Immersive theatre informing VR experiences

 Posted on March 23, 2017  |  2 minutes  |  271 words

  But for as popular as immersive theater has become, it hasn't solved its scale problem. Productions like Then She Fell offer incredible intimacy between the actor and viewer, but to do so, they only fill 15 seats a night. That means a year of shows can accommodate less people than a single movie theater for half a day. A few years ago, creator Jennine Willet was having drinks with 14 creatives at Disney who worked on park attractions. [Read More]
theatre  vr  dramaturgy  immersive performance 

Audrey Watters - Attending to the Digital

 Posted on October 22, 2016  |  2 minutes  |  408 words

The transcript from a presentation by Audrey Watters at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. She was invited to talk about digital discourse as part of their launch of a domain-of-ones-own initiative. What a fantastic way to launch such a thing1. Read the entire thing. Building on Postman, Chaucer, Caulfield. Nice. In part, I find that those who want to dismiss such a thing as “digital distraction” tend to minimize the very real impact that new technologies do have on what we see, what we pay attention to. [Read More]
communication  attention  discourse  audrey watters 

Charlene Chin - Will this be the classroom of 2050?

 Posted on October 19, 2016  |  2 minutes  |  380 words

Article with question mark in title? Answer likely "no." But, it's going to be some classrooms, for sure. An interesting use of computer vision and machine learning to generate metadata about student engagement. This could (should|will) be used for more than just lecturing, and what if students had access to their own data? This could be a powerful tool to support self-reflection on teaching and learning… In a case of almost-perfect-timing, I presented to the iLab yesterday about some of my ideas for PhD work - looking for ways to help support self-reflection on teaching and learning. [Read More]
computational ethnography  machine learning  computer vision 

Antti Oulasvirta on reforming CHI

 Posted on October 18, 2016  |  1 minutes  |  160 words

I'm new to the CHI community, and have been involved with only one project that submitted a paper to CHI. I was struck by the cadence - it's a once-per-year submission deadline that sets the pattern of activity for an entire research lab. That feels weird. Maybe it's good, though, as it pushes people to publish their work on a regular basis rather than just at the end of a thesis or dissertation project… [Read More]
publishing  Antti Oulasvirta  chi 

consolidating phd notes

 Posted on July 25, 2016  |  1 minutes  |  160 words

I started a new blog site, running the fantastic Known blogging platform on a fresh subdomain running on my webspace at Reclaim Hosting. The intention was to give a place to think out loud about stuff I'm working on or thinking about for my PhD program. I started publishing some stuff, and then realized that having a separate site for that was awkward. There was no real need to separate and disconnect that content from the Day Jobâ„¢ content from the-rest-of-my-life content. [Read More]
blog 

Ideas on the documentation and interpretation of interactions in a classroom environment

 Posted on July 16, 2016  |  4 minutes  |  759 words

Some rough notes of some ideas I hope to work on, potentially as part of my PhD program. My Masters degree thesis was based on the use of social network and discourse analysis in an online course to attempt to understand the differences in student activity and interactions in two different online platforms and course designs. Tools like Gephi and NodeXL are available to anyone teaching online, to feed the data (system-generated activity logs, raw discussion text, twitter hashtags, search queries etc. [Read More]
classroom  learning spaces  active learning  classroom interactions  ethnography  computational ethnography 

some light reading on technology and robots as tutors

 Posted on June 23, 2016  |  6 minutes  |  1085 words

Bartneck, C., Kuli, D., Croft, E., & Zoghbi, S. (2008). Measurement Instruments for the Anthropomorphism, Animacy, Likeability, Perceived Intelligence, and Perceived Safety of Robots. International Journal of Social Robotics, 1(1), 71-81. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-008-0001-3 Burgard, W., Cremers, A. B., Fox, D., & Hähnel, D. (1998). The interactive museum tour-guide robot. Aaai/Iaai. Castellano, G., Paiva, A., Kappas, A., Aylett, R., Hastie, H., Barendregt, W., et al. (2013). Towards Empathic Virtual and Robotic Tutors. [Read More]
CMD  baxter  robot tutor 

experimental soundscape, mark II

 Posted on June 7, 2016  |  1 minutes  |  52 words

I just sat in the atrium and shaped this soundscape as people were walking through, trying to simulate some kind of response to motion. It's still pretty muddy, but I think there's something there. The trick will be in getting it to be unobtrusive and ambient while still providing information…

[audio wav="https://darcynorman.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/sonification-mark-2.wav"][/audio]

soundscape  sonification