Ambient Culture: A Possible Future for Entertainment Computing

Cultural Computing, 2010

Operational, Legal, Ethical, and Financial Perspectives

This special panel session provides an opportunity to discuss how entertainment computing designers create interactive media/ contents on Buddhism and also other religious practices. In this year, we have launched an exciting project designing interactive contents to be used in Todaiji temple, one of the world heritages located in Nara, Japan. In this project, we are actually collaborating with monks of the Todaiji temple, learning Buddhist rituals in this temple from the monks, and creating Augmented Reality contents working on high performance network infrastructure. This session consists of a presentation introducing our Todaiji temple project and a set of short key notes from specialists; researchers on Augmented Reality, Entertainment Computing, and Anthropology.

Heritage Science, 2024

Human-computer interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and the multilingualism of digital culture open up unexpected scenarios in the contemporary design of cultural spaces with the creation of artifacts in which the analogic and digital dimensions come together to enhance the experience. Sensors and devices track user movement in the real world and translate the inputs into commands through hand gestures, speech recognition, head movements, tangible interfaces, or a combination of these elements. Through theorical models, concepts and tools, the paper reports the evolution of "User Experience" applied to personalized enjoyment and use of cultural places. The functionalperformance survey of tools and technologies for perception, narrative and augmented interaction revealed models that highlight the diversity and richness of tangible and intangible cultural heritage through new forms of interaction and knowledge transfer. In this direction, new technological tools make it possible to detect, track and evaluate the personalized user experience by processing or producing large amounts of data. Therefore, on one hand the paper explores the limitations dictated by data management and user privacy in using such systems and, on the other, it prefigures new scenarios for amplifying and personalizing the user experience.

Proceedings of the seventeen ACM international conference on Multimedia - MM '09, 2009

McLuhan's statement, "the medium is the message" is all-present in discussions within the media community. However, how does ubiquitous and pervasive computation impact when the medium is 'inside' the natural environment of humans? How do location based services, context awareness, emotional responsive interfaces, touch and gesture based interfaces, haptic devices, biometrics, sensor data fusion, mobile embedded systems, distributed networks, and smart data mining change the way of how media are presented, distributed, and consumed? These technical enablers go far beyond existing well known computer screen concepts or simple keyboard and mouse interaction methods. Within the scope of the tutorial several aspects and viewpoints of ambient media are presented: media, technology, HCI, and business. The tutorial presents case-studies and latest research methods in the field of ambient media. Examples of existing services are coming from ambient assisting living, user experience design, sensor networks, distributed systems, and mobile location based services ambient media are explained in further detail. The tutorial intends to train participants in the principles of ambient media and its concepts, content creation techniques, and methods. The tutorial rounds up with a more visionary viewpoint towards media technology in the future: the use of biological metaphors in presenting media, shortly called biological media -'biomedia'.

2011

Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However, while other types of educational activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problem of supporting educational role-play with technology has only begun to be tackled recently. Within the eCIRCUS project we have designed a framework for technology-enhanced role-play with the aim of educating adolescents about intercultural empathy. This work was influenced by related fields such as intelligent virtual agents, interactive narrative and pervasive games. In this paper, we will describe the different components of our role-play technology by means of a prototype implementation of this technology, the ORIENT showcase. Furthermore we will present results of our evaluation of ORIENT. Ó

2011

Search engines, recommendation systems, mapping applications, blog tools, auction tools, instant messaging clients, and, of course, platforms which allow others to write new software – iOS, Android, Facebook, Windows, Linux, – are in the center of the global economy, culture, social life, and, increasingly, politics. And this “cultural software” – cultural in a sense that it is directly used by hundreds of millions of people and that it carries “atoms” of culture (media and information, as well as human interactions around these media and information) – is only the visible part of a much larger software universe. Paradoxically, while social scientists, philosophers, cultural critics, and media and new media theorists have by now seem to cover all aspects of IT revolution, creating a number of new disciplines such as cyber culture, Internet studies, new media theory, and digital culture, the underlying engine which drives most of these subjects—software—has received relatively little direct attention. Even today when people are constantly interacting with and updating dozens of apps on their mobile phones and other computer devices, “software” as a distinct theoretical category is still invisible to most academics, artists, and cultural professionals interested in IT and its cultural and social effects. I think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction, our analysis can't be complete until we consider this software layer. Which means that all disciplines which deal with contemporary society and culture – architecture, design, art criticism, sociology, political science, humanities, science and technology studies, and so on – need to account for the role of software and its effects in whatever subjects they investigate.

The notion of interaction design has become an indispensable aspect in any new product design and development, especially for those products with embedded information technologies. While traditional industrial design focuses on a product's functionality and its physical features, interaction design requires different perspectives and approaches for increasingly complex design problems. New technologies such as networking and embedded technologies provide opportunities to develop new categories of products with a much wider range of services that combine many physical and informational functions. Since such products are more interactive and are more pervasive in our daily activities, design calls for much deeper understanding from more diverse perspectives of product use. This discussion applies not only to physical products but also to other forms of artifacts. For instance, communication media have gone through an astonishingly rapid transformation, from print media to digital media--further extending their ubiquity and interactivity. This technological development has introduced new types of functionality, related for example to control, monitoring, searching, and transactions for many different applications. New technologies such as the Internet and mobile phone networks have changed the way people live and work. Such technological changes are taking place in the social and cultural landscapes of our daily life, and are fundamentally affecting many aspects of our lives.

Interactive Digital Television – Technologies and Applications, 2007

Media are " [media] means effecting or conveying something such as (1) a surrounding or enveloping substance; or (2) a condition or environment in which something may function or flourish; or (3) mode of artistic expression or communication." (Merriam-Webster, n.d.) In the case of ambient media, the humans' natural environment becomes to the "enveloping media" as an environment in which content functions. This work therefore deals with the development of ambient media, far beyond seeing TV as a major entertainment platform in consumers' homes. To satisfy the entertainment-hungry consumer, more and more advanced home entertainment (HE) systems and facilities are required to provide interactive and smart leisure content. This chapter glimpses the future of modern ambient HE systems. Experts in the field of ambient media discuss and contribute to four major lines of the future development of ambient media: (1) social implications, (2) converging media, (3) consumer content, and (4) smart devices.

Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 2004

In culturally embedded computing, we begin by examining how the technology is emblematic of its cultural context. Culturally embedded computing explicitly situates embedded computing in society, individual experience, culture, and history. Based on this new emphasis, five projects explore alternatives to traditional human-computer interaction design. Designing and building these new technologies requires more than simply building and understanding hardware and software. It also requires analyzing and incorporating ...