
and techniques that combine 3D computer graphics with human
interaction. The conference continues to focus on the hottest research
in 3D game technology, interactive visualization and visual depiction,
interactive modeling, user-assisted techniques, and applications. Its
early fall deadline provides the perfect outlet for your summer work!

NEW in 2006
===========

- We are adding a doctoral research seminar for selected PhD students
to discuss their ongoing research with each other and a panel of
experienced I3D researchers.

Submission deadlines (11:59 pm EST):
====================================

Paper abstracts: September 20, 2005
Paper submissions: September 27, 2005
Doctoral seminar submissions: February 4, 2005
Poster and demo submissions: February 4, 2005

Conference Papers

We solicit papers that present original research related to all
techniques that combine 3D computer graphics with human interaction,
explicitly including (but not limited to) research that has
applicability for 3D games. Original papers are limited to 8 pages,
including all figures. The submission of a video to accompany the
paper is allowed. Details regarding electronic submission will be
available on the web page. Accepted papers will be published in an
archival-quality proceedings distributed by ACM.

Doctoral Seminar **NEW**

The Doctoral Seminar will provide the opportunity for doctoral
students working in areas relevant to I3D to present and discuss their
research in an informal setting. Each accepted doctoral student will
give a short presentation to other doctoral seminar participants and
a panel of experts in the field. Ample time will be provided for
interactive discussions of the work and future directions. Accepted
doctoral seminar participants will also be given the opportunity to
present a poster of their work to the larger I3D audience. Preference
will be given to students who already have a dissertation proposal.
Submission will be in the form of a two page extended abstract, to be
evaluated based on originality, quality of research, and potential
impact on interactive graphics.

Posters and Demos

The posters program offers a unique opportunity to showcase innovative
techniques in games and other commercial products, work in progress,
student projects, or non-traditional research. We encourage (but do not require) posters that can be presented with an accompanying live
demo. A posters "fast forward" session will give each presenter the
chance to give a brief description of their poster prior to the poster
sessions. Poster sessions will provide a casual setting to allow
presenters to show their work and have one-on-one dialogue with
attendees and also to control the pace and level of the presentations.

Submissions will be reviewed by a panel of experts in the field.
Review criteria include contribution of the work to the game,
graphics, and HCI communities, validity of the results, originality of
the work, and clarity of presentation. A poster proposal consists of a
one page extended abstract in ASCII text or PDF format. The authors
are also encouraged to submit a preliminary PDF or Powerpoint version
of the poster.

Eyebeam Circuit and R&D Residencies

Eyebeam

Eyebeam has developed Circuit in response to the need for emerging artists, particularly those exiting graduate-level programs (ie artists who have not shown their work in a professional setting or outside of university) to exhibit work and receive professional critique and exposure to networks within the art and technology community. This three-day intensive program offers a particular group of artists working and experimenting with new tools and practices, the opportunity to:

- meet fellow artists working with similar media;
- have the experience of exhibiting work at an art and technology center in New York City
- receive critique from peers and professional curators, gallerists, artists, academics, writers, theorists, etc.
- publicly present work during a public event at Eyebeam to gain feedback from peers, professionals and the public

Call For Fellows
Eyebeam R&D seeks inaugural fellows to work on creative technology projects in the Eyebeam Open Lab. The fellowship is a unique opportunity to participate in a new kind of research environment and contribute to the public domain.

The Open Lab is dedicated to public domain R&D. We are seeking artists, hackers, designers and engineers to come to Eyebeam for a year to develop pioneering work. The ideal fellow has experience creating innovative creative technology projects, a love of collaborative development, and a desire to distribute his or her work as widely as possible.

Participation in the R&D Fellows program includes:

One year fellowship
4 days/week commitment
$30,000 annual stipend + health benefits

Casual Games Conference

http://www.casualgamesconference.com/

The new Casual Games Conference takes place July 19-20, 2005 in Seattle, Washington and provides insights to the business opportunities and design considerations required for developers, publishers and distributors to succeed in this rapidly-expanding game industry segment.

This looks interesting! More for us non-hardcore gamers who play Zuma and what not on every portable device they own...

Slamdance Student Game Competition

Slamdance Games has announced a Student Game Design Competition for this year's Slamdance Film Festival. Selected finalists will be displayed on Slamdance’s website and be shown at the Games venue during the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City.

Deadline: August 1, 2005
More at: www.slamdance.com

Slamdance is calling for all new games from student designers, programmers, and artists. Selected games will be judged online, and winners will be announced before the Slamdance Film Festival, which occurs in Park City, Utah, January 19-27, 2006. There will be two awards; Physics, an award that will judge engine, tool, and A.I. programming, implementation, and game play; and Philosophy, an award that will judge story, character design, sound design, and visual effects.

Game submissions have an early-postmarked deadline of August 1, 2005 and a final postmarked deadline of September 19, 2004. The entrance fee is $25 for games that meet the early deadline, and $35 for others. Entrants must submit 3 hard copies of their game and provide a URL. Entry forms and application information are available through the Slamdance website at www.slamdance.com.

ISEA2006: "Commuity Domain" CFP

ISEA2006 Symposium
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR COMMISSIONED WORKS
THEME: COMMUNITY DOMAIN
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu./calls.html
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/communitydomain1/

This is an invitation by the ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge to groups and individuals to submit proposals for interactive artworks and projects reflecting on the thematic of "Community Domain". Up to three commissions will be awarded, and the results will be shown at the ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose Festival.

ABOUT THE ISEA2006 SYMPOSIUM AND ZEROONE SAN JOSE FESTIVAL

The 2006 edition of the internationally renowned ISEA Symposium will be held August 5-13, 2006, in San Jose, California.

The Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international non-profit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technologies. Prior host cities include Helsinki, Paris, Sydney, Montreal, Chicago, Manchester and Nagoya.

ZeroOne San Jose is a milestone festival to be held biennially that makes accessible the work of the most innovative contemporary artists in the world. In 2006 it will be held in conjunction with the ISEA2006 Symposium.

See http://isea2006.sjsu.edu for more information about the Festival and Symposium.

ABOUT THE COMMUNITY DOMAIN CALL
Over the next year leading up to August 2006, individuals or groups will be commissioned to work with various San Jose communities combining technologies such as GPS, mobile communications or digital imagery to map their experiences and to tell their stories. These experiences and stories will become part of the fabric of the festival. In this way, the Festival becomes not only a glimpse of the possibilities of art and technology, but using some of those same innovative technologies, it is a celebration of the diversity found in San Jose and a platform for community members to
participate.

A wide range of cultural contexts, media, art disciplines and venues are feasible within the definition of "Community Domain". See
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/thematic.html#community for more about the theme.

San Jose has a very diverse and hybrid population, and we are particularly interested in projects that traverse different communities.

Three commissions will be offered for projects related to the Community Domain theme: one at a level of $25,000 and two at the level of $5,000.

Proposals may be submitted by individuals or groups: professional artistic credentials and advanced forms of technology are not required. The proposal narrative should be no more than three pages in length and should cover five topics:

Description of the project: What are the characteristics of the project? In what ways will the project connect to the theme of Community Domain?

Audience: In what fashion will an audience be engaged in this project? In what ways will the project seek to engage audience members of varying cultural backgrounds?

Technology: What types of technology will be incorporated into the project?

Personnel: Please identify the key individuals/groups involved in this project, and their qualifications.

Budget: Please provide a brief explanation of how funds will be used to support this project.

Special Considerations:
Projects will be welcome in a variety of traditional or new forms of art, media and physical environments. For example, projects in formal theater or exhibition settings or informal community or outdoor settings will be appropriate. All art forms are welcome including literary, performing,visual, media and multidisciplinary. Appropriate forms of technology include, but are not limited to, mobile communications, Worldwide Web, recorded audio or video, film, robotics and digital imagery.

Projects involving teams and collaboration are encouraged.

All projects should incorporate an element of "shared space" that will be accessible to persons of varied backgrounds.

Preference will be given to projects involving artists and other personnel having significant familiarity with the communities and cultures of San Jose and Silicon Valley.

TIMELINE
Proposals must be submitted by August 1, 2005. Proposals will only be
accepted online at http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/submissions . All proposals will be reviewed by a panel of distinguished authorities on culture, art,technology, and community. Final awards will be announced by September 1, 2005. All awards are subject to ZeroOne San Jose's fundraising efforts.

INQUIRIES
Questions regarding this call for proposals can be addressed to
communitydomain@yproductions.com

PLEASE NOTE
There will be a subsequent call, beginning September 1, 2005, for existing projects related to the Community Domain theme that do not, necessarily,focus on San Jose / Silicon Valley.

http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu./calls.html
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/communitydomain1/

Keitai City Competition

A new competition sponsored by NTT DoCoMo looking for ideas on how the mobile phone will transform urban environments:

Few tools have become as widely accepted in everyday life in recent years as cell phones. Keitai ("portable"), the shortened term for a cell phone, has come to mean much more than a portable communication terminal; the keitai has become an indispensable tool for constructing the infrastructure of everyday life; the term has taken on a greatly expanded significance to mean new lifestyle media.

How is the city, our immediate environment, developing under these circumstances? In times of great change, the city, in keeping with, or in critical reaction to, that change, has also undergone changes of guise or structure. What sorts of conditions will the city generate in the future, as the keitai becomes an integral part of our lifestyle?

This spatial design competition seeks new proposals concerning the relationship between the urban environment and keitai in the near future. What sorts of conditions, forms and environments will the "keitai city" exhibit? Competition entrants are encouraged to propose images of the future of a "keitai society" unconstrained by preconceptions, or proposals for new spatial designs that make today's assumed worldview seem hackneyed.

1st DoCoMo International Architectural Design Competition 2005 - Top Page

Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment

Anyone going? Seems like some really good power players are speaking, including Chris Crawford, Will Wright, and our very own Bing Gordon.

"There are so many reasons for the game industry, academia, and the commercial community to share knowledge," notes Ian Davis, Ph.D., CEO of Mad Doc Software and AIIDE Publicity Chair. "With the incredible growth of the game industry, many universities are starting to put a lot of resources into the study of game technology, and game developers will find that a lot of the hardest AI problems they’re starting to encounter have already been tackled by some of the brightest researchers. I think that the best games moving forward will do a great deal more with both established advanced AI techniques and cutting edge research."

June 1-3, 2005
Marina Del Rey, CA

Link

Theater of the Oppressed Conference

(Hey Scott G. -- sorry that I asked you to post this, forgetting you didn't have an account. So I'm re-posting for you on the main blog.)

The 11 annual Pedagogy & Theater of the Oppressed conference going on this week. Here's the link: http://www.ptoweb.org/conference/index.php. For those of you who recall, we read about this ages ago in 564 ... wish I was in town to attend.

If any one is curious, get in touch with Scott Gillies: gillies@usc.edu.

Winners of the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica - Honorary Mention for Waco Resurrection

Congratulations to Peter Brinson, et al.

winners list

Benjamin Fry and Casey Reas got a well-deserved Golden Nica in Net Vision for Processing.

Waco Resurrection got an Honorary Mention. It is the first chapter of Endgames, a 3D multiplayer computer game series which incorporates elements of subjective documentary and speculative fiction with interactive technologies to create a visceral gaming experience focused on extreme psycho-social phenomena.

Revisiting the 1993 Waco tragedy, gamers enter the mind and form of a resurrected cult's leader David Koresh through headgear, a voice-activated, 3D skin. They are Koresh who must defend the Branch Davidian sect against intrigue, skeptical civilians, rival Koresh and government agents.

Players are bombarded with a soundstream of government “psy-ops”, FBI negotiators, the voice of God and the clamor of battle. Players voice messianic texts, wield weapons from the Mount Carmel cache and influence the behavior of both followers and opponents by radiating a charismatic aura.

Ten years after, in 2003 (year of the game creation), the spirit of Koresh has become a paradoxical embodiment of the current political landscape - he is both the besieged religious other and the logical extension of the neo-conservative millennial vision. Waco is a primal scene of American fear: the apocalyptic visionary - an American tradition stretching back to Jonathan Edwards - confronts the heathen "other" - in Waco Resurrection, the roles are anything but fixed.

By: Team Waco (Michael Wilson, Eddo Stern, Jessica Hutchins, Brody Condon, Peter Brinson, Mark Allen) (US).

via wmmna

We LOVE Katamari Ball

"At the next E3 Expo, they will be making a real-world Katamari Ball: attendees are invited to bring whimsical detritus that will be stuck to the ball in simulation of the gameplay:

'Help the Prince please the King of All Cosmos at this E3Expo with the We LOVE Katamari ball. The King of All Cosmos has requested all attendees to provide items throughout the three days. Items should be lightweight enough to be attached and as nutty and creative as possible. Items should NOT be x-rated in nature or include clothing, books, magazines, papers or garbage. Those representing the Prince also have full right to decline any item.' "

via boingboing

ISEA 2006 - Interactive C4F3

Call for Proposals for ISEA 2006 Interactive C4F3..That's Cafe for you non-L33Trs.

http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/C4F3/

"The goal of The C4F3 is to create an active ambient space of augmented
everyday objects that is not just an art gallery, a restaurant, or a chill
space, but a new kind of project space where the whole environment has
been rethought in terms of the capabilities of current technology."

DUX2005

AIGA, ACM SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI Announces DUX2005 will be held November
3-5, 2005, in San Francisco, California

(San Francisco, CA - March 15, 2005) AIGA, ACM SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI today
announce the 2nd international DUX conference, "Designing for User
Experiences", will take place 3-5 November, in San Francisco, CA at the
beautiful Fort Mason Center.

"We are pleased to announce the 2nd DUX conference as well as the
release of the Call for Participation," said the conference chairs,
Richard Anderson, Brian Blau, and John Zapolski. "We invite design
professionals from all disciplines to contribute studies of specific
cases, best practices, and research, so the community can benefit from
others' successes and insights." More information and the Call for
Participation can be found at the conference website,
http://www.dux2005.org

The DUX2005 program will focus on interaction design and visual
communication. Leading this effort are Program Chairs Clark Dodsworth,
Nancy Frishberg and Rakhi Rajani. Its focus reflects current trends in
innovative user experience designs in areas that include mobile device
interfaces, data visualization, design process, responsive environments,
public art installations and live performance interfaces, consumer
products and services, appliances, and game interaction. This broad
range of topic areas ensures relevant, fresh, and meaningful submissions
from the experience design community.

DUX2005 invites submissions in four categories: Design Case Studies,
Design Practice Studies, Design Research Studies, and (briefer) Design
Sketches. Studies report on implemented designs and the methods and
techniques people have used, specifying what worked, what did not work,
and why. Sketches report on works in progress. Both studies and sketches
will be presented in at the DUX2005 conference in an intimate theater
setting. Individual presentations will complement panel discussions,
group presentations and tutorials.

Information about submissions and the submission kit will be posted on
the web site on April 21, 2005. In late May we will post additional
information about the conference, registration and hotel availability.

The conference committee invites all interested parties to read more
about the conference and the Call for Participation at
http://www.dux2005.org

FILE 2005, Sao Paolo, Brazil

MARCH 17TH 2005/// SAO PAULO/// BRAZIL///

FILE - Electronic Language International Festival is opening registrations for its 6th edition. It will be held at SESI Paulista's cultural space, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from October 3rd to 22nd, 2005. Call for entries are open from march 17th to April 17th, 2005. Submissions are free and open to professionals, researchers and students of the electronic language.

In the last five years, FILE has shown what's been happening in the global networks related to digital and electronic arts, becoming a reference for studies and research on new media. It has exhibited web art, net art, artificial life, hypertext, computer animation, real time teleconference, virtual reality, soft art, games, interactive movies, e-videos, digital panoramas and electronic art installations and robotics, through interactive and immersive rooms.

FILE-SYMPOSIUM has become a meeting po! int in the city of São Paulo, proposing discussions and tackling the electronic-digital culture in its relations to art, science and technologies.

FILE Hipersônica, the festival's sonorous branch, is on it's 3rd edition and intends to elaborate connections between the world of images, the world of sonorities and the world of texts. Sound installations and real time performances will be presented by a number of groups and collectives, comprising both erudite and pop electronic music, but also electronic compositions, sound poetry, radio art, video music and sonic landscapes, as well as Djs and VJs presenting their sets through specific apparatus and installations with experimental and immersive projections.
For more information visit: website

ISEA 2006 - Interactive City Early Call For Proposals -- DUE 23 APRIL 2005

ISEA 2006
Interactive City
San Jose, California, USA
1-14 August 2006

EARLY CALL DUE: 22 April 2005

ISEA INTERACTIVE CITY CFP: http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ISEA2006/

GENERAL INFO ABOUT ISEA 2006: http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/

ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) is a large, international,
two week long, conference and festival situated at the critical intersection
of art and technology (see http://www.isea2004.net for last year's festival
details). In August 2006 the 13th ISEA will be held in San Jose,
California. ISEA spans a broad range of work from critical theory and
application papers, interactive demonstrations, videos, installations,
performances, and emerging music to name a few. In 2006 ISEA will feature
four themes: Interactive City, Community Domain, Transvergence, and Pacific
Rim. Each theme will of course manifest itself at ISEA in the form of
papers, demos, performances, etc. Each of these topics will also feature a
2 day event immediately preceding ISEA to further focus the topic and go
into more critical depth. This announcement is for the early call for
proposals within the scope of the Interactive City.

The city has always been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations,
even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, however; with the
advent of 24/7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space
into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the
computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the
xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. We dream of something
more. Not something planned and canned, like another confectionary
spectacle. Something that can respond to our dreams. Something that will
transform with us, not just perform change on us, like an operation.

The Interactive City seeks urban-scale projects for which the city is not
merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their
formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to
walking in someone else's shoes to geocaches of urban lore to hybrid games
with a global audience, projects for the Interactive City should transform
the "new" technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous
networks, and locative media into experiences that matter.

We are initiating an early Call for Proposals that manifest but are not
limited to the spectrum of ideas below. Interactive City proposals should
embrace aspects of the city of San José and/or the surrounding metropolitan
San Francisco Bay Area specifically.  We are seeking projects that are large
in scale, require advanced or special planning and/or permissions, or
projects seeking early review.

Let us experience your vision of the Interactive City!

MORE INFO: http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ISEA2006/

Altered States: transformations of perception, place, and performance

CALL FOR PAPERS

Altered States: transformations of perception, place, and performance

A Transdisciplinary Conference

23/24 July 2005

Portland Square, University of Plymouth, UK

Papers are invited which will contribute to the development of transdisciplinary discourse between artists, scholars, scientists and technologists interested in issues of heightened or paranormal perception; cognitive science; virtual, transformable or esoteric architectures; psychic studies; ritual; shamanism; pharmacology and ethnobotany; quantum consciousness; technoetics; telepresence; new media arts; electronic literature; performance; digital music; net art; interactive
technologies.

Chair: Professor Roy Ascott

DEADLINE : 11th March 2005

More here

SIGGRAPH 2005 - Position Papers

There are a couple of panels seeking Position Papers for discussion at SIGGRAPH 2005 that would be perfect for the work many of us are doing here. The panels have titles like: Rethinking The Narrative Thread: Where Do Movies End And Videogames Begin? Discussing The New Storytelling Paradigm, and Networked Performance: How Does Art Affect Technology and Vice Versa?, State Of The Art In Game Research: Games on the Horizon and Beyond, and Ubiquitous Music: How Are Sharing, Copyright, and Really Cool Technology Changing the Roles of the Artist and the Audience?

Deadlines are approaching!

E3 vs GDC

Just wanted to create this post for some healthy debate. I (and it seems to me most people?) found GDC to be a really engaging and educational experience, while E3 was more of a commercial promotional event. It seems like if EA devoted some of the $8 million to sending all or some of us to GDC, it would really benefit us as game developers (much more so than E3).

ACE 2005

ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology

The field of computer entertainment technology has aroused great interest recently amongst researchers and developers in both academic and industrial / business fields as it is duly recognized as showing high promise of bringing on exciting new forms of human computer interaction. Now deemed deserving of both serious academic research, as well as major industry and business uptake, techniques used in computer entertainment are also seen to translate into advances in research work ranging from industrial training, collaborative work, novel interfaces, novel multimedia, network computing and ubiquitous computing.

The purpose of this conference is to bring together academic and industry researchers, as well as computer entertainment developers and practitioners, to address and advance the research and development issues related to computer entertainment.

Prospective authors are now invited to submit Papers/Posters/Demos electronically via the conference website:
http://www.ace2005.org by 15th February 2005

LEA Special cfp: Locative Media - Deadline 7 March 2005

LEA Special Issue: Locative Media

* Worldwide Call for Submissions *

Guest Editor: Drew Hemment
lctvmedia@astn.net

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting
papers [and artworks] that deal with the emerging data-based
spatial practice of Locative Media.

Across a broad range of contexts the interface between data
environments and location has emerged as a central concern,
reversing the trend towards digital content being viewed as
placeless, or only encountered in the amorphous space of the
internet. Artists have long been concerned with place and
location, but the combination of mobile devices with positioning
technologies opens up a manifold of different ways in which
geographical space can be encountered and drawn. An emerging field
of creative practice is coalescing around artists and
technologists who are exploring the use of portable, networked,
location-aware computing devices for social interfaces to places
and artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes a
canvas.

More here: http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/LEA2004/authors.htm#lmedia

NIME CFP

this is totally late, because the deadline is on monday the 31st.

but NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) is an annual conference that brings together, as the title subtly suggests, new musical interfaces.

I know of a few of you (noha/brad/aaron/erin) that may be interested in this kind of thing (?), so this seemed like a good venue. Keep it in mind for next year, too, I guess. Sorry about the late heads up.

Ben Hooker @IMD, 1/13/05

Ben Hooker will give an informal presentation about his work In the CTIN 544 class tomorrow (Thursday afternoon) from 5-6pm in the IML. All are welcome to attend.

Ben is a research fellow and visiting tutor in the Interaction Design department at the Royal College of Art. He is also a final-year tutor on the Graphic Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Through architecture and design, his projects explore the consequences of computer-based 'data landscapes' merging with real spaces.

For more information see http://www.dataclimates.com and
http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/research/people/ben/1.html

The 3rd International Conference Virtual Concept 2005

Virtual Concept 2005 will bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss current advances, issues, and case studies in key technical areas of Virtual Reality dedicated to the product design, product manufacturing or industrial process implementation.

This international conference will be held at Biarritz, in the south-west of France, between the Atlantic Ocean and Pyrenean mountains.

Virtual Concept 2005 will bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss current advances, issues, and case studies in key technical areas of Virtual Reality dedicated to the product design, product manufacturing or industrial process implementation.

This international conference will be held at Biarritz, in the south-west of France, between the Atlantic Ocean and Pyrenean mountains.

Papers, invited sessions, tutorials from design, mechanical, computer science and industrial engineering fields may cover aspects of innovative theories and applications of Virtual Reality tools and techniques.

Papers and invited session articles will be published within the proceedings of the conference edited by Springer Verlag. The chairmen of invited sessions will co-edit the proceedings of the conference. Best papers will be selected for publication in an international journal and also best communication and poster awards will be organized.

Electronic Perception Design Contest

Canesta Announces Electronic Perception Design Contest

San Jose, CA; November 11, 2004 -- Canesta has announced a design contest for the best applications of Canesta's revolutionary, low-cost "Electronic Perception Technology." The two-phase contest has been created to spur development of applications in a broad range of markets--from automotive to security and facial recognition, gesture control, human computer interaction, entertainment, and many others.

The CanestaVision Contest, which is open to all eligible applicants 18 years and older, features a $10,000 first prize, a $5,000 second prize, summer internships for two promising student entries, and awards of ten $7,500 development kits that each include a Canesta 3-D sensor module. The winners in each phase will be those that simultaneously demonstrate novel applications of electronic perception technology, high market potential, a substantive advance in computer or "machine" vision, and the ability of the application to address an important or "real" need.

Details are available at www.canesta.com/contest.

The contest will feature an idea phase, and an implementation phase, each with its own prizes. During the idea phase, contestants will be asked to submit application ideas in the form of brief written descriptions and drawings. From the submitted proposals, due on or before December 6, 2004, the judges will select 10 proposal winners, each of whom will be awarded a Canesta DP200 Electronic Perception Development Kit. This development kit (EP DevKit) has a $7,500 list price and contains the CanestaVision 3-D electronic perception sensor chip--with a USB interface, and application program interface (API) software. The kits may be used by the winners to translate their proposals or other application ideas to working prototypes. Winners of the first phase of the contest will be notified by January 12, 2005.

The second phase of the contest--the implementation phase--will begin on January 12, 2005 and close June 10, 2005. Contestants in the implementation phase will submit to Canesta a working prototype built using the EP DevKit. From the submitted prototypes, judges will select a first place winner and a second place winner. Additionally, the top two student entries will be chosen. The first place winner will receive a cash prize of $10,000, with the second place winner receiving $5,000. Two paid summer internships will be granted to promising student entries at Canesta's headquarters in San Jose, California, during 2005. In addition, the winning entries will be displayed during SIGGRAPH 2005. All submitted proposals and prototype applications will become public domain.

Interested individuals should note that it is not necessary to participate in or be a winner in the idea phase to enter the second phase contest for cash prizes or internships. It is only required to submit a working prototype by June 10, 2005 that incorporates the CanestaVision sensor in some type of electronic vision application. Contestants who wish to begin application development immediately, or who fail to win one of 10 Development Kit awards in the proposal phase, can purchase their own EP DevKits from Canesta immediately. Academic institutions may receive special pricing.

LIFE 7.0 International Competition - Call for Participation

Announcing the sixth edition of the competition on "art and artificial life" sponsored by the Telefonica Foundation in Madrid. We are looking for outstanding electronic art projects employing techniques such as digital genetics, autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots, computer viruses, wetware, embodied artificial intelligence, avatars, evolving behaviours and virtual ecosystems.

An international jury -- Chris Csikszentmihalyi (US), Daniel Garcia Andujar (Spain), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico/Canada), Jose-Carlos Mariategui (Peru), Fiona Raby (UK) and Nell Tenhaaf (Canada)-- will grant four cash awards totaling 20,000 Euros.

The competition's website at http://www.vidalife.org has the guidelines, application form, and information on the previous award-winners, including texts, videos, images and links.

Deadline: Wednesday, November 3, 2004.

WiFi.ArtCache

Well, there isn't a toot-your-own-horn category, but this project I am exhibiting may be of interest to some of you who are interested in pushing the boundaries of Flash-based interactive art. This is a CFP, in effect. We are looking for Art-Technologists interested in contributing work that would be exhibited using the WiFi.ArtCache at the upcoming Spectropolis event during the first week of October.

WiFi.ArtCache is a platform for experimenting with location and proximity based digital art media.

By simply coding to a provided ActionScript 2.0 API, Flash artists are able to create an interactive experience that changes based on how many people have downloaded their work, how many people are currently interacting with their art object, or whether it is currently in range of the WiFi.ArtCache.

The WiFi.ArtCache, developed by Julian Bleecker with support from Eyebeam Atelier, is a server containing a WiFi access point. When exhibited at the Spectropolis event at New York City Hall Park (October 1-4, 2004.), the WiFi.ArtCache will contain a storehouse of art objects. Visitors to the event can download these art objects onto their 802.11 equipped laptops and experience the artists' interpretation of location and proximity effects. WiFi.ArtCache is looking for art-technologists willing to contribute during Spectropolis. Deadline for submissions is September 26th. Submissions, questions and inquiries should be sent to wifiartcache at techkwondo dot com.

Additionally, the WiFi.ArtCache will contain a generic storehouse of digital ephemera that visitors can upload and download to the server. Scratchy audio, yellowed digital documents, discolored image files and spoiled emails can all be found and dropped off at the WiFi.ArtCache.

SensAble Haptics Competition $10k

While poking around at the Siggraph expo, I was a little disappointed at the software demo SensAble had for their Phantom Omni device. I let them know and they said they have a little competition going for demo software. They are offering the Omni system to developers for a low cost, along with their new libraries (all GL-based) for demos ranging from game development to sci-viz. If anyone is interested in this, please let me know immediately.

Press Announcement with PDF link

CFP - transmediale.05

I can think of several IMD projects that would make worthy entries!

:: transmediale.05 Award
:: Call for Entries
:: Deadline: 15. September 2004

You will find the complete call for download at: http://www.transmediale.de/05/pdf/tm05_call.pdf

transmediale, international media art festival berlin, invites submissions for its Award Competition. The competition highlights outstanding contemporary artistic positions in digital media art. The international jury will award one main prize of EUR 4.000, and two second prizes of EUR 2.000 each.

It seems impossible to define either the 'core' or the 'borders' of what constitutes electronic or digital media art. However, the main concern of transmediale is the vector field in which artistic practices and new technologies intersect, and where they articulate their social and cultural meanings. As a festival for media art and digital culture, transmediale presents advanced positions in the artistic reflection about the socio-cultural impact of new technologies. It seeks out artistic practices that not only respond to scientific developments, but that try to shape the way in which we think about and experience these technologies. transmediale understands media technologies as cultural techniques which need to be embraced in order to be able to understand, critique, and shape our contemporary society.

There are many ways for artists to explore the relation between art and technology. What is important for transmediale, though, is that the artistic practices do not only make use of technologies, but that they also imply a reflection about the aesthetic, cultural and social dimensions of such technological developments. What the festival and its competition try to convey is an understanding of media art as a sounding board and catalyst for a critical and creative expansion of the potential of human agency through new technologies.

While during the last years, the transmediale competition had three separate categories (Image, Interaction, Software), we are this year responding to various discussions by abolishing the separation into these categories. This move forms part of a general debate about the definitions and limits of 'electronic', 'digital', or 'media' art, and we hope that opening up the terrain of the competition will help to re-evaluate the connection between art and media technologies.

We invite the submission of works and projects that respond to this challenge. We remain interested in works that expand our understanding of interactivity, of digital image aesthetics, of narrative and, in particular, the cultural significance of software and computer programming as cultural techniques. However, we are also curious to see the submission of works outside of these areas, works that encourage us to reconsider the traditional boundaries defining artistic practice, and works which can make a strong argument for the crucial role that new technologies should play in our perception and projection of a contemporary global culture.

:: Jury of the transmediale.05 award:
Valie Export (Cologne/Germany)
Masaki Fujihata (Tokyo/Japan)
Amanda McDonald-Crowley (Australia/currently Finland)
Gunalan Nadarajan (Singapore)
Christiane Paul (...

CFP: Mobility, New Social Intensities and the Coordinates of Digital Networks

From stirrups to satellites, the invention of new forms of
technically-assisted mobility has always created new intensities within
the social. Each invention has also required a new idea of what it
might be to be human, along with new tensions as older cultural
practices and social forms are challenged.

Papers are invited for the 'Mobility, New Social Intensities and the
Coordinates of Digital Networks' Issue of the Fibreculture Journal, to
be published late in 2004/early in 2005. The issue will be co-edited by
Larissa Hjorth and Andrew Murphie.

http://journal.fibreculture.org

The deadline for submissions is September 22, 2004.

CFP - Ubiquitous Systems for Supporting Social Interaction

This workshop is the second workshop on the subject of ubicomp technologies for supporting social interaction in public spaces. It will be held in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2004) in Nottingham, England.

Public spaces, such as conferences, museums, cafes, and workplaces present new opportunities for ubiquitous computing technologies. Such spaces represent important venues for social interaction and the informal exchange of knowledge, providing a place to find others who share common or complementary interests. As discovered in last year’s workshop, we have only begun to understand the challenges and questions associated with situating ubicomp technologies within such spaces.

Seems to me that there are a few IMD projects that would fit well within this workshop.

Call for Papers

For example, how do people find others who share their interests and develop their social networks? How can technologies provide richer ways for people to communicate and engage with others? How can the serendipitous exchanges and interactions that often occur within public spaces be supported? How and where does the interaction between people happen? In view of these questions, the proposed workshop seeks to bring together like-minded researchers and practitioners to better understand the design, development and evaluation of ubiquitous systems for supporting social activities and social interaction in public spaces.

FUSEDSPACE

Entry #146

FUSEDSPACE, an international competition for innovative applications for new technology in the public domain.
Do you have an idea or proposal through which technology will make possible other interactions with the public domain, will shed new light on it or in any other way will bring about innovation? Then do enter the Fusedspace competition. Fusedspace is an international competition for ideas on inspiring applications for new technology in the public domain.

The total prize money amounts to
€ 17,500. The competition is open to artists, architects, designers and anyone who is interested in the subject. Fusedspace is an initiative of Stroom, the hague¹s center for contemporary art, InformatieWerkPlaats, SKOR Foundation for Art and Public Space and Premsela foundation for Dutch design.

[IMD should enter SPECK, Chojo, or Patholog...]

ACE - Day 3, Full Paper Session 05 - interface

audio games: new perspectives on game audio
Johnny Friberg and Dan Gardenfors, Stockholm International Toy Research Center, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Mudsplat: trad. game, levels, power-ups and bosses. played from 1st person perspective. Uses a simple 3-key navigation system with different audio backdrops to reflect changes in each level.

x-tune: user composes music according to a set theme (which determines which sounds are available)-- 2 interfaces, one with visual cues, the other being completely aural.

Tim's Journey: mix between adventure and 3d game w/ surround sound. the soundtrack is interactive surround sound, highly spatialized - sounds cool. The game itself is a exploration/puzzle solving game, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how the interactive surround-ness enhances the game itself. Their approach is novel: developing the audio at the same time as the rest of the same, but other than that, I can't tell how this is advancing game audio other than making it a more cohesive part of the game experience. Overall, what they are proposing is a move towards audio gaming as an enabler for freedom of movement, etc., but I'm not certain, without playing these games, how at least 2/3 of these games work towards that goal.

The Intelligent Street: Responsive Sound Environments for Social Interaction
Henrik Lorstad, Mark d'Inverno and John Eacott, Interactive Institute Sweden, Sonic Studio

Been looking forward to this talk all conference.

responsive sound installation that processes SMS messages into a overall composition. Users can interact transnationally in Sweden and London. Uses algorithmic composition. User goals: available to all, easy to understand, easy to use, require no musical skills. Users send SMS messages to a vodaphone sms recognition system. The command then outputs music from the . (additional commands are stored in a buffer). Commands reflect a genre, such as 'urban', 'dance' etc., which triggers an algorithmic composition. The sounds from sweden are sent to a location in the UK, and the UK compositions are sent to sweden.

Augementing the Virtual Domain w/ Physical and Social Elements
Carsten Magerkurth, Timo Engelke, Maral Memisoglu, Ambiente Research Division

This project was dealing with the creation of computer Tabletop games (apparently in germany tabletop games are much more successful than video games) that allow for the social interactions that exist in normal tabletop games. the intercTable is a plasma screen tabletop w/ overhead projector and a camera recording hand movements and object positions for input. the first implementation is a monopoly clone with visual representations of money, pieces, etc. the interface itself is a little sketchy to me, as it is with a lot of AR interfaces. The idea of hand/gesture interface is a great idea in theory, but in the end seems less natural than just pressing a key, or in this particular case, moving the thimble around the board.

The Soul of ActiveCube -- Implementing a Flexible, Multimodal, Three-Dimensional Spatial Tangible Interface
Ryoichi Watanabe, Yuichi Itoh et. al

what is up with osaka university and this powerpoint template:

support real-time 3D modeling by building w/ blocks. (ok, and this presentation has the most active powerpoint animations I've ever seen...). Ok, so that's what I thought it was, but it seems that there are 3 types of blocks: light, sound, and vibrate. Kids put blocks together and then control things on a screen with this building block interface they've created -- the example is controling a plane --> they build up a set of blocks that looks like a plane, then can control the virtual plane with that interface... the light blocks light up to tell the kids when to turn the plane, or it vibrates when they crash. Adrian just asked a good question about how the kids know what type of shapes to build, but I think it was sort of lost in translation, so to speak. As far as I can tell, there are no directions - the kids just play around until they get it right - discovery, I guess. I just couldn't tell if there was any feedback telling them when they built the right shape, etc.

Entertainment Feature of the Game Using a Skin Conductance Response
Shigeru Sakurazawa, Naofumi Yoshida and Nagisa Munekata

THis guy is a molecular biologist and sounds very nervous. But awesome powerpoint so far, depiciting a boy acting cool for his favorite girl (don't ask...). This is a little out of my league, but it's basically just a proposal for using new types of input (skin conductivity response) for entertainment applications. Ok, so I get that you can measure skin conductance response (supposed to indicate autonomic response/stress), but there are a lot of X factors that would really need to be tested before a good design for an entertainment app could be made. Ok, he just showed this awesome video showing how they measure skin conductance --> there is this woman sitting in front of a huge metal thing and next to a waveform display reflecting her current scr (I'm assuming). So then some research guy in a white lab coat comes in from behind and slams a mallet against the metal thing, causing a gong-like noise. The woman knew it was coming, so she didn't totally jump and tried to remain calm, but the scr graph suddenly went off the charts. It was pretty awesome.

So now he's showing an actual game that looks something like Joust. However, I'm not clear at all how the scr is controlling the character. I guess it would be really easy to mess someone up who was playing it, though. Ok, he just showed another video where an audience member put a joy-buzzer on the person controlling the game, and he totally lost. that was cool too - I wish my demo videos were this cool. Oh, I finally get it - the player controls this joust like game w/ a controller, but they have to try and maintain a consistent scr level or the player sinks into the ocean.

ACE - Day 3, Full Paper Session 03 - stories

Scene-Driver: A Narrative Driven Game Architecture Reusing Broadcast Animation Content
Annika Wolff, Paul Mulholland and Zdenek Zdrahal

Using narrative principles to guide the growing field of viewing galleries (movie clips for shows, movies, etc). They are working with a UK production company called Pepper's Ghost on a show Tiny Planets. The show follows two main characters as they travel to different planets to help it's inhabitants with problems. This narrative structure is broken down and the clips are then organized and described according to that story structure. THe interface for this is in the form of dominoes. Children using the system will match dominoes

Extending Game Participation with Embodied Reporting Agents
Dan Fielding, Mike Fraser, Brian Logan and Steve Benford, Univ. of Rottingham

System for AI reporters in a persistent virtual game world - a very cool idea that would allow players to be somehow alerted to game events even when they aren't participating in the game. The reporters look around the space for events, then prioritize them and report them back out to a human system editor, who then posts them in an event report. THey can see events directly (see them) or also infer things about the event. THey tested this in an unreal tourney game, where reporters were reporting on the events: drop, capture, pickup, return. Right now, I think the weakness is that the reporters just give stuff to an editor, who then logs it in a standard unreal log file. The second thing is that the unreal game doesn't seem like the ideal place for this to happen - it doesn't seem persistent enough. My take is that you'd want this system in something like sims online or second life, where reporters could report information and the data could be sent out in headline form to your mobile phone or something, which could warn you if your pad was being raided, etc. I can see someone in a cafe with their boy/girlfriend or something, getting an update from the online world and running out to get back in the game world before more damage is done.

Oh, and now reporters can be killed in the unreal game, which is something they are trying to stop. This seems like a great thing that should be nurtured rather than thrown away, because how cool would it be to have people in a team killing a reporter so that they couldn't report that information to another player. This seems like one of the coolest parts...would be a shame if they axed it. Overall, a totally cool idea.

Extending Game Participation with Embodied Reporting Agents
Steve Benford, Duncan Rowland Univ. of Rottingham

Platform: iPaq w/ GPS (welcome to the club...) THe game tries to teach players what it's like to be a lion. the 'savannah' was about the size of a football (soccer) field (pitch). There is constant sound feedback - as the players wander around they hear wind, water etc. that might have been around them. Players are allowed text messages, e.g. "THe masai are attacking, RUN!"

Gameplay: Role play on the savannah : mark "interesting" sights or scents on the savannah. After this territory has been marked, they go out and kill and eat water buffalo, which is a collaborative activity. YOu can then go to a DEN interface where you can review your territory, look at maps, etc. The feedback for this stage was also a text messaging system. THe demo has a blur soundtrack. how very british...

see the presentation

Uncle Roy All Around You: Implicating the City in a Location-Based Performance
Steve Benford

this has been around for a while: check the specs online. It's really a compelling game / idea where street players and online players collaborate, using clues provided by 'uncle roy' and embedded in the space to find Uncle Roy. The game is very well executed--especially on the design end. You can actually play online right now - the last day of a setup in the UK is going on this weekend - I think the last day is the 5th (UK time) so pls. check it out if you get the chance.

A User-Centric Adaptive Story Architecture Broowing from ACtivn Theories
Magy Seif El-Nasr

This guy is talking about interactive narrative, but I don't think he really knows what it is. I guess my problem is that he said that America's Army has an interactive narrative. Or rather, he's throwing the term interactive narrative around without really having thought about what that means. Also, the structure of interactive story he's talking about is strictly a branching one. ugh, anyway - onwards. Basically just breaking down a basic screenwriting model and applying a basic AI to lead the user through different paths. Ok. maybe it's just the powerpoint, but this one seems just like a bad tech. approach to solving story problems. update: getting sort of blasted in the questions...

Augmented Reality Chinese Checkers
Nicholas Cooper, Aaron Keatley, Maria Dahlquist, Simon Mann, Hannah Slay, Joanne Zucco, Ross Smith and Bruce Thomas University of South Australia

the name sort of says it all. it looks fun, but I guess part of me wonders why not just play the physical game. I think the novelty might wear off after a little bit in the AR space, and the delay and lag seem bad. There are some nice features, like the ability to rotate the virtual board. it's becoming more clear that this is purely a tech. demo, and that not much thought at all has been put into the design other than 'chinese checkers game.' Bruce Thomas is responsible for AR quake, and has done a lot of other great things in this field, but this particular one isn't my favorite. Id like to see the technical framework applied to other more compelling experiences.

ACE - day 2, full paper session #2, interacting

Full Paper 2 - Interacting

Re-tracing the past: Mixing Realities in Museum Settings

Multi-Audible Table for Collaborative Work
Tama Art University, Tokyo

(if I see this powerpoint template again, I'm going to lose it...)

table has a number of cell based sound spots, represented by characters on the top of the table which are displayed via an overhead lcd projector. A user would stap on a system called CoBIT, which basically is a little finger sleeve attached to a cable which runs up to a set of headphones. When the user touches a certain icon, or moves it around, they individually hear sounds based on their interactions w/ each character. This one is pretty cool. It brings up this issue though that nearly every one of these presentations is about 'collaboration' yet they all are pretty weak at actually enacting it. This woman is going through the testing results and sounds surprised by the fact that the kids tested didn't talk to each other very much, when she has them all in a headphone environment.

Robot's Play: Interactive Games With Sociable Robots
Andrew Brooks, MIT media lab
Teaching robots basic games, then playing those games with them -- the 2 games they showed, one a binary switch game, and the other an imitation game, worked really well, but I'm wondering how much pre-defined behaviors were inherent to those games. Basically, I'm not sure how easily scalable the system would be. I think the idea of teaching robots via movement and action is really cool, and giving the robot much better vision and more scalable recognition and logic systems would benefit this research.

THe Sensing Board enhanced by Interactive Sound System for Collaborative Work
uses a sensing board system w/ rfid. same people who did the multi-audible table and this research seems like it overlaps with the other project. there are a couple differnet configurations w/ this -- the best one seemed to be a color based sound generator. Users could place colored cut-outs all around a table -- a black line moves around the stage like a clock hand, and plays sound based on which colors it is moving over. What's cooler is that users can record sounds using mics set up around the exhibit, and then embed those sounds with rfid to one of these color circles. uses the same headphone coBit tech. as the earlier piece. Not convinced that headphones are the way to go with either of these systems...

up next, keynote by Mark Billinghurst from u washington's hit lab.

ACE2004 Day 1.

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

Full Paper Session 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Fellowship Call for Projects

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular

The Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication is pleased to announce a Fellowship program for summer 2004 to foster innovative research for its new electronic publishing venture, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.

Vectors is a new, international electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media.

Continue reading

Rhizome Net Art Commissions (2/15 deadline)

Winning Does Not Matter

Artists: do you have formal or critical ideas you want to wrap around a game? Gamers: do you have a game to wrap around a theory? If so, it may be your time to shine: Rhizome.org is seeking proposals for its 2004 Net Art Commissions and the theme is games. Five awards ranging from $1500-$3500 will be announced in late March, 2004 and winning projects will likely be exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. One must be a Rhizome member to submit a proposal, and interested parties should fill out the online entry form before the deadline next Monday, February 15. If you're an enthusiast or a player and not an artist, you can still be involved in this project: Rhizome members can participate in the evaluation of submissions. Game on!

http://rhizome.org/commissions/

Milia 2004

Check out the keynote and plenary talks for Milia this year - interesting snapshot of hot topics in the interactive industry. (Lots of mobile media this year!)

KEYNOTE AND PLENARY SESSIONS
› Tuesday 30 March, 2004
Joint MILIA/MIPTV Keynote: Broadcast
Greg Dyke, Director General, BBC
The Impact of New Media and Digital Technologies on the Future of Television Programming

› Wednesday 31 March, 2004
· Keynote: Broadband Entertainment
The future of Entertainment Programming for the Always-On Generation.

· Keynote: Mobile Lifestyles (Joi Ito)

CFP: N@rrative: Digital Storytelling

April 22-23, 2004

NARR@TIVE: DIGITAL STORYTELLING questions how digital culture has transformed our practices of reading, writing, and thinking about narrative. Topics are to be addressed from a wide variety of disciplinary fields, including: literature and poetics, copyright and archiving, e-journals and publication, code and linguistics, film and image.

Speakers:

Katherine Hayles
(UCLA, English and Design| Media Arts)

Rita Raley
(UCSB English)

Guest Grads:
Nick Montfort
Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Deadline: March 1

Send Papers/Abstracts and/or Electronic Literature + New Media Art to:

Jessica Pressman
UCLA English Department
2225 Rolfe Hall Box 951530
Los Angeles, CA 90095
jesspres@ucla.edu

Download CFP Flyer: [.DOC]

Vida 6.0 / Life 6.0

LIFE 6.0 INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION - CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Announcing the fifth edition of the competition on "art and artificial
life" sponsored by the Telefonica Foundation in Madrid. We are looking for
outstanding electronic art projects employing techniques such as digital
genetics, autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots,
computer viruses, embodied artificial intelligence, avatars, evolving
behaviours and virtual ecosystems.

An international jury --Daniel Canogar, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Machiko
Kusahara, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jane Prophet and Nell Tenhaaf-- will grant
four cash awards totaling 20,000 Euros.

The competition's website at http://www.vidalife.org has the guidelines,
application form, and information on the previous award-winners, including
texts, videos, images and links.

Deadline: Friday, October 31, 2003.

ACM Multimedia 2003

The 11th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia
November 2-8, 2003 Berkeley, CA, USA

Pretty technical conference but some interesting tutorials:

Emerging Peer-to-Peer Technology: Fundamentals and Challenges
Ralf Steinmetz (Darmstadt Univ. of Technology)

Understanding Media Semantics
Presented by Marc Davis (marc@sims.berkeley.edu), Chitra Dorai (dorai@watson.ibm.com), and Frank Nack (Frank.Nack@cwi.nl)

OSCON 2003

The O'Reilly Open Source Conference (Grid) is going on right now in San Diego. I'm not there this year, but there are a bunch of interesting uses of technologies to help people follow along:

• OSCON 2003 TrackBack
• Semi-Un-Official OSCON 2003 Wiki (blog)
• OSCON 2003 Community Coverage (fed by a chump bot)

Just imagine cool stuff that's going to be happening with the next generation of distributed notification/aggregation/discussion tools.

Interactive Narrative Content Seminar

Developing Interactive Narrative Content Seminar
August 20 - August 26 2003
Leipzig, Germany
Seminar language: English

Lectures and intense workshops will cover essential subjects to be
considered during the development/ pre-production phase for interactive
entertainment projects (story development, financing, project management,
marketing...).
In parallel up to ten selected interactive narrative projects in
development will be provided with several face-to-face consulting sessions
designed especially to the needs of the projects.

Application deadline (with project): June 1 2003
Application deadline (seminar only): August 4 2003

sagasnet is a non profit initiative in the frame of the European MEDIA
Programme Training to further content development for interactive media.

More information and application forms available at
http://www.sagasnet.de

The Art of Blogging

Blogging... is a format constant (archives, links, time stamps, chronological listing of thoughts and links), personalized, community-linked, social, interactive, democratic, new model innovation built on the unique attributes of the Internet.

http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm

(as featured on the CFP for "Blogtalk - A European Weblog Conference" )

KNOWLEDGE MEDIA NETWORKING: CFP

IEEE International Workshop on
KNOWLEDGE MEDIA NETWORKING

Date: October 22-24, 2003
Location: NTT Labs, Tokyo, Japan
Web: http://knowledge-net.com/KMN03/

Paper Submission Deadline: July 1st, 2003
-----------------------------------------
Overview:
New integrated services are emerging from the rapid technological advances in networking, multi-agent, virtual environments, media and broadcasting technologies. Knowledge Media Spaces would couple models, knowledge, data, instruments, and intellectual activity across space, time, and disciplinary boundaries. Metadata could be exploited to develop the semantic web for
mining/retrieving/designing multimedia web information resources. Computational devices and agents could become part of furniture, walls, and clothing; physical space provides a sense of place that would be augmented towards knowledge space. The space must precisely understand its devices and their situation,in particular the computations they are performing, in order to understand what individuals in the space are doing.

This workshop would provide a forum for researchers and
practitioners involved in the
design and development of knowledge media networking spaces,
meta-data architectures,
knowledge based systems and 3D media architectures. It is expected that the workshop will
promote a very intensive interaction among those attending it.
The Workshop Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press. Papers up to six
pages or position papers of two to three pages (including figures, tables and references)
should be submitted as PDF or PostScript files. Papers should include a title, the name and
affiliation of authors, an abstract of up to 150 words and no more than eight keywords in
two-column IEEE format. Submissions will be peer reviewed. Papers should be submitted to
Kawamori.masahito@lab.ntt.co.jp, osawa@fun.ac.jp, or to kmn03@knowledge-net.com.

Topics of interests include , but are not limited:
- Architectural aspects of designing knowledge media spaces (3D virtual presence, Internet,
agents, mobility, VRML, MPEG4, MPEG7, TVanytime)
- Metadata architectures: mining, extracting, indexing, managing,
modeling, recording,
accessing, utilizing information resources
- Sensors, mobile devices networking, ad-hoc networking
applications, self-organizing
systems, P2P systems
- Interconnection of heterogeneous communities, Ontologies, resource sharing, Quality of Service
- What kind of rules, artifacts, conventions and infrastructure must be providedto help
community members self organize and manage their affairs, increase knowledge bandwidth,
develop a feeling of social awareness?
- Applications: Entertainment, e-Healthcare, e-Commerce, e-Communities, Virtual Universities,
Cultural Heritage

-------------------------------------------------------------
Important dates: Paper Submission Deadline: July 1st, 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------

General Co-Chairs:
------------------
Hiroshi Yasuda, Tokyo University, Japan
Peter T. Kirstein, UCL, UK

Local Arrangements Chair:
-------------------------
Jay Kishigami, NTT Labs, Japan

Technical Co-Chairs:
--------------------
Masahito Kawamori, NTT Labs, Japan
Eiichi Osawa, Future University -Hakodate, Japan

MOBILE DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION SYSTEMS-CFP

CALL FOR PAPERS

HICSS-37 Minitrack on
MOBILE DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Part of the Software Technology Track
at the Thirty-seventh Annual
HAWAI'I INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SYSTEM SCIENCES
on the Big Island of Hawaii

http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu

January 5 - 8, 2004
In today's mobile society, access to relevant information and to context-
specific services "anytime, anywhere" is becoming increasingly important.
Mobile users are often particularly interested in information about and
services in their immediate vicinity, thus Mobile Distributed Information
Systems must address location-dependent distribution of and access to
services and information from mobile devices. In addition to location,
other environmental aspects, such as the user's current situation, topology
and available bandwidth of wireless networks, battery power and
characteristics of mobile devices, are also relevant for determining
information and service requirements. For mobile applications, a dynamic
re-configurable architecture is thus required to support flexible reaction
to changing contexts and seamless operation in foreign environments, with
little or no need for manual reconfiguration. With mobile devices becoming
more and more popular and powerful, communication and cooperation between
mobile users in an ad-hoc manner are strongly desired. Consequently,
the long-established distinction between clients and servers is blurred,
which calls for an extension of the architectural paradigm towards peers
or alternating roles.

!! Abstract Deadline extended: April 10, 2003 !!
CfP: HICSS-37 Minitrack on Mobile Distributed Information Systems at HICSS-37

This Minitrack will address current topics in the field of
Mobile Distributed Information Systems, such as:

- Location and Situation Aware Information Services: Modeling,
Architectures and Applications
- Network Support for Mobile Access to Services and Information
- Mobile Ad-hoc Networking and Computing
- Provision, Distribution and Management of Services for Mobile
Environments
- Directory Services, Service Discovery and Service Brokers
- Middleware for Mobile Distributed Information Systems
- Distributed Databases and Data Management for Mobile Applications
- Peer-to-Peer Computing and Cooperation: Scenarios, Platforms and
Applications
- Self-/Zero-/Auto-Configuration, Dynamic Configuration for Mobile
Users
- Mobile Multimedia Systems, QoS for Mobile Information Access
- Management of Groups of Mobile Users
- Mobile Devices: GUIs, Usability and Adaptability
- Location Tracking Technologies
- Security, Privacy and Billing Issues for Mobile Information and
Service Access
- Applications and Case Studies of Mobile Distributed Information
Systems

MINITRACK CHAIRS

Andreas Meissner Zhou Wang Lars Wolf
Fraunhofer IPSI Fraunhofer IPSI TU Braunschweig
Dolivostrasse 15 Dolivostrasse 15 Mühlenpfordtstraße 23
64293 Darmstadt 64293 Darmstadt 38106 Braunschweig
Germany Germany Germany
{Andreas.Meissner, Zhou.Wang}@ipsi.fhg.de wolf@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de

The Minitrack Website is http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/mobile/hicss
Please email general inquiries to hicss@ipsi.fraunhofer.de

MINITRACK PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Heribert Baldus, Philips Research, Germany
Andrew T. Campbell, Columbia Univ, USA
Maria F. Costabile, Univ Bari, Italy
Carsten Griwodz, Univ Oslo, Norway
Junzhong Gu, East China Normal Univ, China
PÃ¥l Halvorsen, Univ Oslo, Norway
Haiming Huang, Broadstorm, USA
David Hutchison, Lancaster Univ, UK
Jae-Yong Lee, R&D Center of Serome Technology Inc., Korea
Bruce McDonald, Northeastern Univ, USA
Andreas Meissner, FhG IPSI, Germany
Jochen Schiller, Freie Univ Berlin, Germany
Jens Schmitt, Tech Univ Darmstadt, Germany
Wolfgang Schönfeld, FhG IPSI, Germany
Jochen Seitz, Tech Univ Ilmenau, Germany
Zhou Wang, FhG IPSI, Germany
Lars Wolf, Tech Univ Braunschweig, Germany

IMPORTANT DEADLINES

April 10, 2003 Abstracts submitted for guidance and indication of
appropriate content.

June 1, 2003 Full papers submitted.

August 31, 2003 Acceptance notification sent to authors.

October 1, 2003 Accepted manuscripts sent electronically to the
publisher of the conference proceedings. Authors
must be registered for the conference by this date.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PAPER SUBMISSION

1. Abstracts may be submitted by email to hicss@ipsi.fraunhofer.de as
PDF, Postscript, or RTF documents. Abstracts may also be sent in ASCII
format and are expected to be 300-500 words.

2. Full papers should consist of 22-26 double-spaced pages, including
diagrams. Papers may be theoretical, conceptual or descriptive in nature.
(NOTE: Final papers will be 10 pages, double-column, single-spaced.)
Full papers should be submitted electronically. Please see the Minitrack
Website (http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/mobile/hicss) for the detailed
paper submission instructions.

3. Do not submit the manuscript to individual Minitrack Chairs - use
the above alias instead. Papers should contain original material and
not be previously published, or currently submitted for consideration
elsewhere.

4. Each paper must have a title page to include title of the paper,
full name of all authors, and complete addresses including affiliation(s),
telephone number(s), and e-mail address(es).

TRACKS AT HICSS-37

- Collaboration Systems;
Co-Chair: Jay Nunamaker; E-mail: nunamaker@cmi.arizona.edu;
Co-Chair: Robert O. Briggs; E-mail: bob@GroupSystems.com
- Complex Systems; Chair: Robert Thomas; E-mail: rjt1@cornell.edu
- Decision Tech. for Management; Chair: Dan Dolk;
E-mail: drdolk@nps.navy.mil
- Digital Documents; Chair: Michael Shepherd; E-mail: shepherd@cs.cal.ca
- Emerging Technologies; Chair: Ralph H. Sprague; E-mail: sprague@hawaii.edu
- Information Technology in Health Care; Chair: William Chismar;
E-mail: chismar@cba.hawaii.edu;
- Internet & the Digital Economy;
Co-Chair: David King; E-mail: dave@comshare.com
Co-Chair: Alan Dennis; E-mail: ardennis@indiana.edu
- Organizational Systems & Tech.; Chair: Hugh Watson;
Email: hwatson@terry.uga.edu
- Software Technology; Chair: Gul Agha; E-mail: agha@cs.uiuc.edu

HICSS conferences are devoted to advances in the information, computer,
and system sciences, and encompass developments in both theory and
practice. Invited papers may be theoretical, conceptual, tutorial or
descriptive in nature. Submissions undergo a peer referee process and
those selected for presentation will be published in the Conference
Proceedings (IEEE). Submissions must not have been previously published.

For the latest information visit the HICSS web site at:
http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu

CONFERENCE ADMINISTRATION

Ralph Sprague, Conference Chair
Email: sprague@hawaii.edu
Eileen Dennis, Track Administrator
Email: eidennis@indiana.edu
Sandra Laney, Conference Administrator
Email: hicss@hawaii.edu

2004 HICSS-37 CONFERENCE VENUE

Hilton Waikoloa Village
on the Big Island of Hawaii
425 Waikoloa Beach Drive
Waikoloa, Hawaii 96738
Tel: 1-808-886-1234
Fax: 1-808-886-2900
www.hiltonwaikoloavillage.com