Search

We explore how augmenting musical instruments with digital identities can enhance their provenance, utility during creative practice, and personal meaning. A literature review reveals the importance of object identities in general and instrument identities in particular, how the identities of things can be digitally augmented, but also that this idea has not been widely applied to musical instruments. A first case study draws on interviews to illuminate the current practice of physically relicing guitars to enhance their identities. A second case study of augmenting a guitar to capture and retell its life story illuminates potential digital identity practices. Reflecting on both case studies, we reconsider musical instruments as product-service systems in which physical instruments come bundled with digital services that forge, perform, and share their identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from an interdisciplinary collaboration between prosthesis-using disabled dance artists, computer scientists, dance researchers and engineers to explore the transformative potential of digital technologies to co-create aesthetically personalised prosthetics from dance movements. Beginning with the dancers performing improvised movement sequences in motion capture suits, which drove a computational design algorithm, an 'aesthetic seed' for each dancer was generated: a kind of personal signature from their movement. These seeds were then algorithmically mapped onto the shapes of prosthetic limb covers that could be 3D printed in a variety of materials. The paper will share some of the reflections from the dancers on how the process generated questions about agency, appropriation, ownership and the political implications of disability as a site of resistance. It will suggest some ways in which digital methods can offer disabled artists different routes towards making and sharing work, whilst foregrounding the importance of inclusion to challenge normative thinking around what 'connection' and 'access' means in the context of digital innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guitarists struggle to play their instruments while simultaneously using additional computing devices (i.e., encumbered interaction). We explored designs with guitarists through co-design and somaesthetic design workshops, learning that they (unsurprisingly) preferred to focus on playing their guitars and keeping their instruments' material integrity intact. Subsequently, we devised an interactive guitar strap controller, which guitarists found promising for tackling encumbered interaction during instrumental transcription, learning and practice. Our design process highlights three strategies: considering postural interaction, applying somaesthetic design to interactive music technology development, and augmenting guitar accessories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is often oriented primarily towards the past, while the latter is often oriented towards the future, in terms of anticipating the receiver's reactions. Our article provides a sustained and well-evidenced new theoretical framework on the role of time-orientation on the design of forward-oriented (gifting) experiences in past-oriented (museum) settings. This Temporal Experience Design Framework develops from the analysis of two such studies, one smartphone app and one VR experience using passive haptics. Both interventions prompted the user to reflect on the past while planning a gift or donation for future consumption. We apply a novel combination of analyses to both projects using the lenses of conversational storytelling, performance, and human geography. Our analyses reveal the power of orienting users towards the past and the future – simultaneously – to enhance the present moment of a performative engagement. Our aim is to provide a conceptual framework that can help design researchers to identify, name, and understand how time-orientation can be used to enhance user and visitor experience. We also extrapolate design guidelines that we expect may be fruitful outside these contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomy revisited While our case studies are not directly of autonomous systems (typically involving quite simple interaction algorithms rather than the overt use of artificial intelligence, and in which systems are tightly coupled to humans rather than being independent of them), both I Broncomatic i and I Climb! Our observations have implications for the design of a wide variety of autonomous systems from human interactions with autonomous robots and vehicles to increasingly everyday interaction modalities involving gaze control, breath control, physiological sensing, and even voice, face, and gesture recognition, all of which may involve involuntary and unaware human actions. Embodied interaction revisited Our paper directly addresses calls for HCI to focus on the role of the body in embodied interaction, and in particular to adopt a more holistic approach toward designing for both mind and body (Höök et al., [28]; Klemmer et al., [36]). This mind-body dualism is reflected in much of HCI's thinking about interaction, for example, in the separation of cognitive goals from physical systems, the so-called gulfs of execution and evaluation in Norman's ([45]) "cognitive engineering". [Extracted from the article]

We reflect on two museum visiting experiences that adopted the strategy of interpersonalization in which one visitor creates an experience for another. In the Gift app, visitors create personal mini-tours for specific others. In Never let me go, one visitor controls the experience of another by sending them remote instructions as they follow them around the museum. By reflecting on the design of these experiences and their deployment in museums we show how interpersonalization can deliver engaging social visits in which visitors make their own interpretations. We contrast the approach to previous research in customization and algorithmic personalization. We reveal how these experiences relied on intimacy between pairs of visitors but also between visitors and the museum. We propose that interpersonalization requires museums to step-back to make space for interpretation, but that this then raises the challenge of how to reintroduce the museum's own perspective. Finally, we articulate strategies and challenges for applying this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augmenting navigation systems with landmarks has been posited as a method of improving the effectiveness of the technology and enhancing drivers’ engagement with the environment. However, good navigational landmarks are both laborious to collect and difficult to define. This research aimed to devise a game concept which could be played by passengers in cars, and would collect useful landmark data as a by-product. The paper describes how a virtual graffiti tagging game concept was created and tested during on-road trials with 38 participants. The data collected in the road trials were then validated using a survey, in which 100 respondents assessed the quality of the landmarks collected and their potential for reuse in navigation applications. Players of the game displayed a consensus in choosing where to place their graffiti tags, with over 30% of players selecting the same object to tag in 10 of the 12 locations. Furthermore, significant correlation was found between how highly landmarks were rated in the survey and how frequently they were tagged during the game. The research provides evidence that using crowdsourcing games to collect landmarks does not require large numbers of people, or extensive coverage of an area, to produce suitable candidate landmarks for navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of pervasive computing, location-aware pervasive games have proliferated quickly. To counter the inefficiency of information adaptation based on a location and a radius, this article presents the design and implementation of Your Way Your Missions (YWYM), which is a location-aware pervasive game exploiting the routes of players. YWYM provides a Google Maps–based tool for players to predefine routes, and utilizes self-reporting method to obtain the planned routes of players. By such a design, missions are returned to players in terms of the location properties of missions and the planned routes of players. A field study was conducted to investigate the usage of YWYM, and the results indicate that route predefining and self-reporting methods are an effective approach to obtain the planned routes of players, and information adaptation based on the planned routes of players could help them find missions at any place and any time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces an original documentation and archiving tool, CloudPad, that integrates ‘cloud computing’ into the annotation and synchronisation of mixed media resources. Through CloudPad users are able to view a documentation, edit a version of it, and record their own comments in response to it. Whether users may have created and/or experienced a particular work, or whether they may simply wish to consult a work's documentation, their journey through these records and annotations are subsumed into the work's documentation, thus augmenting the ‘original’ artwork's field of social engagement. Before discussing CloudPad in detail, we proceed to explain how recent debates in performance documentation influenced our methodology and development, and the general challenges of mixed reality documentation that CloudPad aims to address. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses modes of documentation and archiving of live performance. It also constitutes a documentation of the practical and theoretical concerns encountered while documenting Blast Theory's Mixed Reality Performance Rider Spoke (2007) over a period of three years (2007-2010) through two different technologies developed by the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham: the Digital Replay System (DRS), and a CloudPad. Conducted by an interdisciplinary team with expertise in Performance Studies, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Management, this documentation comprises: a reflection on the imperative to archive which underpins significant aspects of the digital economy; an analysis of Blast Theory's work Rider Spoke; a discussion of a prototype archive developed using the DRS as part of the EPSRC-funded Creator project; a 'bespoke' documentation of Rider Spoke, including a description of how the team from the Mixed Reality Laboratory, the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter and the Ludwig Boltzman Institute Media.Art.Research used off-the-shelf technologies innovatively to capture the participant experience when the work was shown at the ars electronica festival in Linz (2009); and a contextual analysis of our methodology and the first presentation of an original archiving tool, the CloudPad, developed by the RCUK-funded Horizon research project specifically for the documentation and annotation of Mixed Reality Performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the issues and challenges arising from the archiving and replay of an interactive mixed reality performance work called Rider Spoke. After a description of the work, a practice-based approach to the development of an information architecture for the archiving and replay of the work is presented. The approach includes the design of a website, a cross-disciplinary approach to the development of metadata and the development of a visual prototype implemented using a Digital Replay System (DRS). The article concludes with suggestions for creative and artistic replay, and recommendations for further work in support of research replay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flashlight torches are cheap, robust, familiar and fun and so make interesting devices upon which to base interaction technologies. Computer vision software has been developed that can recognise and distinguish between different flashlight beams and these can be used to activate digital media including audio, video or special effects. The technology appears to 'magically bring to life' objects and areas of the environment merely by shining a torch on them and has been used successfully to enhance visitor attractions such as museum exhibits and displays. This paper considers the potential for using this technology in special needs education, providing a means for children to explore their immediate environment and discover something new. Potential applications for supporting learning are proposed and a feasibility study is presented. Three case examples were conducted to assess the practicalities of configuring interactive learning experiences within the schoolenvironment and pupil's responses to the technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asperger's Syndrome (AS) is an autistic spectrumdisorder characterised by normal to high IQ but with marked impairment insocial skills. Successful social skills training appears to be best achievedeither in situ or in role-play situations where users can explore differentoutcomes resulting from their social behaviour. Single user virtual environments(SVEs) provide an opportunity for users with AS to learn social interactionskills in a safe environment which they can visit as many times as they like.Theuse of game-like tasks can provide an incentive and can also be used to guidethe user through progressive learning stages. Collaborative virtual environments(CVEs) allow several users to interact simultaneously within the virtual environment,each taking different perspectives or role-play characters. Within the ASinteractive project a series of SVEs and CVEs have been developed in collaborationwith users and professional groups with an overall aim of supporting socialskills learning. Initial evaluation studies have been carried out which havebeen used to both inform and refine the design of these virtual environments(VEs) as well as giving an insight into the understanding and interpretationof these technologies by users with AS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]