Papers by Nick Tandavanitj
The European Commission, 2020
ECSCW 2011: Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 24-28 September 2011, Aarhus Denmark, 2011
A long-term naturalistic study reveals how artists designed, visitors experienced, and curators a... more A long-term naturalistic study reveals how artists designed, visitors experienced, and curators and technicians maintained a public interactive artwork over a four year period. The work consisted of a collaborative augmented reality game that ran across eleven networked displays (screens and footpads) that were deployed along a winding ramp in a purpose-built gallery. Reflections on design meetings and documentation show how the artists responded to this architectural setting and addressed issues of personalisation, visitor flow, attracting spectators, linking real and virtual, and accessibility. Observations of visitors reveal that while their interactions broadly followed the artistsʼ design, there was far more flexible engagement than originally anticipated, especially within visiting groups, while interviews with curators and technicians reveal how the work was subsequently maintained and ultimately reconfigured. Our findings extend discussions of ʻinteractional trajectoriesʼ within CSCW, affirming the relevance of this concept to describing collaboration in cultural settings, but also suggesting how it needs to be extended to better reflect group interactions at multiple levels of scale.
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences - DUX '07, 2007
This study examines the development of a mobile phone-based pervasive game that related its user'... more This study examines the development of a mobile phone-based pervasive game that related its user's environmental footprint. It discusses the design challenges, development and evaluation of the prototype game in order to identify the key strategies and mechanisms that relate to the production of pervasive systems for mass participation. Designing the user experience for such systems is particularly difficult, as the game had to educate and entertain without patronizing or preaching to the user. A prototype system was developed and trialed in order to identify and understand how users related to the experience and how the game may be further developed. We found that character-led tailored physical activities were generally found to be the most enjoyable, while players wanted more interaction with each other and more score-based content. Creating interdependent question sets and orchestrating the game arduous process. In the future a fully automated system will be key to its use.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006
Hitchers is a game for mobile phones that exploits cellular positioning to support location-based... more Hitchers is a game for mobile phones that exploits cellular positioning to support location-based play. Players create digital hitch hikers, giving them names, destinations and questions to ask other players, and then drop them into their current phone cell. Players then search their current cell for hitchers, pick them up, answer their questions, carry them to new locations and drop them again, providing location-labels as hint to where they can be found. In this way, hitchers pass from player to player, phone to phone and cell to cell, gathering information and encouraging players to label cells with meaningful place names. A formative study of Hitchers played by 47 players over 4 months shows how the seams in cellular positioning, including varying cell size, density and overlap, affected the experience. Building on previous discussions of designing for uncertainty and seamful design, we consider five ways of dealing with these seams: removing, hiding, managing, revealing and exploiting them. This leads us to propose the mechanism of a dynamic search focus, to explore new visualization tools for cellular data, and to reconsider the general relationship between 'virtual' and 'physical' worlds in location-based games.
IEEE Distributed Systems Online, 2007
Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) ... more Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Submitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appearance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2011
An ethnographic study reveals how professional artists created a spectator interface for the inte... more An ethnographic study reveals how professional artists created a spectator interface for the interactive game Day of the Figurines, designing the size, shape, height and materials of two tabletop interfaces before carefully arranging them in a local setting. We also show how participants experienced this interface. We consider how the artists worked with a multi-scale notion of interactional trajectory that combined trajectories through individual displays, trajectories through a local ecology of displays, and trajectories through an entire experience. Our findings shed light on discussions within HCI concerning interaction with tangible and tabletop displays, spectator interfaces, ecologies of displays, and trajectories through cultural experiences.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2006
We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game called Can You See Me Now? in which online play... more We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game called Can You See Me Now? in which online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by ‘runners’ (professional performers equipped with GPS and WiFi technologies) who have to run through the actual city streets in order to catch the players. We present an ethnographic study of the game as it toured through two different cities and draws upon video recordings of online players, runners, technical support crew, and also on system logs of text communication. Our study reveals the diverse ways in which online players experienced the uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as problems, or treating the as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. In contrast, the runners and technical crew were fully aware of these uncertainties and continually battled against them through an ongoing and distributed process of orchestr...
Deliverable D12. 4
mrl.nott.ac.uk
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY City as Theatre (CAT) is one of five workpackages called “showcases” within IPe... more EXECUTIVE SUMMARY City as Theatre (CAT) is one of five workpackages called “showcases” within IPerG that demonstrate and study new examples of pervasive games. The CAT showcase is exploring artistled pervasive games, drawing on the talents of artists to create novel and compelling experiences that offer visions of how more mainstream games might be in the future. This has involved developing a prototype public performance called Day of the Figurines, a slow pervasive game in the form of a massivelymultiplayer ...
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2013
We explore the approach of performance-led research in the wild in which artists drive the creati... more We explore the approach of performance-led research in the wild in which artists drive the creation of novel performances with the support of HCI researchers that are then deployed and studied at public performance in cultural settings such as galleries, festivals and on the city streets. We motivate the approach and then describe how it consists of three distinct activities -- practice, studies and theory -- that are interleaved in complex ways through nine different relationships. We present a historical account of how the approach has evolved over a fifteen-year period, charting the evolution of a complex web of projects, papers, and relationships between them. We articulate the challenges of pursuing each activity as well as overarching challenges of balancing artistic and research interests, flexible management of relationships, and finally ethics.
Orchestrating a mixed reality game 'on the ground'
Orchestrating a mixed reality game 'on the ground'
Steve Benford, Andy Crabtree, Martin Flintham, Duncan Rowland The Mixed Reality Laboratory, The U... more Steve Benford, Andy Crabtree, Martin Flintham, Duncan Rowland The Mixed Reality Laboratory, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK. {sdb, axc, mdf, dar}@cs.nott.ac.uk Bill Gaver Interaction Design Research Studio, The Royal College of Art, UK w.gaver@rca.ac.uk Matt Adams, Ju RowFarr, Nick Tandavanitj Blast Theory Unit 43a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London, UK. {matt, ju, nick}@blasttheory.co.uk Amanda Oldroyd, Jon Sutton BTexact Adastral Park, Martlesham, Ipswich,UK {amanda. oldroyd, jon.sutton}@bt.com
Gifting in Museums: Using Multiple Time Orientations to Heighten Present-Moment Engagement
Human–Computer Interaction, 2021
HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is ofte... more HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is often oriented primarily towards the past, while the latter is often oriented towards the future, in ter...
Day of the Figurines (DoF) is a text messaging pervasive game for mobile phones that is designed ... more Day of the Figurines (DoF) is a text messaging pervasive game for mobile phones that is designed to be slow and interwoven with the patterns of players’ daily lives over a month of play. We describe the design and realisation of DoF showing how it is driven by a strong narrative that is crafted from destinations, times and events and yet supports interactivity through chat, the use of objects, health and dilemmas, all of which can be combined into more complex missions. Feedback from a deployment at Singapore that was played by 141 paying players was positive, with 71% of 24 questionnaire respondents saying they would play again and suggests that this format has potential to broaden the demographic for computer games. Author
We are exploring the use of mobile mixed reality technologies to create citywide performances. We... more We are exploring the use of mobile mixed reality technologies to create citywide performances. We introduce six approaches to overlaying a virtual world on the city streets that emerged from early brainstorming workshops. We describe how one of these was refined and used to create an initial public performance called Can You See Me Now? in which up to twenty on-line players were chased across a map of Sheffield by three performers running through the streets. We discuss key issues raised by these experiences: combining diverse interfaces to create a single experience; supporting orchestration; and the critical role of real-time audio. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE CITYWIDE PROJECT The Citywide project is exploring the potential of mobile mixed reality technologies to create performances across a city. Participants on the city streets will experience events that are taking place in a parallel virtual world that is connected to and overlaid on the city in a variety of ways. At the same-time,...
From Sharing To Gifting: A web app for deepening engagement
Can You See Me Now? was a mobile mixed reality game that took place on-line and on the streets of... more Can You See Me Now? was a mobile mixed reality game that took place on-line and on the streets of a city. On-line players moved across a map of the city that they accessed over the Internet. Runners equipped with wireless handheld computers with GPS receivers chased them by running through the city streets. Players communicated with one another using text messages and also received walkie-talkie communication from the runners as an audio stream. Can You See Me Now? was staged publicly. Evaluation based on ethnography, discussion with participants and analysis of system logs, revealed a number of design issues for future citywide mixed reality games. Gameplay issues focus on the tactics of the runners and players, the need to enhance local knowledge for the players, the role of audio, and designing entry into and exit from the game. Orchestration focus on improving monitoring interfaces in the game control room and better supporting participants on the streets.
Designing Hybrid Gifts
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate... more Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate new kinds of gifts. Our review details how gifting is a complex social phenomenon and how digital gifting is less engaging than physical gifting for both givers and receivers. Employing a Research Through Design approach, we developed a portfolio of four hybrid gifting experiences: an augmented advent calendar; edible music tracks; personalized museum tours; and a narrated city walk. Our reflection addresses three concepts: hybrid wrapping where physical gifts become wrapped in digital media and vice versa; the importance of effortful interactions that are visible and pleasurable; and the need to consider social obligation, including opportunities for acknowledgement and reciprocation, dealing with embarrassment, and recognizing the distinction between giving and sharing. Our concepts provide guidance to practitioners who wish to design future gifting experiences while helping HCI resea...
Uncle Roy All Around You: Implicating the City in a Location-Based Performance
Ace, 2004
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2015
We explore the ethical implications of HCI's turn to the ‘cultural’. This is motivated by an ... more We explore the ethical implications of HCI's turn to the ‘cultural’. This is motivated by an awareness of how cultural applications, in our case interactive performances, raise ethical issues that may challenge established research ethics processes. We review research ethics, HCI's engagement with ethics and the ethics of theatrical performance. Following an approach grounded in Responsible Research Innovation, we present the findings from a workshop in which artists, curators, commissioners, and researchers explored ethical challenges revealed by four case studies. We identify six ethical challenges for HCI's engagement with cultural applications: transgression, boundaries, consent, withdrawal, data, and integrity. We discuss two broader implications of these: managing tensions between multiple overlapping ethical frames; and the importance of managing ethical challenges during and after an experience as well as beforehand. Finally, we discuss how our findings extend pr...
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Papers by Nick Tandavanitj