Transitioning Between Audience and Performer: Co-Designing Interactive Music Performances with Children

Live interactions have the potential to meaningfully engage audiences during musical performances, and modern technologies promise unique ways to facilitate these interactions. This work presents findings from three co-design sessions with children that investigated how audiences might want to interact with live music performances, including design considerations and opportunities. Findings from these sessions also formed a Spectrum of Audience Interactivity in live musical performances, outlining ways to encourage interactivity in music performances from the child perspective

Interactive art, immersive technology and live performance

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.This research explores the impact of combining interactive art and immersive technology with live performance. An interactive system was designed to combine the movement of human performers with physical simulations in order to generate complex visualizations that respond to the performers in real-time. This system was used prominently in a series of live performances including dance, music and physical theatre. The performances and system evolved symbiotically throughout this practice-based research. The capabilities of the interactive system was inspired by the demands of each live performance and, in turn, each performance was inspired by the evolving capabilities of the system. A number of immersive technologies including 360 degree stereoscopic visuals, surround sound and physical modeling were added to the system and explored within the context of live interactive performance. Self-reflections of the researcher’s role as interactive artist and technologist is provided. These reflections suggest that the underlying system should be built as flexible and as scalable as possible to cater for different sized venues and budgets. A basic framework is provided for building such a system, utilizing open source software, pre-existing hardware and the flexibility of modern network architectures. Two major works are examined in detail, a physical theatre show and an immersive installation, both paying homage to the classic Australian children’s novel, Dot and the Kangaroo. Interviews with the performers, artists and key contributors of these productions were conducted. These interviews were analyzed using grounded theory techniques to gain insights into the use of interactive and immersive technologies within the productions and how it impacted their professional craft. The interactive technology was found to bring an element of ‘aliveness’ to the visuals, but were most successful when tightly integrated with the physical choreography to portray a specific part of the narrative. The interactive components were perceived to assume many different roles within these productions including that of character, digital set, theatrical mask and lighting state as the artists attempt to identify with the technology through their own personal knowledge base and expertise. The 360 degree visuals of the interactive installation immersed the participants in a digital depiction of the Australian bush, and invited a sense of exploration and play. The large scale installation allowed multiple children to experience the work simultaneously, while live actors promoted a richness of movement and facilitated social interactions amongst the participants. The artistic productions, technological system design and findings based on interviews, analysis and self-reflection are presented as contributions towards the relatively unexplored intersection between interactive art, immersive technology and live performance

Setting the stage – embodied and spatial dimensions in emerging programming practices.

In the design of interactive systems, developers sometimes need to engage in various ways of physical performance in order to communicate ideas and to test out properties of the system to be realised. External resources such as sketches, as well as bodily action, often play important parts in such processes, and several methods and tools that explicitly address such aspects of interaction design have recently been developed. This combined with the growing range of pervasive, ubiquitous, and tangible technologies add up to a complex web of physicality within the practice of designing interactive systems. We illustrate this dimension of systems development through three cases which in different ways address the design of systems where embodied performance is important. The first case shows how building a physical sport simulator emphasises a shift in activity between programming and debugging. The second case shows a build-once run-once scenario, where the fine-tuning and control of the run-time activity gets turned into an act of in situ performance by the programmers. The third example illustrates the explorative and experiential nature of programming and debugging systems for specialised and autonomous interaction devices. This multitude in approaches in existing programming settings reveals an expanded perspective of what practices of interaction design consist of, emphasising the interlinking between design, programming, and performance with the system that is being developed

Interactive Video: One Monitor or Two?

Interactive video is a rapidly growing technologywhich holds great promise for teachingforeign language and culture. Multimediacontextualization of the language and simulationsof typical cultural situations are powerfultools for language teachers and learners. Interactivevideo is often delivered with alternateworkstation designs: one with a single monitorto present simultaneous video and text, and onewith different monitors for video and computertext and graphics. This study investigates thepossibility that the workstation configurationsmight have a differential impact on studentperformance on a test of Spanish culture. Studentsin second semester college Spanish classesstudied five interactive video Spanish culturesimulations during the semester. Some studentsused a single monitor workstation and others adual monitor design. They were given pre- andpost-tests on Spanish culture and the resultswere analyzed for significant differences. Additionalfactors influencing workstation design(e.g., hardware and software costs, user friendliness)are also discussed

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

Narrative approaches to design multi-screen augmented reality experiences

This paper explores how traditional narrative language used in film and theatre can be adapted to create interactivity and a greater sense of presence in the virtual heritage environment. It focuses on the fundamental principles of narrative required to create immersion and presence and investigates methods of embedding intangible social histories into these environments. These issues are explored in a case study of Greens Mill in the 1830’s, interweaving the story of the reform bill riots in Nottingham with the life of George Green, mathematician and proprietor of the Mill