For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Arena Project is an information gathering and data broadcasting system being performed by the Makitalo Research Center in Northern Sweden. They are basically wiring up a bunch of hockey players, taking vital signs, keeping track of stats, and broadcasting the information to the fans in the seats. I am pretty sure I am going to narrow down my thesis to this type of project, incorporating somthing for one of the sports teams here at SC. The project in Sweden took place about two years ago and was headed by Tommy Arngren. I just happened to stumble into some more information about it, and it looks like this system has also been tested with women's basketball and will move to soccer for its next trial run. All of this is taking place in Northern Sweden of course. Ericsson Erisoft and the CDI are cohorts in this little shindig. I am curious to know their plans for things over here in the states. Go here for the PDF on the basketball.
Since the DVD revolution has been in full force lately, I decided to check out the nitty gritty on the net about burning your own discs via your home computer. Boy did I jump in over my head. I had no idea the formats were so wildly different and non-compatible with each other. The site I have been reading most lately about it is here. I would check this out if anyone is planning on making any of their own DVD media any time soon. I plan on trying to memorize the info as best I can, always comes in handy later. I was very glad I paid attention during the burnable CD's craze...it has come in very handy.
During my Senior year at Truman State University, I took a course during the winter interim called Hypnosis and Para-psychology. I was absolutely rivited by the information about the paranormal and fascinated by the guest speakers (some of you would call these people "quacks") stories and information. I learned everything there was to know about Aura's, chakras, spirits, poltergeists, hypnosis and even somthing called "Remote Deposession" (some of you would call this "insanity"). Despite the fact that many people would go into the class a naysayer and come out a believer is irrelevant. I was just plain fascinated, so my inspiration for one of my documentary films last semester was ghosts. And boy is there a lot of material to be covered about that here in LA! I have visited at least 4 places here in the greater Los Angeles area that claim to have spirits roaming around at their own free will. I visited a few, and was quite impressed by the amount of sitings and stories that everyone gave me. So I want to do somthing with the material, and my first inclination was a website. Well, someone really has me covered there, and thats this site. However, they are not an active blogging site, which I find to be an interesting mode of communication and sharing these days. Now what I want to do is create a mobile blogging system that allows people to select their location (CA--> LA-->, LACMA--> expierence) and post information about it! This allows the user to be there and to post their expierence almost in real time. I think it's sort of a problem to have to go home and recreate the expierence all over again and then write it down. Why not go mobile with it? I did some searchs on google, can't come up with anything yet. You all let me know if you find anything. Hopefully this project will get under way sometime starting this summer. Maybe sooner.
Well, I am now officially WAP enabled! For those of you with a mobile phone and a WAP connection, my new WAP page address is...
http://www.jimdrewes.com/~kenyon/wap_index.wml
I would greatly appreciate it if those who have the capability could test it for me. It would be mighty nice to know the differences between phones and browsers and such. I am mostly concerned about images at the moment.
Learning WML (Wireless Mark Up Language) has been rather interesting. It's easier than J2ME but definitely a lot more stubborn that HTML. It is very similar, but there are a lot of little things that can go wrong a lot easier. Oh well, I hope to produce some good stuff with it along with some xml scripting too. Let me know if you are interested!
So I have gotten part of the game "Discovery 3051" up onto the WAP site, but unfortuneatly, many people are having problems browsing to it. Apparently the T68i's are getting there, but most everyone without one is. After a lively discussion about the game today in Interactive Writing class, I figure I have two choices. Make the game more narrative and more in depth with characters and story, or scale it back and forget a story and just make it a scavenger hunt (without pictures of course). My main issue is doing the work, since I am not very well versed in Java. I really want a final, tangible, product to show to people. If I had my way, I would do this all in J2ME, but I have neither the skill set, time or patience to learn it. Plus I like wml, and I think there is potential between that and some of the server side xml scripts that can be used with it. More as I get it going.
Here is a test message for William Carter.
More testing...
I went to see David Rokeby at UCLA tonight (4/7/03) and it was interesting to see the progression on his installation called "A Very Nervous System." The demo tape we saw in Interactive Animation class was quite dated, sometime during the late 80's in it's conceptual stages. It has now progressed and works phenomenally well! For those of you who are unfamiliar, please visit his website page all about it here.
He said some very interesting things regarding this installation, some that are very interesting to me as a performer. He noted that since the installation doesn't allow for an individual solid link between a certain movement of the performer and the noise or sounds that it makes, that most musicians and professional dancers are often turned off or frustrated by this. I think this presents and interesting question about the degree of control and the aesthetics of music as it pertains the amount of knowledge you have about it. Those who understand notes, scales, pitches, harmonies and tone are often professionals who consistantly create music by this rule base. Those who do not (like myself) compose music or create it are often confused, perplexed and mystified at trying to take on this challenge in the traditional way. Not so in this installation, for the movement of the performer gives life to what could be played, often to a degree of control that is rather astounding, based souly on the rapidness of movement.
I also asked about the addition of visuals, if any. He was resolute in that the installation wouldn't work with them. And I agreed. The visual is the performer, createing the music with movement. Much like we would go to watch a concert. We don't watch the music, we listen, but we still watch those playing it.
During the Game Developers Conference, I was intrigued by a mobile phone game that was presented by DC Collier. The game was sort of an update to the tamagotchi digital pet. The catch was that instead of pushing a few buttons to feed your pet, you had to actually take pictures based on descriptions of food that the pet wanted. Example, I am hungry, I want a fish. So the user took a picture of somthing blue, and depending on the color, turned the image into a fish for the digital pet. If not, the pet was fed somthing else that it may or may not have wanted.
We were fortunate enough to have DC Collier come speak to us and show us the exact same game again, and of course for the life of me I can't remember what the Japanese name was. I started thinking after his talk, "What if it's possible to put shape recognition in there too and make a detective type game out of it?" Thus was born the idea of Scavenger Hunt. I am currently working on design documents and learning J2ME to program it. Todd Furmanski, a fellow student, is going to help me pull it off. I will post more later. On a similar note, an old CS buddy of mine from Truman created an Image Mosaic Tiling program in Java. It is quite cool. For more info on JImage Mosaic, please go here http://jimage-mosaic.sourceforge.net/ and if you want to know more about me and what I do, please go here http://www.jimdrewes.com/~kenyon
Ah yes, and the name of the game I speak of is called, "Virtual Pet." And it's by Panasonic available in Japan. Thats what Colliers PowerPoint slides say anyways. Ah well, I will have to do some more digging.
Alright, figured out how to change the look of these posts to my little corner of the world. Expect more changes soon. The editor for Moveable type is quite easy to use. Just login and click on the templates button on the left. You first have to choose manage your own weblogs first. After that, find the CSS file to edit, should be the last one called styles-site.css (CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets) After getting the code up, scroll down to the entry that says .blog Right below it, enter in the following text
margin-right:250px;
Hopefully that should take care of the problem of the blog text running of the edge of the screen. Now to get rid of that goofy scroll bar. Oh, also changed the title...hehehhe...
I guess this is my Interactive Media Weblog section so I am going to fill it up as best I can. My interests are primarily in Mobile Media and Wearable Media, Immersive Environments and Video Games. I try and stay within this range but sometimes I just get too interested in everything! I am currently working on a J2ME mobile game involving image processing. I am also toying around with a mobile direction finding system. My thesis will either be focused on the human performance issues with avatars as cartoons, robots and CG characters...or it might deal with wearable information gathering media such as the technology used in the Arena Project
FACT: Mike Brinker has a webpage
FACT: It is not filled with FACTS, but fun stuff.
FACT: Mike also has a BBS
FACT: This IS filled with FACTS.