 |
場 (ba)Collaborative Places
| |
I stumbled on this nice interview with Matthew McGinity about the T-visionarium and other iCinema applications. Note to self: consider 10M diameter by 4M height for the panorama cylinders in the prototype CVE.
Here’s a link to the video – not embedded because ZDnet’s embed code is dodgy.
This day I received enrollment confirmation 
*CONFIRMATION OF CANDIDATURE *
We would like to confirm that the University Graduate School (UGS) has received your signed letter and enrolment form, accepting the offer of a place in a Higher Degree by Research for Autumn 2008. UGS has now officially enrolled you into your degree program and your Expected Work Submission date is 31 December 2011.
Thanks to my supervisors Yusuf Pisan and Ernest Edmonds; to UTS for pin-code access to the ol’ Hallowed Halls; to the Creativity and Cognition Studios for a place to sit, inspiring colleagues and the coffee machine; to the kindly and far-sighted Commonwealth of Australia and the Australian CRC for Interaction Design for the scholarships; to the most excellent lecturers I had for my Honours year* and of course to Shan for proofreading all my papers, collaborating on my final Interactive Arts project, and pumpkin soup.
* Everyone doing IT or multimedia at UTS should take Toni Robertson’s wonderful class on HCI. If you’re at all interested in media theory, then Meredith Jones’ fascinating Digital Media in Social Context is a perfect excuse to read a swathe of mind-blowing works.
I was pleased with the opportunity to learn both Java and object oriented design in one semester in Robert Rist’s enjoyable, fast and rigorous Programming Fundamentals. Much easier than picking it up myself, no matter how nice the O’Reilly books are.
My co-supervisor Ernest Edmonds took us for Interactive Arts – quite lovely to have this one available to IT students. Thanks to my group and especially Doreen Ee for a satisfying final project, which we’re now carrying on to a finished work worthy of exhibition in beta_space.
Finally, the two “how to do research” subjects (IT Research Methods and IT Research Preparation; I count myself very fortunate to have had the guidance of Barry Jay and Teresa Dovey as I try to get my head around what that means.
OK, that was a lot of thanks, but at least I was only making a blog post, not a speech
I’m at IE 2007 in Melbourne, and so are Damski and Yusuf and Christy Dena and a number of other people. I have so far enjoyed listening to Troy Innocent, who appears to be making something with resonances of Jaron Lanier’s post-symbolic communication and Leibniz’s Universal Character. And I’ve been very happy to both listen to and converse with Bruce Joy from Vastpark, who is several kinds of clever. And just this minute I’ve been regaled by Christian McCrea and am enjoying a ramble by Darshana Jayemanne on the Nonsense of the Aura. Lots of goodness here
My Honours Research Report is here (9.5 MB PDF). Tomorrow I’ll be demoing the VR model of Utzon’s studio in Hallebæk born from a practice-based enquiry into the nature of collaborative place, one of the studies described in the report. So now, to bed 
Here are the slides from my presentation today, in HTML (with nice navigation buttons but maybe too big for some screens), and in Flash (click to go forwards, no way to go back, but automatically fits your screen).
If you’d like to print it out, here is the low-res (1.6 MB) PDF, or the high-res (10.3 MB) PDF (40 slides on 5 pages).
Just arrived at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct for the VSMM conference, the program committee of which has kindly consented to display my poster about the design of collaborative place. I bumped into the most excellent and prolific Eric Champion on the airtrain, so I’m in good company
My first task on arrival was to whack up the poster, and the second was to get online through QUT’s wifi. This turned out to be an absurd and tortuous process involving the generation of a unique password for me, the installation of a VPN client, a web gateway, two clickthrough legal agreements that I didn’t read, a password change and a re-login. Thank Drokk I’m not on Windows or it would have required a reboot as well. The lovely people at the registration desk made me my initial login and presented me with instructions – VSMM made it as painless as possible, it’s QUT that is the villain of this piece. This is after all the Creative Industries Precinct, the denizens of which are supposed to be inventing the cyberspace of the future right here and now. How they are to do it with one foot in a bucket of concrete baffles me.
I’ve been reading about various real collaborative places lately, in an attempt to discover what makes them work, and what elements of those can be applied to CVEs. The studios of the Dada movement at the turn of the last century must have been something; I’ve found a few images but not enough to do much with yet. However there’s a fabulous archive of imagery at the NSW State Library covering Jørn Utzon’s studio in Hellebæk, where his small team brought the Sydney Opera House into being. Enough in fact that I’ve been able to reconstruct scenes from the studio. IE2007 is coming up, so I’ve proposed to show the virtual reconstruction of the studio as a demo there (4.6MB PDF).
Update: the demo has been accepted – here is the revised edition for publication (3.7MB PDF).
Space, Place and Ba – my poster submission to VSMM2007.
I’m finally happy enough with my first literature review to call it done – so, here it is. I’m new to this kind of writing and to the field, so I’ll leave the comments thread open on this post; any feedback is good.
Updating – I’ve extended my review with a section on future research, incorporating some wider reading from areas of study that I think have been insufficiently applied to the design of place in CVEs.
Twitter Ba links