Games for Health Conference, Games Accessibility Day, and Games Beyond Entertainment Week! (Via Ben Sawyer, Digital Mill, Serious Games Initiative)

The Games for Health Conference and Games Beyond Entertainment Week are coming soon.

Register now at: http://www.regonline.com/gbew2010

We can now reveal our excellent keynotes for the 2010 Games for Health Conference:

Day 1: Wednesday May 26

THE MIND-BODY EXPERIENCE OF SONY MOVE: Relationships between Gaming, Play, Exercise, and More!
Dr. Richard Marks
Senior Researcher Sony US R&D group

Dr. Marks also known as the "father of the EyeToy" will discuss the relationship between gaming, play and exercise, referencing his work in the development of Sony’s new motion controller system, PlayStation Move, as well as his previous work with Sony’s EyeToy, PlayStation Eye and other interfaces.

Day 2: Thursday May 27

THE HUMAN PLAY MACHINE

Chaim Gingold

Chaim Gingold, a longtime independent game developer and original designer of Spore’s creature creator will discuss how existing game genres map onto the human brain and body and how design decisions affect who will be attracted to the game and how they will play.

You can see the nearly full schedule at: http://www.gamesforhealth.org/schedule.htm

Two of our May 25: Pre-Conference Events also have schedules posted:

Out & About: The Mobile Serious Games schedule: http://bit.ly/9MbEEF

3rd Annual Games Accessibility Day: http://gamesaccessibilityday.org/schedule.html (See below)

Complete details of both http://www.gamesforhealth.org & http://www.gamesbeyondentertainment.com

Games for Health
http://www.gamesforhealth.org/brochure.pdf

Games Beyond Entertainment Week
http://www.gamesbeyondentertainment.com/brochure.pdf

Best,

Ben Sawyer
Digitalmill
Serious Games Initiative
Games for Health Project
@bensawyer on twitter

Here is the schedule of the Games Accessibility Day,  May 25, 2010:

Tuesday, May 25, 2010
8:30 am to 9:00 am	Coffee
9:00 am to 9:50 am	Opening Ceremonies Introduction of the Day, Mark Barlet  Keynote Address: Chuck Bergen – Making a commercial game targeting at the disabled community, and how he sold the idea to the biggest game company on the planet.
9:50 am to 10:00 am	Break
10:00 am to 10:30 am	Presentation: Tobi Saulnier - Winter's Tale : A Case Study of Designing for Game Accessibility on the Nintendo DS
10:30 am to 10:45 am	Presentation: Katherine Mancuso - Best Practices for Accessible Communication Using a Virtual World
10:45 am to 11:00 am	Presentation: Tim Holt: Game Accessibility in Special Education.
11:00 am to 11:15 am	Break
11:15 am to 11:30 am	Introduction to the “Hacker Hardware Challenge” Adam Coe Ben Heckendorn Suzanne Robitaille
11:30 am to 12:00 pm	Presentation: Halimat Alabi - Making the Fantasy Real: Giving Good User Interface
12:00 pm to 12:20 pm	Presentation: Mantha Sadural - SPREAD: Appreciating Speech through Gaming
12:20 pm to 1:30 pm	Lunch
1:30 pm to 1:50 pm	“Hacker Hardware Challenge” the reveal and Q&A
1:50 pm to 2:10 pm	Presentation: Johnny Richardson - The Social Construction Model of Interactive Gaming for Disabled Users: Benefits and Developmental Evaluation
2:10 pm to 2:30 pm	Presentation: Eleanor Robinson - Game Accessibility and the Aging Community
2:30 pm to 3:00 pm	Group Activity: Break out into groups and solve the world’s problems How could we pass up the opportunity to flex the massive amount of talent assembled in one room. Take on a challenge and help develop a solution.
3:00 pm to 3:10 pm	Break
3:10pm to 3:40 pm	Group Activity: Presentation of the breakouts
3:40 pm to 4:10 pm	Presentation: Rock Vibe - Rock Band for People with No or Limited Vision
4:10 pm to 4:30 pm	Break
4:30 pm to 5:00 pm	Presentation: Suzanne Robitaille and Mark Barlet - Reviews for All, A New way of looking at things for our community
5:00 pm to 5:20 pm	Presentation: Heidi Silver-Pacuilla - Unleashing the Power of Innovation for Assistive Technology
5:20 pm to 5:30 pm	Closing Ceremonies

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!"

libTISCH, a multi-touch development framework with multi-touch widgets and more!

For techies and the tech-curious who like technologies that support collaboration and multi-touch interaction,  this is great news!

Florian Echtler announced the first stable releas of libTISCH, a multi-touch development framwork, which can be found on Sourceforge.  TISCH stands for Tangible Interaction Surfaces for Collaboration between Humans.  libTISCH, a C++ software framework, is included in this project.  It provides a means for creating GUIs based on multi-touch and/or tangible input devices.

Here is how it works:

Here is information from libTISCH announcement:


Highlights of this release are, among others, the following features:

- ready-to-use multitouch widgets based on OpenGL
- reconfigurable, hardware-independent gesture recognition engine
- support for widely used (move, scale, rotate..), pre-defined gestures
 as well as custom-defined gestures

- hardware drivers for FTIR, DI, Wiimote, DiamondTouch..
- TUIO converters: source and sink

- cross-platform: Linux, MacOS X, Windows (32 and 64 bit)
- cross-language: C++ with bindings for C#, Java, Python

libTISCH has a lot to offer for the multitouch developer. For example, 
the textured widgets enable rapid development of applications for many
kinds of multi-touch or tangible interfaces. The separate gesture
recognition engine allows the translation of a wide range of highly
configurable gestures into pre-defined or custom events which are then
acted on by the widgets. While the lower layers of libTISCH provide
functionality similar to tbeta, touche etc. (you can interface existing
TUIO-based software with libTISCH in both directions), it goes far
beyond.

More information about the library and underlying architecture can be
found on http://tisch.sf.net/ and in the Sourceforge wiki at
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tisch/

TISCH Project Wiki

RELATED
Florian is on the scientific staff at the Technisch Universitat Munchen in Germany. Be sure to check out his  webpage.

I especially like the concept of the MeTaTop: "A Multi-Sensory Table Top System for Medical Procedures" that is linked from Florian's website.

Mobile Art && Code 2009: November 6, 7, & 8, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh. I want to go!

The following information is from the MOBILE ART CODE Ning social network.

Art & & Code is an event series and online community dedicated to the democratization of computer programming for artists, young people, and the rest of us.

This November 6-8, we continue our successful workshop/lecture series with MOBILE ART & & CODE: Mobile Media and Interactive Arts - a symposium on the aesthetic and tactical potentials of mobile, networked and locative media. The three-day event will feature intimate, practical, arts-oriented programming workshops for popular mobile platforms (such as the iPhone, Android, Nokia Smartphones, Arduino, SMS, and Asterisk PBX systems) along with an all-day series of free lecture presentations that contextualizes the use of these technologies in a variety of contemporary critical, artistic and design practices.

MOBILE ART && CODE is made possible by a generous grant from Microsoft Research, with oversight by the Center for Computational Thinking at CMU. The ART && CODE symposium series is a project of the CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, directed by Golan Levin. If you have questions or concerns about MOBILE ART && CODE, please email Golan Levin at golan@andrew.cmu.edu.

MOBILE ART && CODE is a symposium on the artistic and tactical potential of mobile, networked and locative media: November 6-8, 2009 at CMU!

Conference Schedule
6 Nov (Fri): Three-Hour Workshops, 9am-Noon and 2pm-5pm ($75/ea.)
7 Nov (Sat): Free All-Day Artist Presentations + Evening Performances 
8 Nov (Sun): Three-Hour Workshops, 9am-Noon and 2pm-5pm ($75/ea.)

Workshop Schedule for MOBILE ART  CODE:

WORKSHOPS	Instructors	Friday 11/6 AM (9am-12)	Friday 11/6 PM (2-5pm)	Sunday 11/8 AM (9am-12)	Sunday 11/8 PM (2-5pm)
Introduction to Arduino	Gaye	$75 + 75m	$75 + 75m
Design Tech. for Mobiles	Bleecker	$75	$75
FlashLite on Mobiles	Kam et al.	$75		$75
iPhone + openFrmwks.	Akten & Gage	$75		$75
Interactive SMS	Evans	$75			$75
Python + Nokia	Scheible		$75	$75
Interactive Telephony	Van Every		$75	$75
Android + Arduino	Anderson & Marlinspike		$75 + $120m		$75 + $120m
Scrapyard Challenge!	Brucker-Cohen & Moriwaki			$75 + $50m. Note: 6 hours.
Master's Seminar	Behrendt, Paulos et al.			$75	$75
iPhone + Pure Data	Steiner			$75	$75
How to Make Ringtones	Foley				$25

Some of the workshops do not require any programming experience, and only two (iPhone + OpenFrameworks and Android + Arduino) recommend that participants have some programming experience.

The Hidden Geometry of Hair: Computer Generated "Hollywood Hair" Unveiled at SIGGRAPH 2008

I came across a link to an article in the UCSD School of Engineering News today and just had to post it.

"HOLLYWOOD HAIR IS CAPTURED AT LAST: DETAILS IN SIGGRAPH 2008 PAPER"

Technology now exists that will enable animators, video-game makers, and film-makers the opportunity to capture images of real hairstyles that look and behave realistically. Below is a series of side-by-side comparisons of computer generated heads of hair and the real thing.

From the article:

"By determining the orientations of individual hairs, the researchers can realistically estimate how the hairstyle will shine no matter what angle the light is coming from. “You can’t just blend the highlights from two different angles to get a realistic highlight for a point in between,” said Chang.
“Instead of blending existing highlights, we create new ones.”


....One possible extension of this work: making an animated character’s hair realistically blow in the wind. This is possible because the researchers also developed a way to calculate what individual hair fibers are doing between the hairstyle surface and the scalp. They call this finding the “hidden geometry” of hair.

“Our method produces strands attached to the scalp that enable animation. In contrast, existing approaches retrieve only the visible hair layer,” the authors write in their SIGGRAPH 2008 paper. An animation of a hairstyle is available as a download from the “hair photobooth” Web site created by Sylvain Paris: http://people.csail.mit.edu/sparis/publi/2008/siggraphHair/

What we need is a real-life hair photobooth. Have a bad hair day? No problem. Walk in, "zap!", and walk out with real Hollywood hair. Maybe the hair scientists are working on it....


SIGGRAPH 2008 Paper citation: “Hair Photobooth: Geometric and Photometric Acquisition of Real Hairstyles,” by Sylvain Paris and Wojciech Matusik from Adobe Systems, Inc., Will Chang, Wojciech Jarosz and Matthias Zwicker from University of California, San Diego; and Oleg I. Kozhushnyan and Frédo Durand from Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Embedded Touch-Screen Computer Games for Primates at the Zoo!

Interactive computer games still very common in our public schools, the day-time habitat for most young human primates. Non-human primates at several zoos now have access to "ubiquitous" touch-screen computer games, embedded within their habitats, as part of a research program spearheaded by Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience.

The games were developed with assistance from IBM volunteers to help assess reasoning, learning, and memory. For related information and links, see the TechPsych blog entry.



I would love to use (and develop) interactive multimedia computer games, delivered on touch-screens, to help me with my assessment duties as a school psychologist!

If you or someone you know is doing research on this subject in the schools or with school-aged populations, please let me know.

RELATED
Researchers Have Orangutans Play Video Games

Convergence: Video Games and Virtual Reality for Special Needs: Autism, ADD, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Social Skills...

This is a link to a post on the TechPsych blog.