Human-display interaction technology: Emerging remote interfaces for pervasive display environments

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.We're living in a world where information processing isn't confined to desktop computers - it's being integrated into everyday objects and activities. Pervasive computation is human centered: it permeates our physical world, helping us achieve goals and fulfill our needs with minimum effort by exploiting natural interaction styles. Remote interaction with screen displays requires a sensor-based, multimodal, touchless approach. For example, by processing user hand gestures, this paradigm removes constraints requiring physical contact and permits natural interaction with tangible digital information. Such touchless interaction can be multimodal, exploiting the visual, auditory, and olfactory senses.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and Amper Sistemas, SA

Crafting Play: Little Big Planet

In the contemporary era of Web 2.0, high-tech consumer culture is increasingly engaged in the production of ‘user-generated content’ (UGC) for digital multicast. The tension between global homogeneity and the potential of technology to support multiple voices, histories and viewpoints is of central interest. The new DIY craft movement is successfully adopting Internet technologies to go straight to market as the digital generation increasingly engages in analogue craft practice. The swell of interest in craft values, both in objects and in hands-on feel and process exhibited in blogs such as Wonderland and distribution aggregators like Etsy, offers a productive frame that connects the digital and the analogue. Whether this reveals any anxiety about the intangibility of the digital or points to an increased creativity inspired by UGC remains open to question. The ‘feedback loop’ (to use Schechner’s (2002) term for the connection between an individual’s behavior and what they observe on street, stage and screen) between digital and real world practice, although far from literal, provides a frame for the dialogue between game form and culture at large. This paper teases out aspects of this feedback loop using examples from Sony’s PS3 series Little Big Planet (2008). The argument presented here does not deal with narratological or ludic structures and only tips its hat at the much broader field of fan culture but foregrounds context, style and characterization in its approach to analysis. The rationale for this approach is two-fold; first through the weight Media Molecule, developers of the game, give to visual communication and secondly through the prioritization of the invitation to create over and above the provision of a full triple-A title more typical of a console launch game

The impact of Nintendo’s "for men" advertising campaign on a potential female market

In order to emphasize the maturation of their hand-held console and increase its appeal to an adult market, Nintendo's UK advertising campaign for the Game Boy Advance SP drew explicitly upon 'lad' culture and a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of cologne advertising. In this campaign, the lead and most prominent promotional advert for the device used an image of the Game Boy with the tagline "For Men". This paper outlines why Nintendo's decision to present the Game Boy as a male accessory prompted exploration into its potential impact on the female market. Much of the emerging research field examining female participation in game cultures had at that point tended to focus its attention on exploring the experiences of different female groups with a variety of software titles and its associated communities. In contrast, this paper addresses participants' perceptions of the gaming industry and its relevance to them as a (potential) consumer by taking a hardware device as its focus. This was achieved by conducting a series of focus groups, with a range of both experienced and inexperienced female game players, during which participants were asked to engage with the hand-held device and experience both its single and networked game-play capabilities with the game Legend of Zelda. The findings address participants' awareness and views on the extent to which gaming is coded male and its ramifications for their participation in game cultures

The Culture of Gamework

While the digital games industry has become increasingly marketised and professionalized in its forty years of commercial existence, at the same time it has maintained some of its DIY roots and is somewhat ahead of other media industries in its attempts to facilitate and appropriate amateur productions. The increasingly globalised nature of digital game development gives rise to challenges and tensions related to managing development projects across transnational networks of companies, managing inputs of amateur producers and managing communities of players. The digital game industry is used today in media and communication studies both as an example of "co-creative culture" (Jenkins, 2006; Raessens, 2005) and of "precarious labour" (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, & De Peuter, 2003; Kücklich, 2005; Postigo, 2003 and 2007; Terranova, 2004). These concepts are not necessarily exclusive and both can be usefully employed to understand work in game production networks in particular (Kerr, 2006a) and media work more generally (Deuze, 2007)

Social play spaces for active community engagement

This paper puts forward the perspective that social play spaces are opportunities to utilise both technology and body for the benefit of community culture and engagement. Co-located social gaming coupled with tangible interfaces offer active participant engagement and the development of the local video game scene. This paper includes a descriptive account of Rabble Room Arcade, an experimental social event combining custom-built physical interface devices and multiplayer video games

Abandonware, Commercial Expatriation and Post-Commodity Fan Practice: A Study of the Sega Dreamcraft

This thesis explores the nature of digital gaming platforms once they have been expatriated from the consumer marketplace and have been relegated to obsolescence. In this state, abandonware becomes a site for creative interventions by active audiences, who exploit, hack and modify these consoles in order to accommodate a range of creative practices. As part of the digital toolkit for fan production, the Sega Dreamcast has become a focal point for fan based video game remix practices, whereby fan creators appropriate imagery and iconography from popular media to create new works derivative of these franchises. These fan practices subvert the proprietary protocols of digital platforms, re-contextualizing them as devices for creative intervention by practitioners, who distribute their works and the knowledge necessary to produce them, through online communities

Mapping the Monetization Challenge of Gaming in Various Domains

The cost of developing successful games for either entertainment or business purposes is a high-risk investment but mandatory due to the nature of the sector. However, there are discrete and innovative ways that minimize the investments risk and assure profitability without losing the player’s engagement. Gaming monetization can be approached from direct or indirect financial charges based on the scope of the game and its target group. As of today, no monetization practice can be considered as a silver bullet as they are all affected by geographical, cultural, social, economic and other factors. This paper attempts to define the major monetization elements in the gaming industry. It also attempts to define the major gaming categories and subcategories and associate on them the monetization elements and techniques. Furthermore, it creates a map for the development of gamification monetization approaches per case which can contribute towards effective gaming investments management

Time for play – An exploratory analysis of the changing consumption contexts of digital games

This study posits that Internet technologies are relaxing the coupling constraints required for the consumption of digital games, resulting in entirely different modes of consumption than has been the norm for the past thirty years. The data collection and analysis found that players of traditional console-based games tend to play for several hours at a time while at a home during evenings and on weekends, the traditional scenario associated with leisure activities. Players of the latest breed of online browser-based digital games, on the other hand, tend to play them for only a few minutes at a time, and at many times throughout the day as a diversionary filler activ-ity between other daily activities. Because they utilize simple and readily available Internet technologies, online browser-based games have facilitated the penetration of digital games into new spaces, including the workplace and school, reflecting a growing trend in modern society.Digital games; online browser-based games; time use; uses and gratifications

Ubiquitous Environment Control System: An Internet-of- Things–Based Decentralized Autonomous Measurement and Control System for a Greenhouse Environment

A low-cost and flexible system for environmental measurement and control in greenhouses based on decentralized autonomous technics, Ubiquitous Environment Control System (UECS), was proposed in 2004. The UECS is composed of autonomous nodes as the minimum units of measurement and control. The nodes can connect with each other through Ethernet or Wi-Fi and can communicate information regardless of manufacturer or model. To realize automation and efficiency of protected horticultural production, two consortia for UECS development and extension were established. During the last 10 years, the UECS has been used to apply environment control in large-scale greenhouses and plant factories. The stability and utility of the UECS have been demonstrated and verified in these practical cultivations. Current research and development are being carried out to install information and communication technology (ICT) systems to improve productivity in existing small- to medium-scale greenhouses in Japan. The flexibility and concept of the UECS have been very effective to enable sophisticated environmental control technology to be applied to small- and medium-scale greenhouses. In this chapter, self-fabricated UECS, the renewal of old environmental control systems using the UECS, and Sub-GHz radio band use for communicating UECS nodes among distributed greenhouses are discussed

Music making, teaching, and learning in Chiptune communities

Music education has long identified “life-long and life-wide” musicianship within community contexts as a primary goal of formal music instruction in and outside of public schools. In music education research, scholars often seek out (and study) musical communities to inform formal curricula and pedagogy, with the goal of better preparing students to participate in musical communities outside of formal institutions. In this study, I explore music learning practices at play in one corner of contemporary musicianship—chiptune. Chiptune is music that references videogame sounds and videogame music. Some chiptune artists make music for videogames, others release albums and play live shows. Some use digital tools, like VSTs and digital synthesizers to produce their music, while others use videogame consoles running after-market software on game cartridges. The purpose of this study is to better understand music making and learning in chiptune communities by addressing four questions: what does musicianship in chiptune communities look like? What role does community play? What are the music learning practices of chiptune musicians? What, if anything, can be learned about contemporary musicianship by inquiring into chiptune culture? To address these questions, I make use of an auto/ethnographic method, drawing on online ethnography (Hine, 2015) and autoethnographic inquiry (Ellis & Bochner, 2011). Findings take the form of a dialogic, performative text which embodies the fractured nature of online communities. I adopt a rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) heuristic which highlights how chiptune community is flat, center-less, and facilitates mapping as learning. I offer implications for music education research and practice, and suggestions for future research into relationships among communities and nonhuman actants