Mike Rossmassler

>shaping the user's experience and path through an installation even before PCs in the late 80s
>initally avoided PCs due to the lack of input of data from nonstandard input devices
>if you can't get the right representations, it is difficult to make inferences based on the data
>slide projectors with strobe bulbs as light sources
>product hacking transitioned into robotics
>real time computation difficulties led to economical coding where goals were to minimize latency and to reduce processing time
>intends to turn attention of users to their own embodied experience
>make user focus on their own experience within the work
>interested in creatining intuitive and unintruding landscapes

Traces video of presentation at Ars Electronica99
>3D stereo cameras for immersive narratives in a cave
>4 cameras tied into a 166mhz Pentium in 1998
>dragons created by throwing movement of participant
>adheres to paradigm of naviation through virtual worlds
>not interested in navigation or immersive environments
>autonomous agents had to be simple due to hardware limitations
>all response by the CAVE was due to their behaviour in the environment
>driven by a critique of the rhetoric of VR
-->VR does violence to ones sense of embodiment, one checks ones body at the door
>"Virtual Reality as the completion of the enlightenment project"
>the distinction between showing someone the picture of something and them actually having that experience
>vast amounts of our lives as lived are already fictionalized
>difference between seeing and doing
>conception that the body moves and the eyes watch the body move, vision is a mode of understanding action

Fugitive II
>exploring the modes of cultural interactions with the environment
>build cultural artifacts which have behaviour
>user movement tied to pan and zoom of a camera showing video source
>reduction of user to pointing device
>volumetric data generated by system was deployed as a method of getting a reliable dataset
>behaviour of the user is to undo the cinematography; unwraps the camera used in the original shooting
>not an image centric piece; make the video as boring as possible to remove the agency of the video

Body Electric
>"spectatcor" as the term for artisticplayer/participant
>refresh rate of 15-30 frames per second
>client code takes pointcloud of user's movement

multicamera positional sensor systems can be used for multiple end purposes
"essentialy a sophisticated sensor system"
the camera view overlap creates an "active area"
uses image differencing - any nonzero value means something is there
voxel based imaging system, SUSE platform based

I took away the impression that Simon Penny is aiming for a transparent interface between computing and users. He mentioned numerous times that he aimed to have users be able to interact with the environment without a need for tutorials or instructions. He mentioned that he didn't like the mouse control schematic. While i agree with the notion, i still got the feeling that he was simply just replacing the mouse with the user's movement. For one, the user's movement in relation to the camera's viewport in "Fugitive II," while technically very impressive felt like the user was simply substituting their body for the mouse pointer.