MIT's Opera of the Future Lab and "Death and the Powers": Opera Meets Matrix

MIT's Opera of the Future Lab, part of MIT's Media Lab, has been preparing a new version of a performance of "Death and the Powers", an interactive, collaborative opera that is set to be performed on Sunday, February 16th at 2:00 PM (Central Time) at the Dallas Opera, and simulcast world-wide.  

Innovative interactive technology plays a huge role in this performance, connected to the opera's theme, singing, moving robots, sensors, and displays.

Although "Death and the Powers" opera was first performed several years ago, it has evolved and integrated new technologies over the years. What is really exciting about this upcoming performance will be simulcast in a way that will let the audience/viewers interact with the main performance through the use of cell phones or tablets, in real time.  The audience will have the opportunity to experience the opera through the points of view of different characters, including the perspective of the robots.

Video: Humanizing technology with opera-singing robots




RELATED
Opera of the Future Blog
(Lots of pictures, videos, cast interviews, and information about the technologies involved in the opera's performance.)
Death and the Powers
Death and the Powers Image Gallery
Singing robots show humanity of technology in opera of the future
PBS Newshour, 2/10/14
Sci-fi opera 'Death and the Powers' is doing things differently...with robots
Ann Davenport, PBS Newshour Art Beat, 2/10/14
FYI:  The above link has several video clips about the opera as well as the innovative interactive technology t
The Dallas Opera Global Simulcast of "Death and the Powers"
Susan Calvin, The Dallas Opera News and Features, 10/1/14

Excerpts from the above press release:

DEATH AND THE POWERS, scheduled to take place in Dallas on Sunday, February 16th at 2:00 p.m. Central Time, originating in the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House at the AT&T Performing Arts Center and being simulcast to as many as ten locations in Europe and the U.S.

The Dallas Opera is currently in negotiations with a wide-range of venues and organizations located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University, New York City and its boroughs, Philadelphia, Paris, Los Angeles, London and Stockholm—as well as the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in the Dallas Arts District, which has already shown a keen interest in the questions raised by Machover’s “robot pageant” opera and has partnered with both the Dallas Opera and the MIT Media Lab’s “Opera of the Future” program to support this innovative approach to the art form and attract new generations to opera.

DEATH AND THE POWERS, with music by composer/inventor Tod Machover and text by librettist Robert Pinsky (one of America’s foremost living poets) received rave reviews at its sold-out 2010 Monte Carlo world premiere and subsequent engagements in Boston and Chicago.

However, this unprecedented Dallas Opera Global Simulcast offers far more than a mere stage production; patrons will experience Simon Powers’ perspective from within “The System,” as well as a “robot’s eye view” of the opera, while tapping into a variety of interactive features. Those attending the simulcast anywhere in the world will have an opportunity to interact with the main performance onstage—through cellphones, tablets and other handheld devices—in order to influence the visual elements in the Winspear Opera House in real time, as they unfold.

With the cooperation of the AT&T Performing Arts Center and The Moody Foundation, this production will incorporate the state-of-the-art Moody Chandelier as an important element of the visual and auditory experience.

“The Dallas Opera is thrilled to be collaborating with the brilliant composer and technologist, Tod Machover, on bringing this important work to Dallas,” says Dallas Opera General Director and CEO Keith Cerny, “and presenting an unprecedented interactive global simulcast of the work. In this ‘Brave New World’ of high-tech opera, nothing is off-limits, and we are working closely and intensely with the composer, MIT and leading opera companies in the U.S., U.K. and continental Europe to add these new interactive and creative elements to an already outstanding twenty-first century masterpiece.

“All of us at the Dallas Opera are tremendously grateful to Bob Ellis and Jane Bernstein—whose generosity has brought this dream to life.”

Leading a team from the MIT Media Lab, Tod Machover produced “a challenging opera that questioned how far the human race can push technological development toward immortality.” The action centers on a terminally ill billionaire who downloads his consciousness into an artificial construct and then attempts to persuade his loved ones to join him there.
Andrew Porter of Opera magazine described Death and the Powers as “A grand, rich, deeply serious new opera.”

At the same time, critic Stephen J. Mudge of Opera News noted: “Any worry that the opera might be taking itself too seriously is answered by Pinsky’s witty and at times lighthearted libretto, which treats the situation with respect but levity.”

“It is so exciting to be bringing Death and the Powers to The Dallas Opera, and equally exciting to be collaborating with TDO – under the guidance of Keith Cerny and with the generous support of Bob Ellis and Jane Bernstein – to create an interactive streaming experience so that audiences around the world can be connected to the live Dallas performance,” says composer Tod Machover.
“Our challenge is to create extra layers and interactions for this remote viewing so that being ‘there’ will be just as compelling and powerful as being physically in the Winspear, while revealing new aspects of the opera – such as what it feels like to be ‘in The System’ with Simon Powers – for the very first time.”

Interactive Tablets and Learning: One Laptop Per Child now One Tablet Per Child in Ethiopia

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a philanthropic organization that focuses on learning technologies, distributing thousands of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries.  In most cases, children have been provided access to OLPC laptops within teachers within traditional school settings.  But what about children who live in remote areas, where there are no schools, teachers, or even access to electricity?  They now have the opportunity to learn, even without teachers, through a small experiment conceived by Nicholas Negroponte, of OLCP and other researchers.  In this experiement, each child was provided with a Motorola Xoom tablet.  No teachers were around, because the children lived in a remote village that had no teachers. 

The following video provides a brief overview of what happened over the course of a few weeks and months after the children received the tablets:

To learn more, I encourage you to follow the link to a video of Nicholas Negroponte's presentation at the October 2012 EmTech conference, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He discusses learning and how it can be supported through technology, anywhere.

EmTech Video: Nicholas Negroponte: Teaching Children to Learn

"Nicholas Negroponte, founder, One Laptop Per Child, on his latest experiment with the democratization of education - can children teach themselves to read?"

In his presentation, Negroponte discusses the differences between knowing and understanding, and the importance for teachers (or learning applications) to understand the learner.  He goes on to discuss the OLPC research project Ethiopia where children living in remote villages with no teachers, no exposure to print, illiterate communities, and no access to technology, learned to use tablets without instruction or guidance.  The village was provided with a solar panel and one village member was taught how to use it to supply power for the tablets.

Each tablet provided to the children had over 100 applications.  Within four minutes, one child open the box, turned on the on-off button. Within 5 days, each child was using an average of 47 applications.  Within five months, a child hacked the Android tablet to turn on the camera capability.  According to Negroponte, the children were each using different applications, but collaborated with one another.



Maryann Wolf, Director of  the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, has collaborated with with the "OTPC" project. Other collaborators include Cynthia Breazeal and team at the MIT Media Lab, and Sugata Mitra at Newcastle University, according to Chris Ball, lead software engineer at OLPC.

The tablets include software that tracks data from all of the interactions from the children.  What a goldmine for education and cognitive/developmental psychology researchers According to Negraponte, the data is free for analysis.   (I will update this post with additional information about how the data can be accessed as soon as I can find the link.)

Although the OTPC concept is a noble idea, it does not appear to address the fact the children and their families who live in remote villages do not have access to literacy support in their own language.  


RELATED

OLPC Literacy Project

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves:  A bold experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown "encouraging" results.
David Tabolt,  MIT Technology Review, 10/29/12


OLPC Project Puts Tablets in the Hands of Formerly Illiterate Children with Amazing Results John Biggs, TechCrunch, 11/1/12

Motorola Xoom hacked by Ethiopian kids who can't read; with no instructions whatsoever.
Joe Hindy, 11/4/12
 


DIG DEEPER: SOMEWHAT RELATED
Hourcade, J.P., Beitler, D., Cormenzana, F. and Flores, P. (2009). Early OLPC Experiences in a Rural Uruguayan School. In A. Druin (Ed.), Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann.

Growing Up With Nell:  A Narrative Interface for Literacy (pdf)
IDC 2012, June 12–15, 2012, Bremen, Germany
Authors: C. Scott Ananian, Chris J. Ball, Michael Stone
One Laptop Per Child Foundation, 222 Third Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

ABSTRACT
"Nell is a tablet-oriented education platform for children in the developing world.  A novel modular narrative system guides learning, even for children far from educational infrastructure, and provides personalized instruction which grows with the child.  Nell's design builds on experience with the Sugar Learning Platform, used by over two million children around the world"

Quote from above article:
"To further promote collaboration, Nell is free and opensource and implemented in standard web technologies (JavaScript, HTML5, and WebGL) with offline caching. Resources are named by URL, even when disconnected from the internet, which simplifies the distribution of updates to story modules and the Nell system. URL-based identifiers also allow third parties to manage their own namespaces when extending Nell."

TinkRBook
A. Chang and C. Breazeal. TinkRBook: Shared reading interfaces for storytelling. (pdf) In Proc. of the 10th Int’l Conf. on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’11), pages 145–148. ACM, June 2011.
NOTE:  The above article provides good references about early language and literacy development.



Wilox, Bruce Beyond Facade: Pattern Matching for Natural Language Applications (pdf)
Telltale Games, Feb. 2011
Note:  This paper reviews the history of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as applied to games, and includes information about AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), Facade, and ChatScript.  The author explains how string matching is no longer simply a matching of words. It now focuses matching patterns of meaning.

ChatScript 
ChatScript Website

Note:  One of my assignments for a class in AI for Games, back in 2006, was to create a mini-game that involved the use of AIML.  I realized that a "smart" chat feature would be useful to incorporate in an educational game. In my opinion, it has the potential to support scaffolding of learning, based on the learner's responses, positive as well as errors.