Paper at LCEA 09 Symposium

A paper has been accepted at the LCEA09 Symposium to be held at 19th January 2009:

Richard Stevens, Tony Renshaw, David Raybould and Paul Marchant (Leeds Metropolitan University). Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Eye tracking for the evaluation of dynamic scenes.

It describes the 2006/7 multimedia exhibition, ‘Repossessed’, during which over 400 members of the public watched scenes from Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’. The paper describes the basis of an approach to the use of eye tracking techniques, visualisations, and metrics to measure the influence of directorial techniques on film viewers’ experience.

Project with India

Recently, Reinhold Behringer has been invited to join the project "Voices from Gujarati and Yorkshire Rivers", and he just returned from a travel to Gujarat (India) where this project was conducted in partnership with the Sardar Patel University in Vallabh Vidyanagar. The aim of this project is to "create awareness of climate change with means of arts", and the specific focus was on "linking" rivers from two local regions in the global context: Yorkshire and Gujarat. The poject involved the organisation of workshops for painting, poetry, and translation. Reinhold's role was to provide technology: recording video, audio, and GPS tracks for creating later a multimedia experience. This resulting documentation is intended to be created by L3 students as part of their final project work. In the course of the project, artists created works based on their relation with rivers. The artefacts will be collected abd may be published in book form at a later time. A development blog highlights the progress and timeline of this project.

During this visit, links have been made to the following institutions:
Sardar Patel University, Vallabh Vidyanagar
Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmadabad
Inter-Human Education and Charitable Trust (IET), Surat.

Mini-Symposium at Staff Development Festival

Today, the centre organised the Mini Symposium "Creative Technology - An Oxymoron?", in the framework of the Annual Leeds Met Staff Development Festival Research Day. Reinhold Behringer gave an overview on a few systems which claim to be true creative technology in the artificial creativity domain. John Elliott gave a talk about the human mind, Michael Ward demonstrated the current state of the art in beat tracking, and Ben Dalton presented projects related to telepresence and robotics.

The presentations are available at http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/Presentations.php.

Here are a few more links related to Ben's talk:

www.burnsideinstitute.com/robot_book/robots.html - French book 'What do robots think about?', translated into Russian. A precursor to the irobot roomba.
www.robotlab.de/bios/bible_engl.htm - robot arm as caligraphic scribe of the bible.
www.robotlab.de/bios/video_engl.htm - video of the bible robot lab project.
brl.ee.washington.edu/publications/Rep127/TE.chapt.html - teleoperation examples.
www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2007/05/soldierrobot_lo.html - people humanising their military robot companions.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1898525.stm - Chris Csikszentmihalyi's robotic journalism project as reported by the BBC.
www.appliedautonomy.com/lb.html - institute for applied autonomy - pamphlet robot.
www.appliedautonomy.com/gw.html - the IAA's graffiti writing street robot.
www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1830 - Natalie Jeremijenko's Ooz project with Robotic Geese
www.vestaldesign.com/design/ooz-goose/ - more Ooz pics.
www.auger-loizeau.com/projects/soctel/pro_soctel.html - Auger & Loizeau's teleprescence through dog mounted robotics.
www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/pubs/teleactor-icra02.pdf -
Collaborative Online Teleoperation project that includes human teleactors.
www.pbs.org/art21/artists/wodiczko/index.html - Wodiczko's Tijuana project.
www.zprod.org/PG/machines/roboticEars.htm - Paul Granjon's robotic ears.
www.zprod.org/PG/performances/zLabTrans.htm - performance with the ears and tail video.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A6mon_(His_Dark_Materials) - Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine" (1489-90)
www.gutenberg.org/files/22117/22117-h/22117-h.htm - Kerman and Zeris, the two Kittens who accompanied Author on his wanderings
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5alYLJS4OrE - The Golden Compass: Defining Daemons
muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Jim_Henson
www.creatureshop.com - Jim Henson's effects workshop where the Big1 controllers were developed.
flickr.com/photos/bre/208151402/ - example of puppet controller system in action
www.hektor.ch - graffiti robot

Our Music, Our City won at B.TWEEN !

At B.TWEEN 08, a prize of £ 10,000 was awarded to our Ben Dalton and his team for their entry into the competition "Expoding Narratives", which was jointly organised by JustB and HP-Labs and called for project ideas for geo-referenced applications built on the MSCAPE platform for mobile phones and PDAs. Ben and his colleagues Ben Halsall and Megan Smith had developed a pitch of their project Our Music, Our City .

Congratulations to the team!

The "DoGoSee Project" at ICA

On 10.June 2008, Ben Dalton (Leeds Met, Innovation North), Megan Smith and Ben Halsall (Leeds Met, Faculty of Arts and Society) will present their project DoGoSee at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.

Their work is one of the five projects which had been shortlisted in the Exploding Narrative competition organised by b-tween to win a £10,000 prize grant for developing their concept into a product. The projects are around ideas for location-based games, stories or educational journeys, using software developed by HP Labs (MScape). The audience and a panel of experts, including Adam Gee (C4), Steve Moffett (Creative Partnerships) and Richard Hull (HP Labs), will give feedback.

See the final pitches and vote at the ICA on 19 and 20 June, or at b-tween.

More info on this project is in the blog Our City, Our Music.


Info re. the evening event on 10.June (starts at 7pm) at ICA is available from Emma Quinn emmaq@ica.org.uk
£5 / £4 Concessions / £3 ICA Members.
Advance booking advised.
Please call the ICA box office on 020 7390 3647 or visit the ICA web
site www.ica.org.uk

ICA, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
Nearest Tube Stations: Piccadilly and Charing Cross

Location-Based Tracking Trials at Great Student Run

Today (10. May 2008, 10:30am)the Carnegie Great Student Run takes place at the Headingley Campus of Leeds Met. We have developed a simple tracking application which runs on mobile phones and allows that the position of runners (who carry their phones during the run) is automatically sent to our web server.

We have only a few participants, and we are using this to test the feasibility of a few approaches that can be empoyed in this technology field.

Check out our tracking site and monitor live the progress of a small set of runners!

Ben Dalton's MScape project shortlisted by b.tween!

Our Ben Dalton has been selected to be among the finalists for developing a pitch for his project Our Music, Our City. The competition has been organised by just-b Productions and HPLabs, where ideas have been sought for developing an "Exploding Narrative" using the location-based framework MScape. This is a software development framework which runs on Windows Mobile phones with GPS. The MScape software allows to develop location-based applications in a very easy way, linking events to actions. These actions can be playing media which are stored on the mobile device.

Congratulation, Ben!

Final Year Showcase

On 7.May 2008 the final year students at Innovation North will show their projects in the Final Year Show.

Viewing Times:
Wednesday 7 May 2008 10.00am - 4.00pm

VIP Evening:
Wednesday 7 May 2008 5.00pm - 8.00pm


To confirm your attendance please contact:
Email: innevents@leedsmet.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)113 812 3702

Venue:
James Graham, Leeds Metropolitan University, Headingley Campus, Leeds, LS6 3QS

Seminar Talk: Creative Technology

On 23.April 2008, 15:30-17:00 a seminar talk was held at Leeds Met at Caedmon G09. The following topics were covered:
Reinhold Behringer: Recent Activities of the Centre for Creative Technology
Tony Renshaw: Eye Tracking
Tony Partington: Demonstration of using the Vicon Motion Tracking System for tracking objects

Leeds Met Students win Prices at Games Competition!

On 15.April 2008 the Game Republic organised a student showcase and awarded prices to games designers.

Leeds Met students were very successful:

For the overall game concept, art, and design, the first prize of 100 pounds was awarded to the Leeds Met Team of Jason Brooke, Steven Kerrigan, Richard Hetherington, Joe Roe, and Kevin Jorge.

The 2nd prize for Game Design - 50 pounds - was awarded to David Mclure.

The 3rd prise for Game Art - 25 pounds - was awarded to Ashley Mitchell and Tim Owens.

Congratulations to all these successfull Leeds Met students!

Student Spotlight: Andy Brennan

At Leeds Met, Masters student Andrew Brennan (MSc Sound & Music for Interactive Games) has been investigating a number of tangible interfaces ranging from big screen to table-top interaction. For his ElectroBurst project, Andy created a real-time interactive audio table interface using the Nintendo Wii remote.

ElectroBurst : An investigation into physical, tangible interaction with music. WingBats utilises a glass table, a projector and a Nintendo Wii control setup to bridge the gap between the 'real' and the ‘virtual'. By playing a simple game the physical actions of the user influence the resulting sound.

Andy says, "I initially wanted to be an architect and spent two years learning about principles such as conceptual design, self critique and discipline. After this period I decided to take my newly acquired skills and knowledge to sound design and production. My undergraduate course in BSc Creative Music & Sound Technology has exposed me to exciting areas of sound technology that I had never thought of before. My first audio programming experience was Native Instruments Reaktor, which I used to create various synths and samplers. From this point on I began to experiment with other programming platforms such as Max/MSP, Processing, Java, C++ and C* to create various interactive systems and stochastic performance tools. "

His masters work has continued these experiments and successes. More info is available on Andy's personal site, and his project blog.

Student Spotlight: Simon Mann

For the 2008 Innovation North Postgraduate Showcase, Simon Mann (MSc Creative Technology) demoed his bTraffic project. It builds on boid flocking algorithms to create realistic traffic animation.

bTraffic is an easy to use toolset designed for animating traffic flow. It works within an existing 3D application and generates simulated traffic that can be used for still or animated 3D visualisations. bTraffic is customisable and aimed at animators with little or no programming skills.

Simon has a keen interest in 3D modelling and animation which has led him back into university life. He indulges in programming in a variety of languages including PHP, Python, Actionscript, MEL, SQL and Javascript as well as occasionally dabbling in a little C, C++, Virtools, ASP and Maxscript. From an artistic angle he enjoys regular life drawing sessions which help to complement his 3D modelling skills.

In the past Simon has had a range of jobs including being a web designer, web developer, applications developer, multimedia designer and technical support analyst and has been involved in creating anything from small websites up to large successful Content Management and Ecommerce systems. He has worked in a variety of companies from a small start up business through to an enormous public sector body and believes that all helped him gain a huge amount of experience and skill.

Announcement: Postgraduate Showcase: 13.3., 5-8pm

On 13.3.2008, the annual Postgraduate Showcase for the Creative Technology students will be hosted at the Old Broadcasting House, 17:00 - 20:00. There will be the students presenting their work, as well as some staff from Innovation North. Also, there will be some finger food - bring friends and colleagues to this event!

Yahoo's Christian Heilmann - Met:space GeekUp talk

This week Leeds Met's co-working start-up facility Met:space hosted a GeekUp talk from Christian Heilmann who is a web architect for Yahoo! UK. GeekUp Leeds like OpenCoffee provides a chance for 'grassroots geekery' - web developers and creative technologists meeting up for an informal chat, networking and a space to share ideas.

Christian's talk 'Yahoo UI - Javascript Evolved?' gave an overview of the YUI toolkit, describing how Javascript libraries can simplify web development - letting people focus on innovations in their design rather than browser bugs and basic functionality.

He talked about how a key skill he has been seeking out in recruiting for Yahoo development teams is an ability to program for others rather than just yourself. He looks for developers who can write logical code that can then be passed to Yahoo teams elsewhere in the world without difficulty. Toolkits like YUI help to do this by organising namespaces, interface elements and plug-in widgets for rich interactive web interface design.

The event was packed and interesting. Thanks to the GeekUp team and the NTI for organising the event.

Alison Mealey - C3KE visiting artist

The Centre for Creative and Cultural Knowledge Exchange brings together creative technology practitioners from 5 Universities in Yorkshire. At our recent meeting I had the opportunity to speak with Alison Mealey from University of Huddersfield's Digital Research Unit (DRU) after we both presented our recent activities to the group.

At the DRU, Alison is currently working on a whole range of great sounding projects from 3D scanning & printing sculptural work to exploring the possibilities of text-based adventure games. However, I first discovered Alison through her work using the Unreal games engine and Processing to create beautiful generative 'atomic' collages - some abstract, some portraits.

The artworks are made by setting-up maps and computer AI 'bots' in Unreal. These automatic players are then tracked as they move through the corridors. The temporal traces are drawn onto a digital canvas using Processing to create final 'pointillist' images. The project is well documented online, and you can download Alison's code from the Unreal art site.

This visualising the unseen and mapping out of spaces reminds me of some of the eye-tracking research at Leeds Met. Tony Renshaw, for example, has been using the eye tracker recently to study usability in computer game play. While David Raybould and Richard Stevens re-working of Vertigo - a Hitchcock classic - for the RePossessed show in their piece ReViewed made visible and explicit the normally unseen audience engagement as viewer.

Concert: Echochroma 3: 29.2.2008

Another "Echochroma" concert is planned for 29. February 2008:
17:00 - 19:00 in the Jubilee Room, James Graham Building, Headingley Campus, Leeds Metropolitan University.



The concert will feature student works from the Electroacoustic Music module (level 3) and perhaps a few pieces from Creative Music Skills (level 2).

Contacts:
Adam Stanswbie a.stansbie@leedsmet.ac.uk
Nikos Stavropoulos n.stavropoulos@leedsmet.ac.uk

Student mobile game ideas

I like this quote.

interviewer: How do you get your bosses to let you do what you want?

Keita Takahashi: I don't think it's anything special. I just write down my ideas on paper, present it to them, and if they don't really understand, I say, “Well, you'll understand if I make it.” Then I make part of it, and they understand. But I don't really have any kind of marketing plan when I put this stuff together, I just propose what I think might be fun or exciting. I don't really have a good knowledge of what will sell. All I can really do is make it and see what happens!

- Namco's Keita Takahashi designer of Katamari Damacy in a recent gamasutra article.

Each January I have the privilege of sitting down with groups of my students to hear them present their final mobile game proposals for the Games Development module.

Students are free to express their ideas however they think best, from paper prototypes to functional Flash, Java or Processing demos - and we always get some really interesting and thought provoking results.

Some pitches drew on the unique features of mobile devices, like Martin Blackburn's Mobile Processing demo of a mobile chase game in which one player tries to stay within bluetooth range of another. Others, like Peter Walker's gambling & gangsters game 'Mobs' focused on how to develop compelling narrative and addictive game assets with a limited screen size.

James Roberts discussed a long-term social big game in which players must contract digital viruses through bluetooth proximity to develop anti-bodies and survive. This game had the added twist that players could plug in their phones to charge as a way of halting their scientist character's deterioration - "Can I make it to the plug socket in the library from here while keeping my character alive?".

Finally, Ben Dare proposed a quirky tale of a misunderstood man in a mask battling his way around the city (with peaceful weapons - a pea shooter and a megaphone). The initial spark of inspiration came from GIMP - the free digital creative tool he was using.

C3KE Meeting at Leeds Met

On Monday, 28.January 2008, Leeds met will host a lunch-time meeting with the "Centre for Cultural and Creative Knowledge Exchange" (C3KE), held at the Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. At this event, an overview will be given about the research activities of the centre, presented by a few of the researchers.

The proposed agenda is:
11:00 - 11:30 registration
11:30 - 12:45 presentations by Leeds Met staff
12:45 - 13:00 Derek Hales, Director of the C3KE, will present about the Huddersfield DRU.
13:00 - 15:00 demos, lunch, networking

The presentations are planned as follows:
Tony Renshaw, Richard Stevens: Eye Tracking
Steve Wilkinson: VR and Motion Tracking
Nikos Stavropoulos and Kingsley Ash: Music Composition and Interactive Performance
John Elliott: The Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence

Tentative:
Ben Dalton: Interaction with Big Screens

Demonstrations:
Bal Singh: Interaction with Game on Laptop Computer
Tony Renshaw: Eye Tracking Experience
Kinglsey Ash: Interactive Music Performance
Andy Brennan: Camera-Based Interaction (on DVD)
Rana Gangari: Interactive Video (on DVD)


Please note that your attendance needs to be registered at the NTI:
call 0113-81-21720 or 0845-122-155
or email info@ntileeds.co.uk with your name, event (=C3KE) and dietary requirements.