Games for Health Conference: June 12-14, Hyatt Harborside Hotel, Boston, MA

Note: In conjunction with the Games for Health Conference, the Fourth Annual Games Accessibility Day, "Enabled Play", will be held on June 12th.


Here is the press release:

Games for Health Project Announces Keynotes for Its Annual Conference in Boston

April 04, 2012 – (Portland, Maine) – The Games for Health Project announced the keynote speakers for the eighth annual Games for Health Conference, the nation’s largest conference dedicate to videogames, health, and health care, which will be held June 12-14 in Boston.

The Games for Health Conference brings together hundreds of researchers, health professionals, and game developers to discuss a wide range of topics involving health and videogames.

Over three days, more than 400 attendees will participate in over 60 sessions led by an array of international speakers. Topics will include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, health behavior change, biofeedback, rehab, epidemiology, training, nutrition, and health education.

The 2012 event adds new tracks on sensors and gamification to its traditional exercise, sensorimotor rehab, cognitive and emotional health, and nutrition games tracks.

Keynote speakers include:

Constance Steinkuehler Squire, senior policy analyst for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, will discuss the opportunities for videogames to address national challenges, including those in health, health care, and biotechnology.

Bill Crounse, MD, senior director of worldwide health for Microsoft, will present “Connecting & Kinecting Health and Health Care,” which will explore how Microsoft and its partners are merging its information and game technologies to create global solutions for personal health and professional health care.

Jane McGonigal, New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of SuperBetter Labs, will highlight the design and release of SuperBetter, a game-based social application designed to help people boost personal resilience and lead healthier, longer, and more positive lives.

“In the last year, it’s been amazing to see the games for health field take some major leaps,” says Ben Sawyer, conference organizer and director of the Games for Health Project. “The number of new game-based solutions coming to market from entrepreneurs, game developers, research labs, and even the government is absolutely amazing. As biometric sensors like Nike Fuel and JawBone Up! take hold, we’re seeing entire new categories of games for health emerge. The Games for Health Conference is the best place to see and evaluate these and other future opportunities.”

The Games for Health Project will also hold three pre-conference events focusing on game accessibility, mobile games, and medical modeling with games.

“We are excited about how far the field and this conference have come,” says Paul Tarini, senior program officer for RWJF’s Pioneer Portfolio. “As a sponsor of the conference and the Games for Health Project, we believe the hard work put in by early adopters in this field is beginning to pay off. The new investments and approaches we’re seeing, informed by what is and isn’t working from years past, tells us that continued gatherings like the Games for Health Conference as well as the ongoing work of its related program, Health Games Research, are helping make the promise we see in videogames increasingly real.”

Learn more about the program of events and register for the conference today by visiting the conference web site.

About Games for Health
Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports the development of the health games community, champions efforts to mainstream health games, and brings together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health, health care, and policy. The Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is a major supporter of both the Games for Health Project and its annual Games for Health Conference.

About the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and its Pioneer Portfolio
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focuses on the pressing health and health care issues facing the United States. As the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans, the Foundation works with a diverse group of organizations and individuals to identify solutions and achieve comprehensive, meaningful and timely change. Projects in the Pioneer Portfolio are future-oriented and look beyond conventional thinking to explore solutions at the cutting edge of health and healthcare. For more information, visit www.rwjf.org/pioneer.

# # #

If you’d like to register now for Games for Health you can go directly to registration now.

Game Accessibility Example: Control Sims 3 with your eyes!

The video below was shared by SpecialEffect Accessible GameBase:





RELATED
SpecialEffect Accessible GameBase website.


SpecialEffect Accessible GameBase (Facebook)

Cross-posted on the TechPsych blog.

Today I hooked up a Wii to the IWB in the school's therapy room. Next - a Kinect?! (Angels are welcome to help us expand the school's "games" programs for students with special needs)

Today, I hooked up our school's Wii to the newly-installed IWB in the therapy room for the first time, and used it during a session for for a social-skills activity with two students who have autism spectrum disorders.  The students helped each other to create their own "Mii" avatars.  I had them play the bowling game, and was impressed how this activity elicited social conversation between the students, with minimal effort on my part.

Most of students in the program at Wolfe are in grades 6-12. They have cognitive, language, and motor delays.  A good number of the students also have autism spectrum disorders. Some have multiple special needs.

We have found that when our students are provided with interactive activities displayed on the large screen of an IWB, they tend to increase their level of attention to their peers and also communicate more with one-another, as well as with the teachers and staff.

By using an IWB for games at school, we are extending the reach of how this technology can be used with students who have more complex special needs.   By providing a means  for our students to learn to play positive games, we help them develop important physical, social, and leisure skills that they can use outside the school setting with non-disabled peers and siblings.  My hunch is that the games will also help promote cognitive/problem solving skills, too.

NOTE:
The funds to purchase the Wii were donated to our school, but did not cover additional games or accessories. We'd like to purchase Rock Band and Wii Fit. We'd also like to expand our program and purchase an Xbox with a Kinect.   An iPad or two would be OK, too : )

If there are any angels out there who'd like to donate funds for our "games" program at Wolfe, please contact me through my Google profile. I will connect you with the appropriate person.

Game designer/developers/researchers/students:
If you are interested in volunteering your efforts to work on a basic cooperative, pro-social game for the Kinect, SMARTTable, or interactive whiteboard, please contact me.

Quick Link: Eight Inspirational Interactive HTML5 Sites, plus "how-to" links, via Innovative Interactivity (II)-Tracy Boyer

I'm moving up from HTML to HTML5, and I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one in the world that is doing so... for that reason, I'm sharing a link to great HTML5 resources.


Enjoy exploring the HTML5 creations! 


Eight Inspirational Interactive HTML5 Sites
Tracy Boyer, Innovative Interactivity (II), 2/8/11  


For your convenience, I've borrowed a few links from Tracy's post:
HTML5 Gallery
12 Fun & Clever Examples of HTML5
10 Addictive Games That (ACTUALLY) Demonstrate The Power Of HTML5 Technology
HTML5 – Examples of interactive graphics, infographics and interactivity
Presenting an HTML5 Interactive Infographic

Mindy McAdam’s series over at Teaching Online Journalism, via Tracy Boyer:

Tips for HTML5, part 1

Tips for HTML5, part 2

Tips for HTML5, part 3: Tags we won’t see anymore

Tips for HTML5, part 4: New tags

Tips for HTML5, part 5: A closer look at selected tags

Tips for HTML5, part 6: A look at CSS3Video for HTML5: The latest update

If you are really serious about this topic, take a look at Dive into HTML5, by Mark Pilgrim.

Serious Games in the K-16 Classroom: Google Tech Talks Video, via Jonathan Brill

In the following video, Victoria Van Voorhis discusses educational software and the Serious Games in Education movement:




Thanks to Jonathan Brill for the link!


SOMEWHAT RELATED
Below is a presentation I gave at the 2008 Games for Health conference:

Descriptions, stories, and links related to the screen shots of the first slide of the above presentation: (Some of the links may need to be updated.)

The science screen is an interactive 'gizmo' from Explore Learning. Something like this could be incorporated into an educational game. http://www.explorelearning.com


I’m pretty sure that the picture of the ancient building was from the VAST project, described in the article 'Reviving the past: Cultural Heritage meets Virtual Reality' by Anthanasios Gaitatzes, Dimitrious Cristopoulos, and Maria Roussou. (2002, ACM) The Foundation of the Hellenic World was involved with this project. http://www.fhw.gr/fhw/


Maria Roussou has been involved with a variety of interesting immersive projects: http://www.makebelieve.gr/mb/www/profile/index.html


The people from the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at the University of Virginia are doing similar work through the Rome Reborn project:
http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/




Note: I thought that it would be cool to have a game for health that integrated with history, so that students could learn about how people from the past handled health and diseases, and learn how scientists from the past came up with solutions that help us today.


The picture of the dragons on the space station was from a game called 'Relax to Win', created by Phil (gary?) McDarby and the MindGames team when he was at MediaLab Europe, which disbanded in 2005. Here is an article about Relax to Win, from 2002:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1972571.stm
McDarby now works as the creative officer of Vyro Games, which focus on stress management.
Rationale: Stress management games are good for health!
McDarby: http://www.vyro-games.com/company/phil_bio.php
Media Lab Europe and MindGames: http://medialabeurope.org/
Vyro Games: http://ww.vyro-games.com/


The cool geometric image was from a project from the Interactive Media Group, Vienna University of Technology: Educating Spatial Intelligence with Augmented Reality http://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/research/spatial_abilities/
The project targeted high school geometry students, with a goal of increasing spatial ability and improving transfer of learning. The program is consistent with Universal Design for Learning principles.
I think that some of the applications involved in this application could be useful in games designed for cognitive rehabilitation or habilitation. Related to this project:  'An Application and Framework for Using Augmented Reality in Mathematics and Geometry Education': http://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/research/construct3d/ and Hannes Kaufmann’s Dissertation: Geometry Education with Augmented Reality: http://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/media/documents/publications/...


The remainder of the pictures:
The Cloud Game: http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/


The picture with the two people is from Kar2ouche, from Immersive Education. Kar2ouche is a creative role-play, picture making, story-boarding and animation software. It is enabled for use on interactive whiteboards: http://www.immersiveeducation.com/kar2ouche/


Hazmat HotZone is a multi-player simulation game used to train first responder teams: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/hazmat_2005/


The underwater scene is from FreeDive, from FreeDive, that is used as a pain distractor. I also think it could be used for stress reduction for children.
http://www.breakawaygames.com/serious-games/solutions/hea...
The game pad is a DanceDance Revolution pad, used as an 'exergame' in many schools to combat the increase in numbers of students who are overweight or obese.


'Dance Dance Revolution: Healthy for Kids'
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news-article/12201/


The classroom scene is is from a virtual reality application:
Rizzo, A., Bowerly, T., Buckwalter, J., Klimchuk, D., Mitura, R., Parsons, T.D. (2006). A Virtual Reality Scenario for All Seasons: The Virtual Classroom. CNS Spectrums, 11, 1, 35-44. http://vrpsych.ict.usc.edu/

Transmedia Storytelling, Interactive Multimedia, & Video Content Funded by 27 Million in Grants

Press  Release:  Education Secretary Arne Duncan Announces $27 Million for Three Ready-to-Learn Television Program Grants

Here is information from the release:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced three awards totaling $27 million for projects to improve educational opportunities for young learners through innovative technology. Grants will be used to develop and deliver high-quality, age-appropriate, educational content to increase the early literacy and mathematics skills of young children age two through eight years old. The current cycle of awards will provide early learning content through the well-planned and coordinated use of multiple media platforms, commonly known as transmedia storytelling.

"It is critical that we focus our educational improvement efforts on the earliest learners and those most at risk of educational failure, including our children living in poverty,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “We know that children of all ages are engaged when given the opportunity to learn with new technologies. These grants will surround young children with a variety of innovative media to equip them with early literacy and numeracy skills to prepare them for success in school."

The five-year grants were awarded to three public telecommunications entities that will offer services across the nation. In addition to programming content, the grantees will provide outreach materials and resources to families, child care providers, preschool and early elementary teachers and others whose work addresses early learning. Each grant includes a strong research component. According to Jacqueline Jones, senior advisor to the Secretary for Early Learning, “These projects represent a critical investment in moving the Department’s early learning agenda forward and ultimately improving outcomes for young learners. We are particularly excited that through accessible media and technologies, these projects will encourage families, caregivers and teachers to interact with and engage young learners in both formal and informal settings.”

"Window to the World Communications (WTTW) will partner with W!ldbrain, an entertainment and animation company, to deliver a multiple-platform, media-based, mathematics curriculum for children that will provide corresponding support materials and digital resources for families, caregivers and teachers. The project will allow children to use multiple entry points to a virtual world of mathematics principles through cell phones, computers, handheld video game systems, television, books and trading cards."

"The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) will deliver transmedia content in literacy and numeracy that is aligned with rigorous academic frameworks and research. Through a multi-level partnership, CPB will develop video, interactive online games (3D-rendered collaborative challenges and immersive games), mobile applications (augmented reality games) and interactive white board applications."

"The Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network (HITN) will partner with Callaway Arts and Entertainment to develop and evaluate three transmedia properties that will cross multiple platforms using the inherent benefits of each to engage early learners. One such property, Learning Apps Media Partnership (LAMP), focuses on English Language Learners and immerses them in literacy and mathematics curricula that draw on real-life situations and encourage the expression of diverse perspectives where children freely use their native language or dialect."

The following list of grantees, by state, reflects 2010 funding:

 ILLINOIS Window to the World Communications; Chicago; Reese Marcusson, (773) 509-5408 or rmarcusson@wttw.com; $6,623,475

NEW YORK Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network; New York City; Linda Hernandez, (646) 731- 3601 or lhernandez@hitn.org; $6,000,000

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Corporation for Public Broadcasting; Washington, D.C.; Debra Sanchez, (202) 879-9784 or dsanchez@cpg.or; $14,627,354

 
RELATED
Partnership with Calloway Digital Arts and Michael Cohen Group LLC Will Create Educational Media for Reading and Math Targeted at Closing Achievement Gap    PR Newswire 10/18/10 -Excerpt Below:


"Project LAMP targets next-generation learners including children from low-income groups. The content will be largely available as an open educational resource and use a transmedia storytelling approach through books, iPAD/Touch Screen applications, mobile device and phone applications, console and hand held gaming applications, sing along DVDs and CDs, an interactive Website, and television. The USDE, in 2010, expanded the Ready to Learn grant program to include transmedia storytelling."


Project LAMP will leverage the existing characters of Callaway's Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends (ages 2-5) and Nova the Robot (ages 5-8).It will also create a third new ELL property produced by HITN. Content in all three properties will align to the 2010 Common Core State Standards in Math and Reading and promote the essential skills defined by the National Early Literacy Panel and the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.  


An essential component of Project LAMP will be the ongoing use of research and evaluation. Dr. Michael Cohen, President of the Michael Cohen Group and one of the co-Principal Investigators of the project said, "As the project activities move forward, we foresee new forms of educational media being developed. As a result, new assessments will be required to provide the producers with useful information on children's learning and comprehension. This is an exciting process for evaluators because research findings will aid in product development, determine if goals are met, and contribute to our general understanding of the role and impact of media in young children's lives." Cohen added, "Our plan is to evaluate the applications at different stages of development by testing with children, teachers, and parents. Research will help ensure that the curricula, design, and narrative are age-appropriate, appealing, and result in student learning." 


The 2010 Ready to Learn grants include outreach monies in addition to program funding. Project LAMP outreach activities will leverage wireless network technology, social media, and community-based organizations to engage children, parents, caregivers, and teachers in New York, Connecticut, and Texas the first year alone. Over the life of the grant, Project LAMP will partner for exchange of ideas, opinions, and results with: 1) persistently low achieving schools, 2) a media production program at an accredited postsecondary institution, and 3) a teacher preparation program at an accredited postsecondary institution focused on early childhood education.
Callaway Digital Arts (CDA)

Web-based Technology-Supported Interaction: 6Rounds mixes webcam, games, and social media....

I've been so busy writing reports* that this almost passed me by!

I found out about 6rounds because they use Twitter as a promotional platform.  I happened to notice that this company was following me and clicked on the link.

6rounds started out as an outgrowth of a speed dating website, and the application was initially designed for people to use while waiting for speed dating sessions. According to the 6rounds website FAQ's, "6rounds is a live meeting point, offering users a variety of experiences that they enjoy together using a combination of webcams, real-time games, social activities and media engagements."

Since I'm a happily married middle-aged woman, I'm not sure 6rounds is up my alley.  I think  social singles, college students, and others who don't mind flashing their faces through a webcam would like it.

If I had time, I might like to play around with GixOO, the opensource API that underpins 6rounds. GixOO has the potential for developers to develop games and activities.  The application allows the users to track each other as they move their mice, and also enables people to see the same things as their friends as they interact online.

6rounds looks like it might provide possibilities for collaborative projects in education, but I won't be sure until I give it a try.

So what is 6rounds?



FOR THE TECH-CURIOUS

The following information was quoted from the Openomics blog from Sun Microsystem's  ISV Engineering:


"6rounds is the first product built on the GixOO live social platform, initially developped on the LAMP stack. As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program, GixOO connected with Sun's ISV Engineering team to test the scalability of their platform on SAMP --the Solaris-based AMP stack, available in an integrated and optimized package from Sun, the Sun Glassfish Web Stack f.k.a. CoolStack. At the time, we ran the benchmark on a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server --featuring the 64-way CoolThreads processor UltraSPARC T2-- running Solaris 10 and CoolStack 1.3. GixOO loved the DTrace kernel instrumentation of Solaris 10 --DTrace gives unique insights into how the application performs, live on a production system-- and the Containers technology a.k.a. Zones --this light-weigth virtualization layer of Solaris allows multiple applications to run in isolation from each other on the same physical hardware--, and quickly adopted them for their internal use.

"At GixOO, we use Sun SPARC-based server, powered by Solaris 10 for our R&D environment. The system gives us the required flexibility and components isolation that we need. Thanks to SPARC's great SMP abilities, we achieve high performance for many development environments running on one single 1U server.
Solaris Zones are very comfortable and simple to configure, and allow the full utilization of the great power hidden in this small machine, which makes Solaris 10 an excellent choice for system administrators. We are using Sun MySQL Server which gives our application high speed data storage solution, and in the future we might migrate to the MySQL Cluster solution to get even faster results."
Dmitry Shestak, CTO, GixOO"

Somewhat Related

2/26/10: Oracle bought Sun in 2009. Here were the latest results when I did a search to get more information:

Not Really Related 


*For those new to this blog, I'm a school psychologist who returned to her day job full time a year and 1/2 ago, when the economy was taking a nosedive. Before that, I was working part-time and taking computer and technology classes, initially to learn how to create interactive multimedia applications and games.  


Since some of the kids and teens I work with have a range of abilities and disabilities, including autism, I developed an interest in accessibility.  How can universal design principles  be applied to games and emerging interactive technologies?   I'm also fascinated by interactive displays and surfaces of all sizes, especially ubiquitous systems that support cognition, collaboration and communication.  

One of my pet projects:

My vision? A collaborative multimedia, multi-modal interactive time-line might help us to understand  complex, interrelated factors and events more effectively. It would provide an opportunity for the inquisitive to view things from a broad perspective, and also explore things in rich detail. Ideally, the time-line would support multi-touch, multi-user interaction on larger displays and interactive whiteboards, and allow for people who are remotely located to participate in the process. 


Now that one of my schools will be getting a multi-touch SMARTTable, I'd like to experiment with time-line concepts and interactions on a table surface. I'd also like to figure out how this can work seamlessly with the existing SMARTBoard that is in the classroom.  Of course, this would have to take place during after work hours!

Special Effect's on-line Accessible Gamebase network, supporting accessible games for young people with disabilities.

"SpecialEffect is a charity dedicated to helping ALL young people with disabilities to enjoy computer games. For these children, the majority of computer games are simply too quick or too difficult to play, and we can help them and their parents to find out which games they CAN play, and how to adapt those games that they can't."


Here is a video that tells a story of how SpecialEffects created a game for a young woman, Helen, with a motor disability.  Helen operates the computer with her eyes to play against her brother, who uses the touch-screen interface:

If you are interested in supporting accessible games, consider joining Accessible Gamebase, a new on-line community maintained by Special Effect.  Below is the message I recently received from SpecialEffect regarding this opportunity to connect others regarding accessible games:


"Have you been wondering just what it is you could do to get involved with SpecialEffect? Well, that question is answered today with the launch of SpecialEffect's 'accessible Gamebase.

• It deals with all access devices for all physical and learning disabilities - from switch users to eye controllers. 
• It's not just a place for gamers but a place where everyone - carers, gamers, developers and, of course, end-users themselves - can both share information and try out the latest games whether they are seasoned gamers or absolute beginners. 
• It has the potential to be a great training tool, too, and we've already put up some example videos to illustrate how the games are played. 
• As it's based on a social networking model, anyone can easily join up and share information. 
• It tells you not only how to adapt mainstream games for use by everyone but also provides information on which special games are available - and for whom.

All in all, then, it's very much designed to be a place that encourages anyone with an interest in this area to meet to share information and ideas. The proof of the pudding will be in the extent to which people use it, of course, and it will need significant promotion (yes, this will be where we will need your help!) to reach that point of critical mass when, with SpecialEffect's expert input and moderation, it will thrive.

Go to http://www.gamebase.info to sign up and Be a Part of It!"

Apple iSlate, iTablet , MacBook Touch: Will it support gesture interaction & haptic feedback?

Soldier Knows Best produces great tech-oriented videos. Here's his spin on all of the rumors about the possibility of the Apple iSlate.


I just inherited a 10 month-old Mac Book, installed Snow Leopard and upgraded to iLife 2009. I'm so used to touching the screen on my HP TouchSmart PC that I found myself touching my Mac Book screen from time to time, especially when I was editing video clips in iMovie. I think the latest version of iMovie was designed with touch/gesture interaction in mind!

From what I can tell, Snow Leopard and iLife 2009 will be able to support a range of touch interactions, if not gesture input as well.

Here are some rumors that have been conjured up and distributed on the web:

The Exhaustive Guide to Applet Tablet Rumors (Matt Buchanan, Gizmodo, 12/26/09)
Apple Expects to Sell 10 Million Tablets in First Year (Pete Cashmore, Mashable, 1/1/10)
iGuide Emerges as Another Potential Apple Tablet Name (Adam Ostrow, Mashable, 12/29/09)
The Tablet (John Gruber, Daring Fireball, 12/31/09)
"And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy instead of a MacBook."
Apple Owns iSlate.com Domain: The Mystery Deepens (Dan Nosowitz, Gismodo, 12/25/09)
What is the Ultimate Role of the Apple Tablet? (Arnold Kim, MacRumors, 12/31/09)

• 153+ comments to the above MacRumor post

iPad, iTablet, iSlate, or MacTab  (Cruz Miranda, 8/31/09)

Why am I excited about this?

I want to see if the iSlate would be good for collaborative educational games, assisted technology, augmentative communication, and alternative assessment for students who have multiple/severe disabilities.

That is a huge goal, so I'm going to start simple.  I am not giving up on Windows 7 multi-touch programming. I just have an urge to find out for myself what works, what doesn't, and what platform works best for specific "personas" and "scenarios".

I plan to make a little app for the iPhone/iPod Touch, based on a game I made several years ago, "Shoes Your Battles" for a game class. I think I'd like to make this game for the Apple iTablet!

The first version of Shoes Your Battles created with Game Maker, and the second version was in Flash, back in the days of ActionScript 2.0.  I started on third version, one that could be used as an advergame for people to play while shopping for shoes during shoe sales, but it never got past the planning stage.  

The idea for the third version came to me when I my elderly aunt came to visit from out-of-town and just had to go shoe shopping on the day after Thanksgiving.  It was extremely difficult to figure out what was on sale, how much it cost, after taking off the previous mark-downs and what was on sale that had a price that was not yet marked down.  

Adding to the confusion was the fact that there were few salespeople and herds of women.   It was madness.  There were pairs of shoes in the wrong boxes, boxes of shoes and no way to quickly find out the true prices!   We were in the shoe department for hours, and it wasn't as fun as you'd think. If you've been in a crowded women's shoe department to buy that special pair of shoes during a fantastic shoe sale, you'll know what I mean.

At any rate, I wanted my little "Shoes Your Battles" game to help with this dreadful scenario, by somehow incorporating a shoe shopping advisor and a means to figure out the REAL sales prices of those awesome, to-die-for shoes. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't where it needed to be at the time- I am always dreaming up things that are too d--- futuristic!

4 years later, we have iPhones and SmartPhones and 3G internet and RFID and ubiquitous WiFi and the Wii and more women who like to play games and...and... The time is ripe.

Apple better come up with the iSlate!

SOMEWHAT RELATED


Thinking about post-WIMP HCI
It is always important to re-visit wisdom from the past when thinking about new interfaces and means of technology-supported human interaction.  Here are a few resources from the field of Human-Computer Interaction found on the HCI Vistas website:
The Prism of User Experience  -A nice graphic metaphor to help the conceptualization process. (Denish Katre, 2007)
Journal of HCI Vistas: Multi-disciplinary Perspective of Usability and HCI
Personas as part of a user-centered innovation process Lene Nielsen, 1/08 HCI Vistas Vol-IV
10 Steps to Personas (Lene Nielsen, 7/07, HCI Vistas Vol-III)

CityScape 1.8: What would it be like on an interactive touch or gesture screen? (Video and link to demo)

Pixel Active, has announced version 1.8 of CityScape, "the rapid urban modeling tool that allows users to build both custom and real-world environments quickly and easily"

CityScape 1.8 looks ideal for use on an interactive touch/gesture display or table.  Since it allows people to work within the same environment concurrently,  I have a hunch that it might work, perhaps with a few tweaks, in multi-touch, multi-user situations.  

As you watch the video below, imagine your finger as the pointer, creating terrain, landforms, buildings, roads, and other structures and spaces, and editing on-the-fly.  

CityScape  "Real Cities, Real Fast" (via Digital Urban & YouTube)

The above video is of version 1.7. To learn about the new features, see the "What's New in CityScape 1.8" section of the Pixelactive website.

Unfortunately, it comes with a high price tag.  Even so, wouldn't it be a great tool to use in middle and high school classrooms?  I want to get the demo and try it out on a SMARTboard....I can think of quite a few ways that it could be put to work in learning environments.

About CityScape

"CityScape was created to reduce the tedious, labor intensive process of building and modifying urban environments, empowering the interactive world builders of tomorrow."

"Using robust data importing, rapid urban modeling, Active Adjustment features, and procedural modeling, CityScape is able to achieve substantial improvements in worker efficiency over traditional object modeling tools and scene editors.

Worlds created by CityScape are compatible with a variety of file formats and optimized for real-time rendering engines."

Pictures from the Pixelactive website:

CityScape's client-server model allows collaboration between co-located or distributed teams so that the environment can be modified concurrently if needed.  It also lets users to check regions in and out in order to work on things independently.

Terrain Painting                           Imported Heightmap

Dynamic adjustment allows you to quickly change your mind and modify without headaches!

If you change elevations, everything will adapt automatically.

Here's a picture of the traffic data generation feature:

Here is a picture of an example of CityScape's GIS data import feature:

Pixelactive Company Information

"PixelActive Inc. was founded in 2003 and is located in Carlsbad, California. Our mission is to develop state of the art interactive 3D technology. We believe that tools and technology should be intuitive to users regardless of its underlying complexity. Our focus is on the video game, virtual world, simulation, serious game, and GIS industries."

"The company's rapid urban modeling tool, CityScape, allows users to build both custom and real-world environments quickly and easily. With the editor, developers can focus on designing their world rather than the labor involved in creation. CityScape's unique feature set allows users to produce environments magnitudes faster than with traditional object modeling tools or scene editors."

"The PixelActive team has a track record of delivering exceptional products on time and on budget. Our core technology is focused on stability, reliability, modularity, usability, high performance and visual quality. PixelActive develops technology for a variety of PC platforms including Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista, and video game consoles such as the Microsoft XBox360™, Nintendo Wii™, and Sony Playstation® 3.P"

RELATED

Pixelactive Gallery

You can download a demo of CityScape from the Pixelactive website.

IDPedia: Interaction Design Patterns for Games Library!

From the HelpYouPlay IDPedia (Interaction Design Patterns for Games Library) website:


"Design patterns are ways to describe best practices, explain good designs, and capture experience so that other people can reuse these solutions. The idea of a pattern was introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander for use in urban planning and building architecture, but since then a pattern community has emerged that specifies patterns for all sorts of problems. Interaction design patterns aim to capture optimal solutions to common usability or accessibility problems in a specific context. Typically best practices concerning interaction design are described as guidelines or heuristics. We consider interaction design patterns to be more descriptive than guidelines as it tells a designer exactly when, how and why the solution can be applied." 

Thanks, Barrie Ellis (One-Switch Games) for the link!


SOMEWHAT RELATED
Game Usability and Accessibility
Donate to the AbleGamers Fundraiser!
The funds will support the work of the AbleGamers Foundation, and donations are tax-deductible.

"The AbleGamers Foundation's mission is to empower the disabled population to enjoy the digital revolution that is taking place in gaming... We believe in harnessing the power of many people's voices to solve the problems of the not so few. The AbleGamers Foundation strives to bring together individuals from every lifestyle with a common goal of improving the lives of the disabled. Everyone has the right to enjoy the world, and together, we can make that possible. Together, we can make it possible for everyone to enjoy the rich content of digital entertainment with his or her friends and family regardless of disability."

Eelke Folmer's Human-Computer Interaction Research

Usability Patterns in Games (pdf)
Accessibility in Games and Virtual Worlds
Interaction Design Patterns

Eelke Folmer's presentation at the 2009 Games 4 Health Conference, Boston
Game Accessibility WorkshopG4H: game accessibility research @ University of Nevada, Reno

View more presentations from eelke folmer.

The World is My Web Browser: Interactive Technology in Public Spaces

Off-the desktop Interactive technologies are spreading quickly, across many platforms.   It seems that within the next 3-5 years we will be able to have instant access to a social and dynamic web, with information and entertainment at our fingertips, anywhere we go. 


The "world-as-web-browser" concept is one I've touched upon in the past.  I'd like to focus on this topic in future posts.

I came across some of the information in this post on the Future of Media Blog,maintained by the folks at the Interpublic Emerging Media Lab, based in California. This blog is a must-read!


The Saatchi & Saatchi ad agency in the UK created interactive games that provide people waiting in bus shelters the opportunity to pass the time by bashing digital falling eggs.


A more utilitarian approach to interactive touch screens is the EyeStop bus stop, a concept created by researchers MIT's SENSEable City Lab, along with the city of Florence and the city's transit service:


MIT



MIT researchers unveil the EyeStop: "Bus stop of the future" can sense its surroundings (pdf)



SOMEWHAT RELATED

IPG Future of Media Blog

Multi-player multi-touch: "NuMTyPysics", based on Tim Edmond's Numpty Physics (similar to Crayon Physics)

I have Numpty Physics on my Nokia n800 internet tablet, and Crayon Physics on my HP TouchSmart PC. Both are designed for single touch, and are fun to play. Since my TouchSmart can handle duo-touch input, I wondered what Crayon Physics might be like if it supported two players at once.



As you can see from the video, Thomas Perl and his colleagues have figured this out- at least with Numpty Physics!



The music is worth the watch. It's by Triplexity.

Numpty Physics and Crayon Physics both use the Box2D engine. Here is some information from the website:

"NuMTyPYsics are our enhancements to Tim Edmond's NumptyPhysics game. We added support for receiving TUIO messages from tbeta via PyTUIO by embedding an Python interpreter into the NumptyPhysics code. Currently, we simply emulate mouse input by pushing hand-crafted input events (SDL_Event) onto the SDL event queue (SDL_PushEvent). In the future, we plan to do bi-directional communication between the game engine (written in C++) and our multi-touch handling code, which will be written in Python." -Thomas Perl

Note:
I've use Crayon Physics Deluxe with several of the students I work with who have severe autism. It is amazing how well they can figure out solutions for the levels. It would be even better if it could be enabled for duo-touch. It supports joint attention, which is a very important social interaction skill for young people with autism to develop.

Pervasive Checkers on Microsoft's Surface: The Gamepack Video

In early 2007, before we knew of the existence of Microsoft's multi-touch surface, I worked on a "Pervasive Checkers" project with Johnny Hopkins, a classmate in my Ubiquitous Computing class. I'd previously worked with XNA Game Studio Express in an AI for Games class, and thought that it would be cool to make a casual checkers game on a multi-touch table that could be played in gathering spots such as coffee houses and neighborhood cafes.

Below is a screen shot of what we created using Inspiration software - (in the application, you can click on an item and it expands to reveal additional information.)

Two years later, and the Pervasive Checkers idea is reality - but I wasn't involved in the process. Checkers is one of the games that is included in a game-pack created specifically for the Surface.

Take a look at the video:



From Surface Computer News:

"The Microsoft Surface Games Pack is a clear illustration of where the Natural User Interface of Windows 7 has the potential to take games. Windows is traditionally the number 1 gaming platform around the world. With the introduction of the NUI, allowing players to literally have titles at their fingertips via touch, Windows 7 can kick the gaming experience up a notch. Provided that developers rise up to the challenge."