VR/Urban: spread.gun - design process and challenges in developing a shared encounter for media façades

Designing novel interaction concepts for urban environments is not only a technical challenge in terms of scale, safety, portability and deployment, but also a challenge of designing for social configurations and spatial settings. To outline what it takes to create a consistent and interactive experience in urban space, we describe the concept and multidisciplinary design process of VR/Urban's media intervention tool called Spread.gun, which was created for the Media Façade Festival 2008 in Berlin. Main design aims were the anticipation of urban space, situational system configuration and embodied interaction. This case study also reflects on the specific technical, organizational and infrastructural challenges encountered when developing media façade installations

Multiple man-machine interfaces

The multiple man machine interfaces inherent in military pilot training, their social implications, and the issue of possible negative feedback were explored. Modern technology has produced machines which can see, hear, and touch with greater accuracy and precision than human beings. Consequently, the military pilot is more a systems manager, often doing battle against a target he never sees. It is concluded that unquantifiable human activity requires motivation that is not intrinsic in a machine

From Linearity to Circulation. How TV Flow Is Changing in Networked Media Space

This article discusses the evolution of the concept of flow from the producer-controlled phase to the user-controlled phase, thus proposing the concept of circulation as a new framework for understanding the new TV ecosystem. The multiplication of screens (from the traditional TV set to handheld mobile devices) has made TV content accessible anytime and anywhere and, furthermore, has provided an interactive space where the digital life of content is managed by the audiences on social media. Such multiplication of screens has created forms of TV consumption that lead to the deconstruction and subsequent reformulation of the concepts of space, time and medium. This article examines this ongoing process, beginning with observations of audience consumption practices that are analysed using Osservatorio Social TV 2015, an Italian research project