Innovative Interactivity (II) | Receptive Cinema: A novel interactive cinema project open to collaboration

Academic Multimedia

Receptive Cinema: A novel interactive cinema project open to collaboration

By May 19, 2011 Post a comment

To kick off the 2011 summer guest blogger series, UK-based HCI specialist Keith Bound discusses the background of interactive film and discusses his latest research that “enables the audience presence to restructure their story world in real time, creating meaningful personalized experiences.” He is looking for collaborators so read on to learn more!

I founded Receptive Cinema™ in order to develop an innovative approach to harnessing the unexplored possibilities within the realm of interactive cinema. My first concept business idea was Emovie™ which was selected as a finalist in the Cisco i-prize Innovation Competition 2010 (3000 participants from 149 countries) to find the next billion dollar business for Cisco.

I am now seeking collaborators and investors to support my PhD research project, and in return the research outcomes and IP can be exploited commercially by the collaboration team.

Background

Cincera’s Kinoautomat (1967) was the world’s first interactive film. Its interaction consisted of stopping the film nine times so that audiences could take a vote on which scene to play next. Since then, digital technologies have enabled filmmakers, artists and designers to create novel and seamless forms of interactive film using database narrative, affective computing and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to sophisticated interactive art installations.

Shaw’s Configuring the Cave (1997) used a wooden mannequin to control real time transformations of visual and audio composition.

Meunier’s Hypnosis (1998) allowed users to interact using mouse clicks to produce a complete film.

Manovich’s Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (2005) has been designed so it never repeats the same image, screen layout or narrative sequences.

VJ Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper performance (2005) creates a novel interactive cinema experience in real time on large multi-screens.

Manovich’s Soft Cinema (2005), VJ Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper performance (2005), Morten Schjødt’s Switching (2003), and Cloran & Doron’s Late Fragment (2007) invited the audience to change the narrative direction through mouse clicks.

Tikka’s Obsession (2006), Enactive Cinema is perhaps the most novel approach to interactive film and cinema. The process detects the audience presence which then navigates the story-world journey through different audiovisual streams representing a different perspective based on the audience’s emotion state.

My project, Receptive Cinema™ (2009), invited users to create a narrative journey by manipulating multiple video streams running simultaneously in real time.

Shaw’s Scenario (2011) is the first 360-degree 3D interactive cinematic installation using artificial intelligence.

Research Project

Inspired by Enactive Cinema, the aim of my investigation is to explore audience emotional responses to film and multi-sensory interactive cinematic experiences and create a process that enables the audience presence to restructure their story world in real time creating meaningful personalized experiences.

Led by relevant research in cognitive/neuroscience, affective computing, intuitive multimodal HCI, interaction technologies and filmmaking techniques, a multi-disciplinary team will be created to develop a multi-sensory interactive cinematic installation experience where the audience interacts though three key senses: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.

The user interaction sensing will allow profiling derived from emotion and gesture recognition to articulate the user’s relation to narrative scenarios: effectively personalizing their engagement, based on their personality and emotional reactions. This means engagement with the story-space or game world will be nuanced in terms of character reactions and mis-en-scene through real-time changes in scene and character reactions using generative, procedural and AI techniques, based on user affective responses and ontology-driven profiling.

The proposed supporting technologies include interaction technologies such as touch, gestures, gaze, physiological data, speech, sound and motion.

Collaboration and Investment Benefits

A pioneering research project that will deliver innovative alternative digital content for the high growth digital cinema market and novel applications for the home digital entertainment market, through a single platform (cloud computing).

  • Audience presence drives the story-world restructuring and narrative direction
  • Transcends cinema or gaming experience through multi-sensory interaction and multi-platforms e.g. TV, Cinema, PC, Mobile
  • New form of pervasive entertainment
  • Creation of meaningful personalised content and experiences
  • Located on a server (cloud computing) to eliminate duplication, downloading content and film piracy
  • New cinematic experience for Hollywood style blockbuster film promotional events in Cinema lobby Areas (Installation)
  • Novel format for independent film makers
  • Global licensing opportunities

I am seeking innovative SME’s and investors to collaborate in the research and commercial development of this novel approach to interactive film and cinema.

For more information or an informal discussion please email me at: receptivecinema@virginmedia.com

Keith BoundKeith Bound is an award winning international designer and innovator. During the last five years he has developed cutting-edge research in multimedia methodologies which reduce cognitive load, improve communication and learning. His work includes a study based on theoretical and practice-led research, investigating complex issues in biofeedback human-computer interaction design, psychological and physiological responses to interactive cinema, film and narrative.

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This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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Brilliant. Genius Use of Social Media: BBC Dimensions: How Many Really?

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From the BBC Dimensions:

"How Many Really? compares the number of people involved in key historical events or situations to the people you know through Facebook or Twitter. You can also add your own numbers — for example, the amount of students in your class.

Choose a story to get started.

Dimensions is an experimental prototype for the BBC. (Find out what happens to your details.) Try How Big Really? to compare the scale of important places and events to the places you know."

Sweet - Kinect Hack & A Digital Canvas That You Paint With Your Fingertips | via Co. Design

"Soak" uses the Kinect to "grab the topology data of the screen in real-time, which is then translated into a 3-dimensional deformation structure," designers Hyunwoo Bang and Yunsil Heo tell Co.Design. In other words, when you press your fingertip into the stretchy membrane, the Kinect can sense the change in depth of the screen, which it then sends to Bang and Heo's software, which generates a visual simulation of ink gently spreading out from the spot you touched. And that, not the 3-D-sensing, was the hard part, according to Bang and Heo: "What was challenging to us in this project was simulating the dying process based on real-world physics," they say. "The simulation itself includes complex phenomena like capillary smear through the pulps with diffusion and delivery of pigments. What was more, the simulation had to be updated [at HD resolution] at least 60 times per second for its real-time application."

Very Very Cool- IDEO Labs » An Exquisite Corpse Experiment (Check out the background deets)

Watch the first chapter.

In traditional storytelling, we rely on words to conjure images in our minds. But what happens when we’re provided with visuals that represent each of the story’s words, but not its larger context? And what if the story itself is collaborative and nonlinear—and the images that represent it keep changing?

This site, inspired by the exquisite corpse model of storytelling, is our attempt to find out.

The exquisite corpse model is rooted in the surrealist movement, and we are inspired by how many experiments currently in public domain play with its framework (or lack thereof). Our take on the model—in which we essentially asked a group of collaborators to submit sentences/fragments—was to create a dynamic visualization for the “exquisite” story our writers had crafted. These collective fragments formed a base on which we layered sensory artifacts, from voice-over to tagged visuals, and we were curious as to how far we could take the experience.

Alex Bogusky's FearLess Blog - Did the Advertising Industry Spark the Occupation of Wall Street?

From the Fearless Blog:

"Indirectly it appears the advertising industry has kicked off #occupywallstreet. Not intentionally of course and merely by being the subject of condemnation and opposition of Adbusters magazine.

The earliest signs of the now coast-to-coast protest were seen on June 9th when the anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters registered the domain occupywallstreet.org. One month later, an independent group registered occupywallst.org where the official site was eventually hosted. Adbusters announced plans for a peaceful protest on Wall Street in July and Anonymous, a hacker activist group, encouraged it's members to attend not long after that.

Anonymous was involved in the protests in Tunisia an Egypt. During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Egyptian government web sites, along with the website of the ruling National Democratic Party, were hacked into and taken offline by Anonymous. The sites remained offline until President Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Anonymous also has ties to Wikileaks, further explaining the sighting of the Wikileaks truck at the protest site. Anonymous clearly has skills and connections.

One of the earliest and most consistent complaints from the protest has been the lack of coverage of the protest and the real issues by the mainstream, corporate owned press. It remains to be seen if Anonymous plans to hack any U.S. news organizations, but based on past activities, it seems a real possibility. The protest in general clearly hopes to use citizen journalism to turn the tables on big corporate media.

Corporate media certainly tried to ignore it as long as they could. This quote from a story in Business Insider from a police officer was as dismissive as possible. New York City officer: "If you find the protest, let us know, because we haven't heard a thing about it since we got here." Yet the photos from the same story show huge crowds facing off with police.

Finally, you may be wondering what are those masks are about. Those are Guy Falkes masks and they are a symbol/disguise used by members of Anonymous to protect their identities and brand their activities. Guy Fawkes was part of a plot to overthrow the king of England in the early 1600s and his character was made popular in the comic book V for Vendetta.

We're extremely supportive and sympathetic to the protesters here at The Cottage. They are showing enormous courage in the face of seemingly all powerful institutions. They are being arrested, maced and harassed without the protection of them media. They are mocked and laughed at and toasted with champagne from the high-price balconies above and yet they are remaining peaceful. Allowing us to bear witness to how lost our American values have become.

Adbusters has a point that gets lost too often in their anti-consumerism message and that is that 1% of the population have profited wildly from the last 20 years and the other 99% have seen zero. Special interest money has corrupted our system. That's not sustainable. It's not fair. And it's not the America that 99% of Americans want. If this is a democracy, those numbers should matter.

By Alex Bogusky
Tuesday, October 4, 2011

video & other images on the original site

Apps on tap | The Economist

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Excerpt:

"...Another reason why apps have proved popular is that, unlike websites, they do not need a constant connection to the internet. Instead, they are stored in mobile gadgets’ silicon memories and refreshed when a new connection is available. This also explains why they launch so much faster than software on PCs. “Apps mean that people are no longer going to be satisfied waiting for spinning hard disks on PCs to deliver what they want,” says Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, a consultancy.

There has been speculation that apps may fade when new websites designed to work better on mobile devices appear. But that is unlikely to happen while mobile-internet connectivity remains patchy. Fans also point out that apps are easy to create.

Most, however, are destined for obscurity. Today there are more than 425,000 apps in Apple’s online store and more than 250,000 in Google’s Android Market. Yet in a recent survey of Android-phone users in America, Nielsen, another research firm, discovered that the ten most popular apps accounted for 43% of usage and the top 50 for a whopping 61%. Admittedly, these statistics may be influenced by the pre-loading of apps for services such as Facebook and Google Maps onto many phones. But the results are still telling. Part of the problem is that there is still no reliable search engine for discovering outstanding apps. No doubt there will soon be an app for that too...."

Beyond the PC - Mobile digital gadgets are overshadowing PCs | The Economist

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Excerpt from article by Martin Giles

"...The consumer is king

The rise of tablets and smartphones also reflects a big shift in the world of technology itself. For years many of the most exciting advances in personal computing have come from the armed forces, large research centres or big businesses that focused mainly on corporate customers. Sometimes these breakthroughs found their way to consumers after being modified for mass consumption. The internet, for instance, was inspired by technology first developed by America’s defence establishment.

Over the past ten years or so, however, the consumer market has become a hotbed of innovation in its own right. “The polarity has reversed in the technology industry,” claims Marc Andreessen, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has invested in several consumer companies, including Facebook and Twitter. Now, he says, many exciting developments in information technology (IT) are appearing in the hands of consumers first and only then making their way into other arenas—a trend that tech types refer to as the “consumerisation” of IT.

The transformation may not be quite as dramatic as Mr Andreessen’s remark implies. Armies, universities and other institutions still spend vast sums on research, the fruit of which will continue to nourish personal technology. Moreover, this is not the first time that individuals have taken the lead in using new gadgets: the first PCs were often sneaked into firms by a few geeky employees.

Nevertheless there are good reasons for thinking that the latest round of consumerisation is going to have a far bigger impact than its predecessors. One is that rising incomes have created a vast, global audience of early adopters for gadgets. Around 8m units of the Kinect, a Microsoft device that attaches to the Xbox and lets people control on-screen action with their body movements, were sold within 60 days of its launch in November 2010. No consumer-electronics device has ever sold so fast, according to Guinness World Records. “These people will absorb new technology on a scale that is simply quite stunning,” says Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s head of research and strategy.

The cost of many gadgets is falling fast, giving another fillip to consumption. Smartphones priced at around $100—after a subsidy from telecoms companies, which make money on associated data plans—are starting to appear in America. The cheapest Kindle, an e-reader from Amazon, sells for $79, against $399 for the first version launched in 2007. The cost of digital storage has also fallen dramatically. A gigabyte (GB) of storage, which is roughly enough to hold a two-hour film after compression, cost around $200,000 in 1980; today a disk drive holding a terabyte, or 1,024GB, costs around $100.

The growth of the internet and the rapid spread of fast broadband connectivity have also transformed the landscape. So has the rise of companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon, whose main aim is to delight individuals rather than businesses or governments. Apple, in particular, has been to the fore in the democratisation of IT, creating a host of impressive devices such as the iPhone and the iPad. Much of the credit for its success goes to Steve Jobs, who stood down in August as its chief executive...."

The Magician: The Revolution that Steve Jobs led is only just beginning | via The Economist

WHEN it came to putting on a show, nobody else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could match Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up an “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”. Mr Jobs, who died this week aged 56, spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy-to-use products.

The reaction to his death, with people leaving candles and flowers outside Apple stores and the internet humming with tributes from politicians, is proof that Mr Jobs had become something much more significant than just a clever money-maker. He stood out in three ways—as a technologist, as a corporate leader and as somebody who was able to make people love what had previously been impersonal, functional gadgets. Strangely, it is this last quality that may have the deepest effect on the way people live. The era of personal technology is in many ways just beginning.

Read the full article on The Economist