An Example of Convergence: Interactive TV : uxTV 2008

I missed this one!



Jeremy Vaught, the administrator of the New Media Facebook group, posted about the the First International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences for TV and Video, held October 22-24, 2008 in Silicon Valley, California. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft Mediaroom, and ifip (International Federation for Information Processing).

According to the conference website, the papers from the conference can be found in the ACM digital library, AICPS: UZTV'08.

Featured speakers included Jakob Nielson (usability guru), Elissa Lee (Sr. Director of Research, TiVo), Gunthar Hartwig (User Experience, YouTube), and Dale Herigstad (Chief Creative Officer, Schematic).

Here is a sample of the topics covered during the conference:

Designing for User Experience: What to Expect from Mobile 3D TV and Video?
(Satu Jumisko-Pyykko, Mandy Weitzel, & Dominik Strohmeier)

The Concept of Interactivity - revisited: Four new typologies for a new media landscape
(Jens F. Jensen)

The Interactive Television User Experience So Far
(William Cooper)

Absolute Pointing and Tracking based Remote Control for Interactive User Experience
(John Sweetser, Anders Grunnet-Jepsen, and Gopal Panchanathan, ThinkOptics Inc.)

Network Analysis of Massively Collaborative Creation of Multimedia Contents: Case Study of Hatsune Miku videos on Nico Nico Duoga (Masahiro Hamasaki, Hideaki Takeda, Takuichi Nishimura)

The uxtv08 website has links to information about the various demos that were presented at the conference. To save you time, I've linked them below:

Demos

Data Driven Interactive 'Lower Third' - Vikram Singh

Dynamic TV: a New Inter-tainment Paradigm for Television - Marina Geymonat, Rossana Simeoni, Monica Perrero, Elena Guercio, Maurizio Belluati, Agnese Vellar and Roberto Montanari

Interactive advertising on n-tv plus - Kathrin Damian, Christian Bopp, Lars-Eric Mann

Interactive Live Demo of Fraunhofer FOKUS Media Interoperability Lab - Oliver Friedrich, Robert Seeliger, Benjamin Zachey, Christian Riede and Stefan Arbanowski

Microsoft Windows Media Center - Linda Chan

Microsoft Mediaroom - Linda Chan and David Giusti

Multi-dimensional Direct Pointing Remote Control for Interactive User Experience - John Sweetser, Anders Grunnet-Jepsen and Gopal Panchanathan

Tarae: Prototype of new interface design for digital TV browsing and navigation system - Hyun Suk Kim, Joung Young Lee and Sang Pil Hwang

Data and Information Visualization Resources for Economics, Finance, and the Current Crisis

I posted a variety of links to data and information visualization resources that might be helpful to those of you who are interested in exploring our current economic crisis:

Economic Sights and Sounds: Links to Data and Information Visualization resources for Economics, Finance, and the Current Crisis

I'm using the Economic Sights and Sounds blog as a repository of information and links for use in a collaborative interactive multimedia time-line of events surrounding the current situation.

The new 3G iPhone: Expanding the Possibilities of Interactive Multimedia Communication

The new iPhone is filled with possibilities....In this post, I'm sharing some pictures of the iPhone that look interesting to educators and those of us who want to increase our interactive multimedia communication and entertainment when we are out and about.

The following pictures from a post I came across on the engadget website today, authored by Ryan Block, while he attended today at WWDC 2008. The new 3G iPhone, with a price of $199.00, was the focus of Steve Job's keynote. I've added a few links to the developers of new iPhone apps, where possible.


3G is fast



Apple offers MobileMe service for the iPhone, which is something most people on-the-go will appreciate:

"Everything you need. Anywhere you are."

"MobileMe stores your email, calendar, and contacts on a secure online server, or “cloud.” The cloud pushes the most current data to your iPhone, iPod touch, and computer so you’re always up to date. And your email, calendar, contacts, photos, and documents are accessible over the Internet through a set of easy-to-use web applications."

Push email, push calendar, and push contacts Web applications at me.com

MobileMe Gallery for photo sharing MobileMe iDisk for online document access

20GB of online storage

This would make the iPhone ideal for mobile learning! Here is an example of an application for science:





Great for musicians and music students who are away from their gear:


According to Ryan Block, this application is from Moo Cow Music. The application is called "Band". Here are the features, as listed on the Moo Cow Music website:

• Drums, bass, guitars, keyboards can all be played and recorded into one song from the same application.
• Multitouch - press up to five keys at once for complex chords.
• Animation shows keys being pressed, strings being struck, etc.
• Any instrument can be recorded, or overdubbed onto a previous recording.
• Erase any mistakes, then go back and overdub replacement notes.
• A configurable metronome can be enabled or disabled during recording.

Here is a video of the beta version of the application:

"Kroll", from Digital Legends Entertainment, runs on the iPhone and is an action-adventure fantasy game.


Sega's Super Monkey Ball on the iPhone


Apple iPhone Site

Link to video of Keynote


Verizon, can you hear me now? I want an iPhone!

Game Based Learning: Second European Conference

The 2008 Second European Conference on Game-Based Learning will be held in Barcelona, Spain, October 16-17, hosted by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Speaker Bios

Conference Program

If you are working in a K-12 setting and interested in sharing your ideas about game-based learning, please leave me a message. I'm especially interested in how interactive games support engaged, meaningful learning.

Even More Multi-Touch, Delivered by NUI...

May 20, 2008
NUI announces delivery of their multi-touch solution for Cityscape, Abu Dhabi 2008





www.natural-ui.com
Natural User Interface Europe Ltd.