Grand theft algorithm: purposeful play, appropriated play and aberrant players

"Copyright ACM, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in MindTrek: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Entertainment and media in the ubiquitous era. pp.3-7 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1457199.1457201"This paper explores ideas about 'appropriated play' within computer games. It identifies different forms of 'purposeful' and 'aberrant' playing and proposes a model of players' motivations. This will enable a discussion about the experience of games players who resist the norms of 'purposeful' or ludic play, while finding reward in their explorations of game possibilities. It provides a new vocabulary for discussing playing outside of the game world, as a way of understanding some of these actions as more than 'cheating'

Novels in the Internet Age: “House of Leaves” and New Media’s Influence in Contemporary Fictional Literature

The now-ubiquitous nature of the Internet has changed the way we see the world, and these changes must be reflected in how we experience other media forms. Postmodern works such as Harry Mathew\u27s The Journalist have challenged the way we read and electronic literature like Steve Tomasula\u27s Toc have stretched the use of the digital to produce stories; but contemporary literature combines the medium and techniques of postmodern literature with the character of the digital. This project explores the influences of the characteristics and attitudes of the Internet medium as they are partially realized in Jonathan Safran Foer\u27s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and as they are fully realized in Mark Z. Danielewski\u27s House of Leaves. It reveals through these examples the focus on multimedia, connectivity, and interactivity imbued in the literary medium through consideration of the Internet-savvy reader. By examining the form and content of these texts, this study shows how literature can come to grips with a medium that may consider neither form nor content but instead motion, comparison, and experience

Unconventional TV Detection using Mobile Devices

Recent studies show that the TV viewing experience is changing giving the rise of trends like "multi-screen viewing" and "connected viewers". These trends describe TV viewers that use mobile devices (e.g. tablets and smart phones) while watching TV. In this paper, we exploit the context information available from the ubiquitous mobile devices to detect the presence of TVs and track the media being viewed. Our approach leverages the array of sensors available in modern mobile devices, e.g. cameras and microphones, to detect the location of TV sets, their state (ON or OFF), and the channels they are currently tuned to. We present the feasibility of the proposed sensing technique using our implementation on Android phones with different realistic scenarios. Our results show that in a controlled environment a detection accuracy of 0.978 F-measure could be achieved.Comment: 4 pages, 14 figure

Citizens' Self-in-Community and Ubiquitous Social Media Use: Disentangling Modern Local Community Experience

The present research project aims at shedding further light on how citizens experience their local communities (that is, neighborhoods and cities) in modern times. It specifically deepens the interplay between citizens' self-in-community – that is, their experience of and ties to their local community meant as a relational entity and to its places – the physical and social features of their communities, and their use of modern ubiquitous, locative, social media with community-related aims. Indeed, on the one hand, local communities have become increasingly spatially and socially closed, with consequences in the opportunities citizens have to experience their social dimensions. Nevertheless, on the other hand, the spread of ubiquitous, locative, social media has produced a more complex social ecosystem and opportunities that have become easily available to citizens. In light of the above, the community-related use of two different mainstream platforms (Instagram and dating People-Nearby Applications), which have sprung up spontaneously regardless of the stated aims of these platforms, have been deepened as potential strategies users could have played out to take advantage of the possibilities offered by ubiquitous, locative, social media and sustain their SoC when more traditional paths were not feasible due to their community spatial and/or social features. Thus, the present research project will address Instagram and dating People-Nearby Applications community-related uses to deepen (a) the needs underlying these uses, and (b) which are the paths through which these uses can enhance users' tie to their local community. It comprises four studies, as the two research questions are tackled with reference to the two considered social media community-related uses. As to the first research question, multilevel models were run in order to take into account individual and community features that could encourage citizens in using these social networks with reference to their local community. As to the second research question, multiple sequential mediation models have been run with Structural Equation Modeling to disentangle how the considered uses associated with users' local social experience and Sense of Community. Overall, the results from these studies highlight the complexities related to modern local community experience and suggest that social media could provide relevant contributions to this as tools providing citizens with new opportunities and resources to be activated. Becoming aware of these complexities and of the implications deriving from them allows opening new perspectives with reference to both further research questions and innovative practices and interventions to be implemented

Distributed Interactive Audio Devices: Creative strategies and audience responses to novel musical interaction scenarios

With the rise of ubiquitous computing, comes new possibilities for experiencing audio, visual and tactile media in distributed and situated forms, disrupting modes of media experience that have been relatively stable for decades. We present the Distributed Interactive Audio Devices (DIADs) project, a set of experimental interventions to explore future ubiquitous computing design spaces in which electronic sound is presented as distributed, interactive and portable. The DIAD system is intended for creative sound and music performance and interaction, yet it does not conform to traditional concepts of musical performance, suggesting instead a fusion of music performance and other forms of collaborative digital interaction. We describe the thinking behind the project, the state of the DIAD system’s technical development, and our experiences working with userinteraction in lab-based and public performance scenarios

Ubiquitous Emotion Analytics and How We Feel Today

Emotions are complicated. Humans feel deeply, and it can be hard to bring clarity to those depths, to communicate about feelings, or to understand others’ emotional states. Indeed, this emotional confusion is one of the biggest challenges of deciphering our humanity. However, a kind of hope might be on the horizon, in the form of emotion analytics: computerized tools for recognizing and responding to emotion. This analysis explores how emotion analytics may reflect the current status of humans’ regard for emotion. Emotion need no longer be a human sense of vague, indefinable feelings; instead, emotion is in the process of becoming a legible, standardized commodity that can be sold, managed, and altered to suit the needs of those in power. Emotional autonomy and authority can be surrendered to those technologies in exchange for perceived self-determination. Emotion analytics promises a new orderliness to the messiness of human emotions, suggesting that our current state of emotional uncertainty is inadequate and intolerable

Factors Influencing the Quality of the User Experience in Ubiquitous Recommender Systems

The use of mobile devices and the rapid growth of the internet and networking infrastructure has brought the necessity of using Ubiquitous recommender systems. However in mobile devices there are different factors that need to be considered in order to get more useful recommendations and increase the quality of the user experience. This paper gives an overview of the factors related to the quality and proposes a new hybrid recommendation model.Comment: The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 8530, 2014, pp 369-37

Defining the influence of bringing on surface roughness worked by cutting

The physical workplace, a hub for communication, collaboration and co-located interaction can no longer be taken for granted. Today, the design of intelligent interactive media, physical products and ubiquitous environments has passed the phase of being technology-driven. Meaning, insight and experience are now the key design drivers for the bridging of digital and physical design. We foresee how new interconnected knowledge systems - objects/devices, buildings and even cities created from web-based services and IoT - thoroughly transforms CSCW. A wide spectrum of services already invites users to seamlessly move between real and virtual workspaces, using a range of previously separated media channels. This interdisciplinary workshop welcomes researchers and practitioners to a day-long exchange targeting User eXperience (UX) and, specifically, the relationship between social and spatial connectedness in mediated and virtual work environments. Examples from ongoing research and developments informs a discussion on how the borders between the virtual and real become increasingly obsolete

Enhanced reality live role playing

Live role-playing is a form of improvisational theatre played for the experience of the performers and without an audience. These games form a challenging application domain for ubiquitous technology. We discuss the design options for enhanced reality live role-playing and the role of technology in live role-playing games