[computer human interaction conference: australia]

OZCHI 2009 – Design: Open 24/7

21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA)

23 – 27 November 2009, The University of Melbourne, Australia

http://www.ozchi.org/

Paper submission site now open: http://precisionconference.com/~ozchi

OZCHI is Australia’s leading forum for research and development in all areas of Human-Computer Interaction. OZCHI attracts an international community of practitioners, researchers, academics and students from a wide range of disciplines including user experience designers, information architects, software engineers, human factors experts, information systems analysts, and social scientists.

The main conference will be from Wed 25 to Fri 27 Nov 2009, and will be preceded by two days of Workshops, Tutorials and a Doctoral Consortium on Mon 23 and Tue 24 Nov 2009.OZCHI will take place back-to-back with HFESA 2009: http://www.hfesaconference.org.au/ scheduled to run from 22-25 Nov 2009. The venue for both conferences is the ICT building of the University of Melbourne, 111 Barry St, Parkville.

The keynote speakers for this year's OZCHI conference:

• Bill Moggridge, Co-founder of IDEO.com
• Patrick Hofmann, Head of User Experience, Google Australia
• Yvonne Rogers, Director, Pervasive Interaction Lab, Open University, UK

Important Dates

Long papers, and workshop & tutorial proposals
19 Jun 2009: EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE
14 Aug 2009: Notification of acceptance
28 Aug 2009: Camera ready papers deadline

Short papers, industry case studies, demos & posters, workshop papers, and doctoral consortium
28 Aug 2009: Submission deadline
25 Sep 2009: Notification of acceptance
02 Oct 2009: Camera ready papers deadline

Conference Theme

The 2009 conference theme is Design: Open 24/7. Accessibility, inclusivity and dissolving boundaries are core to the Open 24/7 theme for the design of human interaction with and through digital technologies. The integration of digital technologies into our everyday life allows for a seamless transitioning between open and closed, work and leisure, public and private. Open implies participation and collaboration across traditional borders between individuals, organisations and disciplines. OZCHI 2009 provides a forum to discuss all aspects of openness, open borders, open participation, open source and open architecture. Theme-related submissions may address these topics:

• Open always-on real-time ubiquitous and pervasive designs
• Open design and universality versus situatedness, contextualisation and personalisation
• Open source for design – design for open source
• Open mind – new ideas, concepts and approaches from outside HCI
• Beyond open – never closed: design for escapism

Conference Topics

Submissions in all areas of HCI are encouraged. In addition, we particularly invite authors to address any of the following topics:

• Augmented Reality
• Context and Location Awareness
• Education and HCI
• Health Care and HCI
• Innovative Design Methodologies
• Smart Service Delivery
• Sustainability
• Universal Usability and Accessibility
• Urban Informatics
• Tangible User Interfaces
• Visualisation Techniques
• Working across Cultures

Read more about the paper/workshop submission process and conference here.

[enactive cinema with pia tikka @ the ioct]

From the IOCT blog:

"PIA TIKKA

Enactive Cinema
The Future of Creative Technologies
IOCT Lab
24th October 2008, 4.30pm

***

A New Concept in Cinema

The Enactive Cinema project introduces a novel kind of interactive cinema genre, which is described as enactive cinema:

How the narrative unfolds, and how rhythm and soundscape emerge, depend on how the spectator experiences the emotional dynamics between the characters. Enactive cinema emphasizes unconscious interaction between the cinema spectator and the cinema. Instead of the spectator directly manipulating the narrative, its unfolding is affected by the spectator’s emotional participation. The project suggests that unconscious and conscious experience interact in an inseparable and complex manner. The cinema experience is more than seeing and hearing. It is about sensing and re-living of one's own experience in what happens to the 'others'. This is, ENACTIVE CINEMA.

• Wanted to reinterpret Eisenstein's dynamic organic film theory of montage
• how to capture the dynamic nature of his theories in today's new media
• so used parachronic reading which is outside of time, recurise: linearity of historical time as put into brackets, or substituted by recursive dynamics of experience, a nowness involving events in a spiral manner.
  
• biomechanics: early Eisenstein and montage of attractions (1923)
• ecstasy : holistic experience auditory and visual
• She jumps over the other people important to Eisenstein - hegel, darwinism, karl marx, vygotsky, alexander bogdanov (political rival of Lenin, retired himself from political scen and in 1928 he died but founded "techtology"

"unifying all social, biological and physical sciences, by considering them as systems of relationships, and by seeking the organizational principles that underly all systems. His work "Tektology: Universal Organization Science", finished by the early 1920s, anticipated many of the ideas that were popularized later by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the General Systems Theory. There are suggestions that both Wiener and von Bertalanffy might have read the German translation of Tektology which was published in 1928. In Russia, Lenin (and later Stalin) considered Bogdanov's natural philosophy an ideological threat to the dialectic materialism and put tectology to sleep. The rediscovery of Bogdanov's tectology occurred only in 1970s."

• Pia's theoretical background - emotion dynamics, cognitive ecologism (Ulric Neisser), recent neroscientific views of the human mind (Gallese), emmbodied simulation (Gallese), emotions as cognition (Antonio Damasio), homeostasis theory of cinema viewing (Torben Grodal)
• gallese draws on merleau-ponty: the body is...that strange object...
• Gallese and george lakoff collabor5ations on embodies role of experience, semantic studies and neuroscience (see this excellent article that i read the other day)
• toolbox for authoring and describing intersubjective cinematic understanding derived from Theory of Metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)
• a way to get a hold of the cinematic experience via the tracking of sensorimotor aspects and spatial dynamics
• gap between phenomenology and how we describe the experience or gap between the phenomenological and the neurological - how to build a bridge between these
• embodied metaphors
• "My goal is to shed light and define novel perspectives especially on the categorization and attribution of emotions within the cinematic narrative. The artistic and scientific outcome is an “intelligent” cinematic system that anticipates and makes inferences about emotional narrative paths suggested by the spectator-participants' bodily actions. "
• enactive cinema - how the narrative unfolds depends on how the spectator experiences emotional dynamics between the characters
  

• dynamic emotion ecology refers to the dynamic interactinon between spectator and psychophysiological states
• emphasises unconscious interaction between narrative and emotional participation, the invitation to enact is very gentle. 5 chairs invite the spectator to sit down, there are also other biofeedback sensors measuring emotional level etc...

Listening to Pia Tikka's talk i'm wondering what happens with spectators who don't have high or normal functioning mirror neurons (perhaps as has been suggested in the case of autism? And what about gender issues. Some cognitive/neuroscience studies suggest there are gender differences with mirror neurons, deepening the stereotype that women are more empathetic because women's mirror neurons showed signs of stronger stimulation (for one example, see this article - "Gender differences in the human mirror system: a magnetoencephalography study")


Data that was monitored - heart rate, breathing rate, activity monitoring, non-body contact - all of this information can go into a toolbox for authors on how to create a narrative.

Have a look at the following video for an interpretation of Eisenstein's visual "vocabulary"

[ TIR-W Volume 9 no. 2 Instruments and Playable Text ]

From the guest editor Stuart Moulthrop:

"Our work is animated by the desire to evoke from simple rules a plausibly infinite set of expressions. We come at this problem from various perspectives, techniques, and points of the aesthetic compass, and we arrive at happily different results, but a certain resemblance remains.

For Judy Malloy, who was a master composer when I was still learning canon and fugue, the key to invention lies in the artful crossing of pattern and chance, of musical and cybernetic form, in her "Concerto for Narrative Data."

John Cayley, who would be our Che or Tristan Tzara if this were an actual movement, gives us a newly re-engineered version of "riverIsland," an exploration of poetry-as-simulation that continues to define the possibilities of its form.

Next come some younger though no less accomplished talents, beginning with Shawn Rider, a writer, digital designer, and meta-gamer who is represented here with two pieces, "PiTp," a work laid open deliberately to digital intervention, and "So Random," a story that tells itself each time, specially, just for you.

Elizabeth Knipe, another relatively new player, offers "activeReader," an interactive media piece that brings its own interpretation of reader engagement and emergent, open form.

Nick Montfort, equally at ease with aesthetic programming and the long-form palindrome, offers what we might call a minimum instrument, "The Purpling," a maze of recirculating expression built from humble Web pages.

Last in train is my own "Under Language," a sort of talkative poem with consequences, far less credible in its claim to infinity than most of its companions, but still a kind of game, for those who will play."

Read the new issue here.

[3d tv interaction]

Interaction with tv looks set to change. Now, instead of the usual remote, tv watchers can interact with their shows (though who will support this and how hasn't yet been explained) with a wii-like object:

The Hillcrest Labs Home Interactive Media System combines a graphical, zoomable interface for television with a patented motion control technology called Freespace which senses movement in three dimensions and translates it into on-screen interaction.



Hillcrest has developed a prototype ring-shaped Loop remote control that is held like a handle. It takes some getting used to, but allows multidimensional on screen navigation by waving it in the air, rather like a Wii game controller.

“Hillcrest Labs has created an entirely new and potentially game-changing platform for television and other forms of home entertainment,” said Jamie Kiggen of AllianceBernstein, the firm leading the funding round, in which existing investors also participated. “By combining pointing with a graphical, ‘zoomable’ interface, their technology holds the promise to alter fundamentally how consumers interact with their TV and digital media.”

For more info see the original article on informitv and Hillcrest Labs here.

[Manolis Kelaidis at the ioct salon]

(nb live blogged so just snippets of notes)

Kelaidis, after doing years of engineering work decided he'd like to be more creative and so came to the Royal College of Art.



Says "he's not the biggest reader" but has fallen in love with the physciality of the book - the pages, the spine, it's a *functional* device.

Decided that books are nice but just not handy for linking information. So, his project would be a way to connect the analogue and the digital worlds.

Kelaidis has created an amazing book that can be connected to a computer. Then the reader's touch elicits information as the page reacts to a slight electrical current. Also, the idea is when someone is reading something, say about book binding, they can link, via the physical book, to a video on book binding.

Idea: to have books in the library light up with colours so that students know which books are relevant to their research.

"If people could use a book to control music on their computers, not only would it present an exciting marketing opportuinity but also a far more convenient way of accessing the story behind the music. Imagine a book where every song mentioned could be played by tougchig the title of the track."

- is working on a "volume bar" that the reader can adjust be sliding finger on the page.


How it works:
He prints his page with conductive ink (ink mixed with conductive particles, silver, copper etc...)
When we touch open circuit we close the cicruit and through the book spin (wireless) the book communicates to the internet.
All links are programmed but can be reprogrammed by individual readers.

Connectivity" book connected to computer which then opens MP3 or video etc. For today's presentation Kelaidis is using blue tooth.

Some images of the amazing book: