IPCity Newsletter #7, April 2007 IPCity Newsletter news can also be read from the IPCity dissemination website at http://www.ipcity.eu/ Select News from the left panel to view the most current news. IPCity (FP-2004-IST-4-27571) is a EU funded Sixth Framework programme Integrated project on Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments. http://www.ipcity.eu/ -------------------------------------------- You can subscribe to IPCity news RSS feed from http://www.ipcity.eu/?feed=rss2. -------------------------------------------- CONTENTS -Peach summer school -Design of presence Ñ thesis -Two performance events of interest -FlashMob -Spatial Cognition in Architectural Design -Research and Activism 4th Urban Studies Days at the Estonian Academy of Arts -Ubicomp2007 Doctoral Colliquium -Transmedial Interactions and Digital Games -Taking a Stroll Through Virtual Dublin -IPCity workshop in Sainte-Anne, Paris -News from HIIT -------------------------------------------- Peach First Summer School. Santorini, GREECE - July 4/5/6th 2007 Are you a PRESENCE junior RESEARCHER (industry or Academic), Or presence PhD student? Would you like to attend the first Peach Summer School! Registration opened until APRIL 20th 2007! Peach has money to support your travel and logistic expenses! Summer School title: ÒTowards Human Machine Confluence - Presence Technologies and FoundationsÓ. The Peach Summer School will have morning lectures, in which Presence experts will share with the students Presence technologies, measurement and Foundations, and working group afternoons, where Presence measurements and applications demos will be provided. Finally each day will have a poster session where students will present their work to the attendees and experts. http://school.peachbit.org -------------------------------------------- Design of presence Ñ thesis BEING THERE, BUT NOT, WITH NEVEJAN (Doors of Perception Report April 2) DoorsÕ lifelong friend and collaborator Caroline Nevejan has completed the dissertation for her PhD on Òpresence and the design of trustÓ. Her timing could hardly be better. As George Monbiot so inconveniently demonstrates in ÒHeatÓ, each passenger on a return flight from London to New York produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. ÒThere is no technofix to the disastrous impact of air travel on the environmentÉthe only answer is to ground most of the aeroplanes flying todayÓ concludes cheerful George. So NevejanÕs topic, the design of presence in technologically mediated environments, moves centre stage. http://www.xs4all.nl/~nevejan/presence/ http://www.being-here.net/ -------------------------------------------- Two performance events of interest MAPPING THE NECKLACE (Doors of Perception Report April 2) Can you roam a park which doesnÕt, as such, exist? How do you map something ephemeral like a memory, or a noise? In the City of Durham, the Necklace Park has opened for business - virtually. On May 5-7, you are invited to join spies, geeks, performers and other lone rangers to track, create, and compose your own park along a12 mile stretch of the River Wear with its 1,000 years of river-linked experience. http://www.mapping-the-necklace.org.uk/ SNOUT - PARTICIPATORY SENSING (Doors of Perception Report April 2) In next weekÕs Snout Ôparticipatory sensing carnivalÕ in London, artists, producers, performers and computer programmers demonstrate how to create wearable technologies, from scavenged media, in order to map the invisible gases that affect our everyday environment. The project also explores how communities can use this visual evidence to participate in or initiate local action. The performance will show in action two prototype Snout sensor ÔwearablesÕ based on traditional carnival costumes. Venue: Cargo, 83 Rivington St, Kingsland Viaduct, London, EC2A 3AY, Tuesday 10 April. http://www.iniva.org -------------------------------------------- FlashMob FLASHMOB - a mailing list to discuss and convene flashmob and related place-specific performative activities to inform performance research (relates to events in the city). To join the list, see here: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/FLASHMOB. ÒIn modern usage, flash mob describes a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, and then quickly disperse. They are usually organized with the help of the Internet or other communications networks.Ó Wikipedia For more information on flashmob, see eg. these links: -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob -http://flashmob.com/ -------------------------------------------- Spatial Cognition in Architectural Design 19 September 2007: Workshop - Spatial Cognition in Architectural Design Anticipating User Behavior, Layout Legibility, and Route Instructions in the Planning Process in conjunction with international Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSITÕ07) Melbourne, Australia. Architects make inferences about the spaces that they are not in. They can infer how multi storey buildings look like by inspecting separate 2D layouts of the floors. They can mentally synthesize separate spaces that make up a building design, and they can create alternative designs by revising the spaces and how these spaces may come together. Apart from these inferences, architects may also anticipate how residents and visitors of a building will behave in the spaces. They may design a building in such a way that peopleÕs ability to understand the spatial layout of this building is influenced (in a positive or negative way). For instance, the legibility of the spatial environment may in- fluence the way in which routes between locations in the building are conceptualized, mentally processed, and communicated. These issues as well can inform and change the architectÕs spatial inferences and decisions in the architectural design process. Questions to be considered in this workshop include, but are not restricted to: - How do architects switch between the designerÕs and the usersÕ perspectives during the design process? - What types of (internal and external) knowledge representations and pro- cesses do they make use of? - What are suitable computational tools for dealing with the spatial complexity of the diverse spatial perspectives and requirements? - What means are there to anticipate the way future users of the building will conceive of the building layout? - Regarding complex built environments, how can the aspect of conceptualizing and communicating route knowledge be integrated in the design process? - How do spatial / architectural and mental complexity related to each other with respect to building layouts? What are the limits both in the design process and the real experience of the resulting building complex? Call for contributions Authors are invited to submit a contribution of 4 to 6 pages as basis for discussions during the workshop (pdf file in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science format, see www.springer.com/lncs). Please send your contribution to barkowsky@sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de. Accepted contributions will be made available on the workshop web site, unless their authors instruct us otherwise. Important dates -30 April 2007 submission of workshop contributions -15 June 2007 notification of acceptance -07 July 2007 final versions of workshop contributions -19 Sept 2007 workshop More information at http://www.sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de/SCAD -------------------------------------------- Research and Activism 4th Urban Studies Days at the Estonian Academy of Arts 25-26 April 2007: Call for papers - Research and Activism 4th Urban Studies Days at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, Estonia. The tools of urban planning and policy can poorly address a range of important contemporary urban issues. Finding cultural and creative uses for old industrial areas, fighting social polarisation, achieving a liveable multicultural milieu and redefining urban character as a political project are questions where forms of urban activism have recently played decisive roles. Multicultural festivals, temporary cultural uses and community based new media are examples of fresh approaches, the ÒResearch and ActivismÓ conference aims at bringing together. More http://www.cumulusassociation.org/index.php?option=com_content& task=view&id=100&Itemid=37. -------------------------------------------- Ubicomp2007 Doctoral Colliquium Call for Doctoral Colloquium (DC) PhD students and candidates are invited to present, discuss and defend their work-in-progress or preliminary results in an international and renowned audience of researchers and developers in the ubiquitous computing field at UbiComp 2007. PhD students and candidates at all stages in the process are invited to submit a thesis position paper. Participants will be expected to give short, informal presentations of their work during the Colloquium, to be followed by a discussion. The submission (max. 8 pages) should clearly state: -the original key idea of the thesis -the problem domain and the specific problem addressed -an overview of related work in the area of the PhD work -methodological approach -research carried out -the contribution made in the field of ubiquitous computing (for early work, state the expected contribution) Submissions should be formatted according to the guidelines of SpringerÕs Lecture Notes in Computer Science and should be submitted as PDF files through EDAS. The submissions will be reviewed and based on these reviews approximately 8 participants for the doctoral colloquium will be selected. The accepted thesis position papers will be published in the adjunct proceedings of UbiComp 2007. Important Dates -extended to March 12, 2007 (closed) Ñ Submission of thesis position paper -May 15, 2007 Ñ Accept/reject notifications -June 29, 2007 Ñ Camera ready papers -September 16, 2007 Ñ Doctoral Colloquium in Innsbruck, Austria More at http://www.ubicomp2007.org/calls/dc/ -------------------------------------------- Transmedial Interactions and Digital Games 12 June 2007: Call for Workshop Participation. Transmedial Interactions and Digital Games, Salzburg, Austria http://hcid.informatics.indiana.edu/ace2007/ Held in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology As virtual worlds and games grow in importance, present limitations in access to them limits their ability to achieve their potential. In persistent online worlds, peer actions and event changes have cumulative effects that are consequential to individuals, whether or not they are available, just as in real life. But unlike real life, where we have plenty of tools to help us juggle multiple responsibilities, access into virtual worlds today occurs through a single access point; active participation requires a significant stationary commitment. Even the most dedicated users have difficulty keeping up with the dynamic information. To remain active and included, users need better ways to communicate, cooperate, and coordinate. Transmedial access, in which playersÕ access to a game and their characters/data is made possible across different devices, offers a promising solution to this problem. It also inaugurates a new category of interaction design: transmedial interaction. This workshop explores the state of the art of transmedial interaction in games, which today unfortunately is often at most mere afterthought. It provides a participatory environment in which attendees can chart new paths forward, from developing viable business models and understanding the technical infrastructure to developing critical vocabularies and evaluative frameworks. The workshop is intended for a broad audience, which will collaboratively achieve the following: - Review current state-of-the-art examples of transmedia interactions in entertainment computing, especially video games - Survey the technical infrastructure needed for transmedia interactions in digital games (e.g., feedback, adaptivity, etc.) - Understand how the strength and weakness of different media channels shape player experiences during transmedia interactions - Construct design guidelines for transmedial interactions and determine the components needed for successful and seamless transmedial interaction design - Consider evaluation criteria for transmedial interactions We encourage participation from diverse academic disciplines including design, HCI, computer science,, media and game studies, strategic communications, and psychology, as well as industry experts and practitioners, for a total of 15-20 people. Specifically, this workshop will create a synergy among the following target audiences: - Online and mobile game designers interested in developing appropriate mechanisms to overcome the difficulty of designing for multiple media channels and cross-media experiences - Interaction designers and researchers interested in human-human and human-machine interactions across devices, including mobile and ubiquitous computing - Gaming industry pioneers interested in the exploration of novel ways to extend and integrate different media channelsÕ capacities to create cross-device and cross-network experiences for their target customers - Entertainment computing marketers interested in identifying key challenges and solutions in promoting transmedial experiences Participants will be selected based on 2-4 page position papers that address workshop goals. Send submissions (PDF) to Shaowen Bardzell (selu [at] indiana.edu) with subject ÒACE 2007 Workshop SubmissionÓ by March 30, 2007. Accepted position papers will be published on the workshop website. Depending on the outcomes of the workshop and the interests of the workshop attendees, the organizers may also coordinate further publications. http://www.ace2007.org/ -------------------------------------------- Taking a Stroll Through Virtual Dublin From Irish Times (03/23/07) Lillington, Karlin Researchers at Trinity College Dublin are constructing an immersive 3D replica of the city, complete with pedestrians, stonework, and the ability to pan upwards for a vertical view. The people who walk the streets of Virtual Dublin wear various clothes that move separately from their bodies, and the carvings on the side of buildings can be appreciated for their detail. ÒThis is much more realistic than [online virtual world] Second Life,Ó says TCD computer science professor Carol OÕSullivan. ÒItÕs a good framework for doing studies into human perception.Ó While the most obvious use for the technology developed by the effort, known as Project Metropolis, would be video games, the work could also contribute to health care and urban planning, as EU regulations will require planners to provide citizens with simulations that take into account road noise, pedestrian traffic, and the aesthetic effects of new buildings. ÒThis will improve our understanding of the human brain,Ó explains TCD cognitive neuroscientist Fiona Newell. ÒA world like this could be used to rehabilitate people who are socially disabledÐwho are agoraphobic, perhaps, or autisticÐbecause all the variables can be controlled. You could also safely put people into otherwise dangerous situations.Ó So far, 2 square km of the planned 5 square km have been completed in high detail, and there are currently 50,000 virtual people walking the streets. Project Metropolis is part of a 2.5 million euro Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) initiative. Click Here to View Full Article - Web Link to Publication Homepage -------------------------------------------- IPCity workshop in Sainte-Anne, Paris By Maria Basile An IPCity workshop in Sainte-Anne hospital (Paris) was held between March 19 and 20th. The workshop was connected to the City on the Move event ÒThe street belongs to all of us!Ó. More information on the event at http://www.larueestatous.com/index_uk.html. The workshop was addressing especially the work package on ÒUrban RenewalÓ (WP6) and ÒPresenceÓ (WP3) but all IP City members were invited since it was the occasion to discuss stakes connecting mixed reality to the city in general. The workshop was attended by participants from the UMLV, TUW, TUG, UniAK, Oulu and Aalborg. The TUW tools which were trialled in the workshop were the Colour Table (Panorama, See-through and Sound applications), and from TUG the Urban Sketcher. On Monday the work was mainly done with the equipment installation and final preparation, Mira Wagner had been preparing content since a week on site, most of the IPCity people had started setting material up on Sunday. During the afternoon, a working session was held with the stakeholders of Sainte-Anne, including the director and staff from the hospital management. Also architects and officials participated this session. One of the main conclusions was that IPCity tools are less adapted to urban design than to negotiation and demonstration/ communication. On the Tuesday workshop, after debriefing and preparations, another session was held. This session was more cooperative than the previous one, probably due to the variety of the participants. The interactive possibilities were appreciated: the users wish to be able to introduce their own references real time. The learning process was a point of interest, too. Discussions went further on the real-virtual mix and its utility for the project negotiation. A more detailed report on the workshop is available http://www.ipcity.eu/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/UMLVnewsletterApril07.doc (doc). -------------------------------------------- News from HIIT Carmelo Ardito from Interaction Visualization Usability group Dipartimento di Informatica, Universitˆ di Bari (http://www.di.uniba.it/~ardito) has visited the IPCity partner HIIT. Carmelo Ardito is currently interested in ÒMaking Dead History Come Alive Through Mobile Game-PlayÓ Using pervasive games to transform the visit to archaeological sites into a more complete and culturally rich experience. Also, Ina Wagner and Giulio JacucciÕs paper titled ÒPerformative Roles of Materiality for Collective CreativityÓ paper has been accepted to ACM Creativity and Cognition 2007. More on the conference at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/ -------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------- IPCity (FP-2004-IST-4-27571) is a EU funded Sixth Framework programme Integrated project on Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments. http://www.ipcity.eu/ -------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------