Week 1 (1/12) Bruce Damer
Week 2 (1/19) Anderson/Ruiz - "Interactive Panoramic Cinema"
Week 3 (1/26) Bing Gordon
Week 4 (2/2) Jim Banister
Week 5 (2/9) Larry Gertz
Week 6 (2/16) Smith, Caudell, Paniotis
Week 7 (2/23) Scott Kim
Week 8 (3/2) Jonah Bruckner-Cohen, Katherine Moriwaki
Week 9 (3/9) Anne Balsamo (IML tour and overview (@IML))
Week 10 (3/16) Spring Break - No Class
Week 11 (3/23) Mayer, Hodges, Dannenbaum - "Embedded Values"
Week 12 (3/30) Ray Zone
Week 13 (4/6) Bernie DeKoven
Week 14 (4/13) Bob Stein
Week 15 (4/20) Naomi Spellman
Week 16 (4/27) TBD

Also lab tours for 1st year students:
- 4/13 (10-12 am) Tour of Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC)
- 4/20 (3-5pm) Tour of Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)

Also workshops for all IM students:
- 3/1, 3/22, 3/23 David Fain - "Fundamentals of Animation"
- 4/7 & 4/8 Bernie Dekoven - "Forever New - from New Games to Junkyard Sports"

Week 1 (1/12) Bruce Damer
Week 2 (1/19) Anderson/Ruiz - “Interactive Panoramic Cinema”
Week 3 (1/26) Bing Gordon
Week 4 (2/2) Jim Banister
Week 5 (2/9) Larry Gertz
Week 6 (2/16) Smith, Caudell, Paniotis
Week 7 (2/23) Scott Kim
Week 8 (3/2) Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Week 9 (3/9) Anne Balsamo (IML tour and overview (@IML))
Week 10 (3/16) Spring Break – No Class
Week 11 (3/23) Mayer, Hodges, Dannenbaum - “Embedded Values”
Week 12 (3/30) Ray Zone
Week 13 (4/6) Bernie DeKoven
Week 14 (4/13) Naomi Spellman (tentative)
Week 15 (4/20) Bob Stein (tentative)
Week 16 (4/27) TBD

Also lab tours for 1st year students:
- 4/6 (3-5pm) Tour of Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)
- 4/13 (10-12 am) Tour of Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC)

Also workshops for all IM students:
- 3/1, 3/22, 3/23 David Fain - “ Fundamentals of Animation”
- 4/7 & 4/8 Bernie Dekoven - “Forever New - from New Games to Junkyard Sports”

Word version here: Download file

for starters.

--- Interactivity as a form of abstraction (as opposed to a straightforward tool). Good example is Jim Campbells "Untitled for Heisenberg" where moving closer to an image make it more degraded.

--- Credibility of the Internet (like Subservient President) is huge. Consider Ken Goldberg's Telegarden, Marie Sester's Access prpoject, and the work of the Yes Men/RTMark.

We speculated on what would happen when a game designer had a $100 million budget. Common answer: give it to game designer friends to make many games rather than "over-produce" a game. Many in the games/computer world want granularity and think that production value does more harm than good. Many in the film/cinema world believe the opposite.

Turns out the "$100M" is currently being spent addressing all these issues by the Army. Please continue to look around the USC Institute for Creative Technologies website. I'll make sure to arrange a class field trip probably in the Spring.

U Washington's HIT (Human Interface Technology) Lab is an important VR place. Its Director, Tom Furness, claimed in the early 1990s that they would develop VR glasses based on retinal scanning with these specs: 140 x 80 degree field of view per eye, 4000 x 4000 pixel resolution, see-through transmitance adjustable from 0-50%, 50 hertz update minimum, and full eye and head tracking. Total weight: less than 2 oz. Total price: less than $500.

Julian, like Alex Galloway and many others, appear to be forgoing their own art for inventing creative tools. How many "rock stars" are there who are known for inventing tools? (Garrett Brown: Steadicam, Tom Holman: THX sound, who else??)

Using mobile media to "take the streets" has become popular (PacManhattan, Street Memes, Digital Street Game, etc.), but has also spawn a who's-in-control? movement as well (Surveillance Camera Players, Galloway's wireless video sniffer, camera zapper).

1) Mobile hardware should be user serviceable.
2) Mobile hardware should provide easy connectivity to other hardware to extend capabilities (easy connection to TV, monitor, network, alternative input devices)
3) The necessity of plugging in to charge up the battery.

1 Inconsistencies in software
2 Processing power too weak
3 Input devices suck (or require learning a new language - eg Graffitti)

1. the lack of etiquette that cell phones seem to foster.
2. battery life needs to be better.
3. more modular/upgradeable technology

1. compatibility with other gadgets (or lack there of)
2. components break easily
3. the day after you decide to buy anything, something "bigger and better" always comes out.

1) short battery life
2) negative impact on social protocol (i.e., rudeness)
3) dependency on closed proprietary networks

1 GPS Auto-Guide: When the car goes under the free ways crossings or about the high buildings areas, it losses the contact with the satellites. And sometimes, even weak signals make it fail to function.
2 GPS Auto-Guide: For those new to somewhere or depending on this guides too much, he/she will probably get lost at even a very small area only because the geo date are not available to the satellites.
3 SMS of Mobile Phone: Sometimes, a lingeringly sent SMS drives people crazy and confused by mixed, sequentially wrong information.

1) Laws are made such that companies can’t upgrade their systems to what the rest of the world has.
2) Everything (with the exception of web browsing) should be voice activated (appropriate given you use a phone to speak).
3) Dedicated portable gaming devices that feature networked play over the internet (N-Gage doesn’t count as it’s not dedicated. No internal graphics hardware. Uses crappy Java software renderer. And side-talking? C’mon.)

1) my mobile communications technologies are not embedded in my flesh
2) mobile communications are not embedded in the flesh of all humans
3) not enough stuff is wireless - ie, decent, cheap stereo speakers

1. Cost (too expensive)--with almost any mobile media
2. Drop zones with cell phone---if you're paying the monthly service charge you want to have a signal wherever you travel
3. Cell Phone Batteries--generate too much heat

1) Low battery life -
This is starting to change, but many of the more powerful mobile devices are still limited to 1-2 hours of battery life. This makes them inadequate for sizable trips/meetings, etc.
2) Very Distracting -
People with Cell phones while driving, in class, etc. Mobile devices can cause people to forget the world around them.
3) Underpowered and undersupported for most creative applications -
This is also changing, but mobile devices are still far from their full potential for normal software use in my opinion. PDA's don't support the resolution or the screen space for skething or doing decent image editing, they don't support voice recognition or simple input for authoring text (keyboards tend to be cumbersome and limit the device), there aren't any well-known powerful 3D mesh building utilities, I can't even really author midi files on a PDA unless I write the application myself. I can't even write code natively on a PDA and run it. I need to write the code on a full PC, then transfer it to the PDA.

A: Restrictive long-term user agreements for cell phones
B: No hard drive – The service provider can erase your saved data whenver they want
C: The knowledge that someone has a cell phone but is not answering leads some to believe that they are being avoided, whereas previously it could be assumed that the recipient of the call was just not at home. I guess this points to a larger problem of trackability – since cell phones became mainstream, it is much harder to remain off the grid with impunity.
D: It doesn’t work in the IML!!!

1) Size - I know this is a paradox, but when media get so small that they are easily portable, the input devices (e.g. laptop keyboards) are so small that they are annoying to use, and the output displays are disappointingly small (e.g. Gameboy screens).
2) Privacy - I hate that using a cell phone in public makes me forfeit the privacy of that conversation and also forces me to impose my private life on others. I wish there were some way to have a portable phone booth, so that I could still use my phone wherever but that my voice couldn't be heard by others in that public space.
3) Responsability - I hate that people using mobile media in public places, particularly cell phones, force others in those places to take on some of their responsability for public safety. My favorite example of this right now is the fleet of USC students who talk on cell phones while riding their bicycles while navigating through pedestrians and cars - it becomes the job of pedestrians to get out of their way and of cars to anticipate their erratic and oblivious behavior.

1. dated contents
Because the performance of mobile game machines are not as good as , their game contents are always behind the cutting edge . So, there are so many mobile games that are usually remake of old games. But it's also true that there are unique mobile games.
2. Hardware compatibility
In many cases, although someone has the same game, just because he/she has different game machine or cell phone, they have to another similar game for the perticular machine.
3. mobility usually also means short time availability
One of the biggest reason to purchase mobile game machine is that they don't have enough time to play game at home with console and they want to make a good use of their free little time like waiting for something or going somewhere in a car or public transportation. But the thing is even though they have a little time to play something, usually they have to quit abruptly. For this reason, mobile games are best to be a short mini game. Sometimes I cannot afford to finish one stage of a mini game.

In prep for Chris Swain, consider what a "breakthrough" game is: a new form that is big enough to affect pop culture. Examples include: Pacman, Sims, Grand Theft Auto, and Stick Ball. These came out of nowhere and could not have been predicted or engineered.

Other examples during class discussion:
- "Where's Waldo" style photographs
- Generative text stories
- personalized games
- on-the-street games
- 'anything' relating to mobile media
- interaction with a virtual person like Futurama heads-in jars

One clue may be to ask what can be done with the technology in the box. E.g., I claim that with little mod or additional peripherals, live immersive experiences can be piped in the home from "VR Webcams," perhaps set up by CNN or National Geographic.

- why have corporations spent billions on interactive tv over 30 years without any success yet?
-- why do they continue?

so instead of thrashing around looking for killer interactive apps, let's look to some obvious alternatives:

- how many unique television stations are there in the world?
-- what constitutes unique?
-- why is this such a difficult question to answer??

- what will the future of tv news be like?
-- in a world with millions of live tv cameras (think mobile phones)
-- will it become impossible to rob a bank??

As cameras and wireless tech become tiny and cheap.
1) will there be more first person media?
2) will there be laws about camera use?

Flight simulator talk:
egocentric view = from the user’s own eyes
exocentric view = not from the user’s own eyes (e.g., “God’s eye view” from above)

Observing versus participating in a story
observing = empathizing with characters
participating = being a character
are they mutually exclusive?

Justin Hall, Vincent Diamante - Sep 8: Perry Hoberman: “Recycling Post-Consumer Media Content”
Jess Rosenblatt , Shelby Wong - Sep 15: Michael Lew: “Filmmaking for Computational Media”
Noah Keating, Mihai Peteu - Sep 22: Scott Fisher & Peggy Weil: “First Person Media"
Anita Stokes, Yuechuan Ke - Sep 29: Jim Rowson, HP, & Kurt MacDonald, “Custom Television & the Phiz Network”
Oct 6: 555 (3rd Year Thesis) projects
Josh Green, DooYul Park - Oct 13: Chris Swain: “Game Play Innovation”
Mihai Peteu, Aaron Meyers - Oct 20: Julian Bleeker: “Mobile Experiences”
Josh Green, Herb Yang - Oct 27: Tracy Fullerton: “Game Studies”
Shelby Wong, Justin Hall - Nov 3: Eric Loyer: “Vectors Journal” & Steve Anderson: “Visual Research”
Victoria Moran, Eric Nelson - Nov 10: Mark Bolas (TBD)
Jess Rosenblatt, DooYul Park - Nov 17: Michael Naimark: "Internationalism"

Other Assignments (TBD)

Noah Keating, Victoria Moran
Anita Stokes, Yuechuan Ke
Vincent Diamante, Aaron Meyers
Herb Yang, Eric Nelson