Scott Fisher

Congratulations Susana Ruiz, Ashley York, Mike Stein, Noah Keating and Kellee Santiago !!
Wow...

mtvU to Launch Student-Developed "Darfur is Dying" Online Game

New York - MTV Networks' mtvU college TV network on Thursday announced plans to launch "Darfur is Dying," a Web-based game created by students at the University of Southern California. The game won the network's "Darfur Digital Activist" competition, aimed at halting the genocide taking place in Sudan. The free online game will be launched on Sunday during an mtvU event in Washington called "Save Darfur: Rally to Stop Genocide".
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060427/nyth141.html?.v=47
http://www.mtvu.com
http://www.darfurisdying.com

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

From Digitalmediawire:

ABC's "Lost" to Debut Alternate Reality Game in Show's Off-Season

New York - ABC plans to debut an "alternate reality game" for fans of its TV series "Lost" on May 3, shortly before the second season of the series concludes, The New York Times reported. "The Lost Experience" is being created by the show's writers and producers, unlike other alternate reality games -- such as those for the Steven Spielberg movie "A.I.", and Microsoft's "Halo" video game -- which were designed by outside marketing firms. The game will introduce new characters and feature a plot that intertwines with that of the TV show. However, players will have to collaborate to track clues dispersed widely across media including fake websites, billboards, e-mails and phone calls. "We wanted to tell stories in a nontraditional way, and there were certain stories that [series co-creator Damon Lindelof] and I were interested in telling that don't exactly fit into the television show," Carlton Cuse, a writer and executive producer on "Lost," told The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/business/media/24lost.html
http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Time: Wednesday, April 26, 6-9pm [Special extended Session!!]
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Featuring Class Projects from :
CTIN 484/489 Intermediate Game Design Workshop
CTIN 482 Designing Online Multiplayer Games Environments: Final Projects
CTIN 488 Game Design Workshop
CTIN 405 Design and Technology for Mobile Experiences
CTIN 542 Interactive Design & Production
CTIN 544 Experiments in Interactivity

Bonus presentation by Jason Harlan on his Mobile Car Tour of LA Project.
and much more....

Food and Drink will be provided starting at 5:30 and overseen by Self Portraits from CTWR 518: Intro to Interactive Writing
*****Schedule Below******

Schedule for Final Presenations:

5:30 FOOD & CTWR 518: Intro to Interactive Writing - Self Portraits
6:00 CTIN 484/489 Intermediate Game Design Workshop (35 min.)
6:45 CTIN 482 Multiplayer Online 3 games (20 minutes)
7:00 CTIN 459 Industry Workshop Rob Finney – Self-made Man Feature Design Presentation (10 min.)
7:15 CTIN 488 Game Design Worshop Stein, Korba – Animal Crossing: Dogs Feature Design Presentation (10 min.)
7:30 CTIN 542 Interactive Design and Production & CTIN 544 Experiments in Interactivity (30 min.)

• Rick - $$$ piece & short Kandinsky-inspired piece
  
• Jess - $$$ piece (w/Justin) & Physical Computing glowy thermometer
  
• Justin - $$$ piece (w/Jess) & (maybe) Physical Computing posture chair
  
• Mihai - $$$ piece (w/Aaron)
  
• Aaron - $$$ piece (w/Mihai) & gesture-based processing app
  
• Noah - $$$ piece (w/Vince ), vocal collage max patch, and phone-based absurd interface

Posted by Scott Fisher at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact

The Scent of a Movie: Theaters in Japan are offering a new sensory experience: aromas synched with film. By Associated Press TOKYO (AP) -- Two movie theaters in Japan began offering a novel sensory experience to audiences Saturday: smells synchronized to a Hollywood adventure film. Seven different aromas wafted from beneath the back-row seats during showings of the ''The New World,'' synchronized with the on-screen action. ''This movie depicted nature a lot, so the aromas created the atmosphere of the forest and flowers shown in the movie. It was nice,'' said Asami Osato, who watched the film at Tokyo's Louvre Marunouchi theater. A floral scent accompanies a love scene, while a mix of peppermint and rosemary is emitted from special machines during a sad portion of the film. The service is available for only the back 33 of the 470 seats, according to theater official Kenjiro Bepp'We sold out all of our 'Aroma Seats' for four showings'' on Saturday, he said, adding that the service will continue through May 5.Movie theaters will be able to download scent sequences for other films from the Internet from NTT Communications, which offers the service to theaters. The company began a similar service for homes in Japan last year. Owners of the US$620 (euro500) home version can download different programs to emit smells to accompany a horoscope reading or for aromatherapy. Owners must keep refilling the machine with fragrant liquids. NTT Communications would not disclose how many machines it has sold U.S. startups have developed similar technologies before, although at least one company was forced out of business during the dot-com bust.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

MASSIVE: The Future of Networked Multiplayer Games
Calit2 Building, University of California, Irvine
April 20, 2006

Keynote: Jack Emmert, Lead Designer, City of Heroes
http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/massive/

Presented by the University of California Irvine
Institute for Software Research
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
UC Game Culture & Technology Lab
with support from UC Discovery Grants

Also see related events taking place April 21:
http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/massive/other_events/

Register early as seating is limited!
Late Registration
General Public: $125
UC Faculty & Staff and ISR Sponsors: $100
Students: $25 (No meals included)
Parking: $7

Posted by Scott Fisher at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

photo by Tristam Sparks

You probably saw this already on Regine's WMMNA site (if not you should have) but worth repeating here: a Mixed Reality Game from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milan:

"xBlocks is a convergence between video games & sculpture — liberating play from the screen. It is a mixed reality installation inspired by traditional platform games of the late 1980s such as Super Mario Brothers or Pitfall. Using standard game controllers, two opposing players must help their characters navigate in and around a three dimensional maze. The real challenge comes, not from traditional game mechanics but rather from moving with your character as he sprints around corners and jumps between the installation’s two play surfaces."

and video here.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 7:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speakers: Dan Winters, Carl Schnurr and Christian Busic
Time: Wednesday, April 19, 2006, 6:00-8:00pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Kate Paneno, Activision's University Relations Manager, we have several great speakers talking on game design, the pitch process and the “business” of games.

Bios:
Carl Schnurr joined Activision in 2005 as the Senior Director of Game Design. Previous work includes producing and designing the award-winning tactical shooters, Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear for Red Storm Entertainment, and overseeing the design of Amped, Top Spin Tennis, and Links as a Design Director for Microsoft Game Studios. He has a PhD in physics from Duke University where he studied quantum optics. Prior to joining the games industry he designed shuttle astronaut protocols, delivered singing telegrams, and freelanced for White Wolf.

Dan Winters has been involved in many hit titles including Medal of Honor: European Assault and Kingdom Hearts. Currently at Activision, he has also been at Electronic Arts and VP Product Development Buena Vista Games. In addition, he has been adjunct professor in the Interactive Media Division and presenter in CTIN 511 in 2004.

Christian Busic was Creative Director on Call of Duty 2: Big Red One and has worked on many other games.

***Backchannel log from class here: Download file

Posted by Scott Fisher at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Sandbox: an ACM Video Game Symposium
Collocated with SIGGRAPH 06
29 July & 30 July, 2006, Boston, MA, USA
http://sandboxsymposium.org/

ACM is hosting a two-day video game symposium on 29 July and 30 July in 2006, co-located with SIGGRAPH 06 in Boston, MA, USA. The symposium will consist of keynotes, panels and papers. In addition, a "Hot Games" session will preview unreleased titles from major game companies and indie developers.

Submission of full paper (long or short): 1 May 2006
Submission of camera-ready papers: 1 July 2006

Video games are a singular technological medium, comparable in cultural impact to the telephone, television or the Internet. How can we advance the state of technology while ensuring that the medium flourishes? What role do Indie developers play in maintaining diversity and creativity in this medium? What are the impacts of the medium on society and on individuals?

The symposium seeks papers that describe research and ideas that are original and innovative. Technical papers should contain an empirical evaluation and an explicit description of the advantages of the proposed technique. Other papers should meet the standards of their respective disciplines (e.g. economics or media studies) and will be peer-reviewed. Selected papers will be those that are judged to have the greatest potential for either immediate or long-term impact on the field of game development

Developers and researchers from all related disciplines are invited to participate in this event and to exchange ideas, theories and experiences regarding the state of the field. We seek contributions from the technical, creative, independent and academic communities that design and develop video games and related technology, and also from observers of video games and their impact on society and on individuals.

TOPICS

Topics should center on critical and analytical approaches to video games. The focus is threefold: (1) industry and scholarly perspectives on how video games are designed and developed; (2) analysis of the experience and pleasures of game play; (3) critical articles on the value and significance of video games as cultural artifacts. Throughout, topics should focus on close readings and critical analysis of the design and development aspects of creating unique game experiences. While MMOs, Serious Games, simulations, and pervasive/mobile games are well researched, the committee also invites submissions that explore games from the wide range of popular console and PC titles. Studies of major games with significant player bases are encouraged. The committee welcomes interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to video game criticism, as well as those from the technical, social sciences and the humanities. We invite work across game platforms and titles, on games and literature, games and film, economics, media studies, communication, sociology, games and art, and games and other digital media.

Examples of some topic areas that are of interest include, but are not limited to:

Real-time animation and computer graphics for video games
Distributed simulation and communication in multi-player games
Game console hardware and software
Psychophysics and user interfaces
Artificial intelligence in games
Interactive physics
Uses of GPU for non-graphical algorithms in games
Multi-processor techniques for games
Speech and vision processing as user input techniques
Development tools and techniques
Procedural art
Sound Design and music in games
Mathematical Game Theory applied to video games
Cinematography in games
Game design and game genres
Story structure (setting, plot, character, theme) in games
Games (Casual, Serious, Mobile, Networked, Alternative Reality, Ubiquitous, Pervasive, etc.)
Legal, political, and societal impacts
Women and diversity in games
Gamer culture and community; such as modding communities, LAN parties, creative gamer content and machinima
Independent game developers
Economics and business of the game industry
Game production and labor
Negotiating intellectual property issues in development
Trade offs between creativity and branding in design and production
Alternative distribution models

SUBMISSIONS
Please submit full papers, not abstracts. Accepted formats:
-Long Paper (max. 10 pages)
-Short paper (max. 4 pages)
All papers will be reviewed by an independent review committee, which will provide written feedback on each paper. ACM will publish the proceedings and papers will be archived in the ACM Digital Library.

DATES
Submission of full paper (long or short): 1 May 2006
Submission of camera-ready papers: 1 July 2006
Submission of Hot Game demo: 1 July 06 *

CONTACT
Conference Chair: Drew Davidson (drew@waxebb.com)
Program Chair: Alan Heirich (alan.heirich@playstation.sony.com)
Program Chair: Doug Thomas (douglast@usc.edu)

* NOTE: There will be a specific call for Hot Games entries. In order to get the most contemporary games, the Hot Games session has a later submission date, but interested parties are welcome to submit ideas for the session earlier.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nice visualization project at the SF Exploratorium (via Eric Paulos at Intel's Berkeley Lab):

Cabspotting: an alternate view of a living city:
A group of designers and programmers led by Eric Rodenbeck of the
mind-blowing Stamen Design firm created the wonderful
Cabspotting.org, an online art experience that traces the movement of
San Francisco's GPS-enabled Yellow Cabs as they move through the
city. It's part of the Exploratorium's larger Invisible Dynamics
initiative to "reveal radically surprising and inspiring views of the
systems interconnecting the communities of the Bay." The
Exploratoirum is also encouraging the creation of artist's projects,
basically novel mash-ups of the same data that drives
Cabspotting.org's real-time cab tracking and time lapse visualizations.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Photo by Max Gerber

Speaker: Norman Klein
Time: Thursday, April 13, 2006, 6:30-8:30pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Norman Klein is on the faculty at CalArts, a cultural critic, and both an urban and media historian, as well as a novelist. His books include "The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory," "Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon," and the data/cinematic novel, "Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86" (DVD-ROM with book in collaboration with USC's Labyrinth Project). His next book will be "The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects.".

His essays appear in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers, scholarly journals, on the WEB-- symptoms of a polymath's career, from European cultural history to animation and architectural studies, to LA studies, to fiction, media design and documentary film. His work (including museum shows) centers on the relationship between collective memory and power, from special effects to cinema to digital theory, usually set in urban spaces; and often on the thin line between fact and fiction; about erasure, forgetting, scripted spaces, the social imaginary.

**********PLEASE NOTE TIME CHANGE!**********

Posted by Scott Fisher at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Gordon Bell , legendary computer pioneer and Director of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (with major projects on "Media Presence" and "MyLifeBits"), will give a talk at Viterbi School of Engineering on Thursday, April 6 at 3pm in SAL 101.

Title: "On Building Memex: Current Status"

Abstract:
Memex is a quest to chronicle a person's life by encoding every aspect of one's communications with people and machines, what is heard and seen, and all the aspects of their physical existence. These digital memories will not only extend human memory; they will infallibly record sensor readings and machine activities not even perceived by humans. Digital memories can provide humans with better recall, improved health, faster learning, new insights, and a telling of their story to posterity that only the great used to receive. They will hopefully enhance personal reflection in the same way that internet search has enabled more research.

Recent IEEE Spectrum article about his work here.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Image by J. Bleecker

Title: "Hard Intangibles"
Speaker: Pierre de Vries
Time: Wednesday, April 5, 2006, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Intangibles have come to dominate the economy and our personal lives. However, our brains are built to deal with physical things. This talk explores what happens when the knowledge economy collides with our cognitive limitations.

Bio: Pierre de Vries was trained as a scientist. After receiving a PhD in theoretical physics from Oxford University, he worked for a London-based venture capital company. He then talked his way into art school, and after three years studying sculpture was hired by Microsoft to build prototypes of future products. His work there included managing user experience design for mobile devices; starting and managing technology incubations, including a community-based wireless mesh network; supervising the start-up of a European advanced development lab; and directing cross-company telecommunications policy. He left Microsoft in June 2005 and is now an independent researcher working on the intersection of technology and society. He is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center at USC.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)