#interactivenarratives

Warsinsky, S., Schmidt-Kraepelin, M., Rank, S., Thiebes, S., and Sunyaev, A. (2021) 'Conceptual ambiguity surrounding gamification and serious games in health care: literature review and development of game-based intervention reporting guidelines (GAMING)', Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(9), p. e30390.

This paper focuses on the difference between gamification and serious games in healthcare and the conceptual confusion in the current literature. Thus, the introduction of the set of GAMING guidelines in the framework of the research allows for clarifying the ambiguous notion of game-based interventions. For this reason, it is highly detailed and encyclopedic in its literature review and a valuable source of expert evaluations of different organizations which makes the book the most authoritative guide on the subject of accurate reporting. This study contributes to the current literature as a conceptual work, providing much-needed definition to help scholars in future examination of health-related game interventions as employed in fields like education and virtual areas through serious games and gamification.

Zaky, Y.A.M. and Al Mulhim, E.N. (2024) 'Teacher Education: Design Thinking Approach in Makerspaces to Produce Quality Educational Video Games with a Visual Identity and Improve Design Thinking Skills', Education Sciences, 14(7), p. 718.

This study aims at looking at design thinking as a process in developing video games for learning. This version is retained as it aims to encourage the formation of teamwork and conceptually ORIGINAL group pictures for pre-service teacher education while keeping the above-mentioned guidelines to an ISA graphic design. Its innovative approach is underpinned by the integration of maker spaces and the so-called design thinking elements (such as empathy and ideation). This is an interesting text since it combines art, education, and design thinking with important lessons to be learned about creativity. It also wants to ‘emphasize collaboration’ which directly intersects my goals of exploring game design and animation from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Wu, M., Lee, J.S., and Steinkuehler, C. (2021) 'Understanding tilt in esports: A study on young League of Legends players', in Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. May, pp. 1-9.

This paper fills this gap by offering an analysis of the causes and effects of the phenomenon of ‘tilt’ in gaming coupled with a look at how it can be affected. The research findings also show that the tilted records originate mostly from teammates while the participants demonstrate predominantly negative self-directed responses. Incredibly, the research shows that those who assume that tilt can be modified have a higher likelihood of applying positive coping that enhances the emotional capital. This is a game psychology and esports sociology research aimed at helping to enhance game experiences and foster healthier gaming cultures. This study is particularly useful as it informs aspects of the competitiveness psychology in the context of gaming which is serially relevant when developing encouraging and friendly gaming communities. That is closely related to my research focus – the relationship between players and designed environments, including games and esports.

Li, Z. (2024) 'Virtuality and Reality: Research on VR Technology Film Production', Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 8(7).

This paper looks at how the invention of VR has cultured interactivity and some of the aspects of 360-degree cinematography into the conventional filming process.s. It raises how VR disrupts the cinematic conventions focusing on what the viewers see instead of presenting a story that only moves in a certain direction. This paper interlinks components from theatre, amusement parks, and video game design to provide a multi-faceted approach to enriching cinematic VR. The author also underscores specific scenes shot in long takes that even theatre actors can help enhance through improvised theatrical performances and audience interaction. This study offers practical solutions as to how to overcome certain issues like controlling multiple 360-degree cameras and integrating subplots within set designs for VR filmmakers. Its concept of narrative comes close to my desire to combine the uses of technology and the conventional technique of art to bring out the best narrative masterpieces.

Zhou, T., Xu, T., Zhang, D., Jiao, Y., Xu, P., He, Y., Xu, L., and Yu, J. (2024) 'Sophia-in-Audition: Virtual Production with a Robot Performer', in Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia. October, pp. 11184-11193.

This study presents the new approach of Sophia-in-Audition, a virtual production system utilizing humanoid robotic technology in enhanced UltraStage architecture. This setup makes use of a controllable light dome and multi-camera systems for improving performance capture dynamics. These are facial motion transfer and robotic motion replication to overcome problems such as the uncanny valley in virtual acting. The work suggests human-like affective responses as well as her capacity to accurately replicate scenes from famous films and engage with human actors, pointing to the possibility of future assignments of humanoid robots in film. Through combining robotics, dynamic lighting, and multi-camera solutions, this investigation advances the concept of virtual production. Its emphasis on tech and ensemble work resonates well with my topic, which is how new media technologies transform strategies of storytelling and stagings in film.

Jiang, X., Rao, A., Wang, J., Lin, D., and Dai, B. (2024) 'Cinematic Behavior Transfer via NeRF-based Differentiable Filming', in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. pp. 6723-6732.

This research on reverse filming behavior and cinematic shot transfers through 3D engine workflow are presented in this work for the first time. The study refines meta tracks like SLAM and also uses algorithms such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to control rendering and optimal the camera trajectories. This research enables the connection between the ‘how’ of technical integration and the ‘what’ of artistic implementation, making it easy to transfer shots from a 2D video to a 3D environment. The use of 3D operations shows that technology can enhance narratives, further, original visions can be achieved successfully. Through the elements of rendering and shot composition this study is particularly useful in virtual production. It leads to investigating how innovations in technology can result in the offering of potent tools by directors and owners of motion picture production to come up with engaging stories on screen, and at the same time, enable them to exercise exclusive control.

Bodini, A., Manohar, A., Colecchia, F., Harrison, D. and Garaj, V. (2024) ‘Envisioning the future of virtual production in filmmaking: A remote co-design study’, Multimedia Tools and Applications, 83(7), pp. 19015-19039.

This research is focused on cooperation approaches applied to virtual production aided by immersive perspectives. This way, the study fosters the collectiveness of ideas in practical workshops with audiovisual professionals and develops creative solutions for filmmaking. The level of detail given to the forms and processes of interdisciplinary cooperation makes it a highly useful text for investigating the work of creative and technical positions. It is related to me because it informs me about the successes of combined creativity in the sphere of audiovisual, thanks to which I understand the value of cooperation in implementing large-scale virtual production.

Widjono, R.A. (2020, December) ‘Analysis of user experience in virtual art exhibition during pandemic’, in International Conference of Innovation in Media and Visual Design (IMDES 2020), pp. 93-99. Atlantis Press.

This paper examines virtual galleries as one of the shifted methods of presenting art pieces in the context of COVID-19. This paper discusses artists, exhibitors, and audiences to demonstrate that virtual exhibitions support the art world where physical constraints prevail. It goes into fan and professional reception and how a show can incorporate more mainstream appeal along with satisfying artistic interest. It also proves useful for the overall areas of art, education, and technology since it provides specific ideas about creating digital exhibitions. It aligns with my passion for using technology to enhance both accessibility and innovation in creative industries.

Kavakli, M. and Cremona, C. (2022, March) ‘The virtual production studio concept–an emerging game changer in filmmaking’, in 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pp. 29-37. IEEE.

This paper aims to analyze the complete changes of Virtual Production Studios (VPS) in the current movie-making techniques. This thesis examines how new display technologies, such as LED walls, virtual reality, and game engines, lead to a qualitative change in production processes. Global perspectives of industrialization, partnerships, and globalization are also discussed in response to the ever-evolving relationship between tech and art. Thus, the paper through the presentation of two examples provides real-life case examples of how the VPS systems are redefining the methodology of shooting, image generation, and post-shooting exercise in the live-action filming industry. This work is invaluable to my interests as it turns light on industry, academic cooperation, and shared resources collaborations. It deepens my appreciation of best practices in Virtual Production Services by shedding light on concrete imaginative and unique/VPS within entertainment industries, which means changing the ways of creating a story and visuals in the future.

Remedios, D.J., Mathew, D., and Schleser, M. (2023) 'A Convergence of Theatre, Cinema, Amusement Park, and Video Game Design to Explore Parallel Interactive Narratives in Cinematic Virtual Reality', Interactive Film & Media Journal, 3(2).

The creation, dissemination, and consumption of 21st-century literature have all been significantly impacted by digital technology. Here's a clear analysis of its importance:

New Storytelling Formats: Creative storytelling techniques are made possible by digital tools. Imagine interactive stories or e-books that include text and other multimedia components, such as audio and video. Creative possibilities hitherto impossible by traditional print are now possible thanks to technology.

2. Greater Accessibility and Reach: Authors can more easily share their work with a worldwide audience by using online platforms. Authors can connect with audiences directly through social media and self-publishing, bypassing established publishing channels.

3. Enhanced Engagement: Readers can now interact with books in new ways thanks to digital technology. Social media and online forums, for instance, enable readers to interact with others and have conversations about their favorite books, which enhances the reading experience.

4. Data-Driven Insights: To get insight into reader patterns and preferences, authors and publishers can leverage data from digital platforms. This aids in telling tales that audiences find more relatable or in successfully adjusting marketing tactics.

5. Collaboration and Experimentation: Thanks to digital platforms, writers may readily cooperate with one another and try out various formats. This could be contributing to a blog, collaborating on group projects online, or incorporating different media into their work.

To put it briefly, digital technology is revolutionizing literature by providing new avenues for story telling, expanding readership, and enhancing the dynamic and inclusive nature of the writing and sharing processes.

Feeling immersed in a great narrative is still a luxury reserved for books, movies and television shows. Rarely does it happen on the internet.

Yes, you can be immersed in being on the internet as a whole, but it's almost never the case when it comes to a single narrative on the internet.

Why is that? It's not that the internet is new. It's been around for 15-20 years. It's not that interactive storytelling is new either. The gaming industry is based almost entirely on that.

In other words, we have both a matured technology and a matured storytelling craft. What's holding us back? Why haven't we taken full advantage of the internet as a media platform?

Life on the edges Because our mindset is still based on the principle of centralisation. Of telling stories from one place instead of from a million places. Of only allowing media institutions to be the bearer of news instead of ordinary people.

The entire premise of the internet is decentralisation and allowing things to arise at the edges of the network. A place where people meet because they share the same interest but are otherwise disconnected from eachother.

Twitter leads Twitter is a great example of it. It gathers people with similar interests across the globe because all these people feel a need to share their point of view with others, and all of a sudden that group of people becomes a decentralised medium in its own right. A very powerful medium with the ability to change people's opinions.

But Twitter is just one platform out there, and it's not really suited for storytelling as such. After nearly 20 years of development you would think there would be platforms that could link text, photos, sound and video together as great narratives. But there isn't.

Blind Spot is coming Not yet anyway. Blind Spot is aiming to fill that space and be that platform, and we are working hard on it. We want to be the place where people are allowed to create their own personal media reality and inspire likeminded people with it.

During my adult life I’ve made an almost frictionless journey away from reading books, taking notes with pen and paper, withdrawing cash from the bank and dropping letters in the mailbox.

Today I hardly ever write with a pen, read printed books or for that matter use any type of paper. I’ve replaced all the atoms in my daily life with digital zeroes and ones. It’s extremely mobile, lightweight, flexible and uncluttered. But like most any new technology it also has it’s flaws and downsides.

By now we have several interesting studies, showing that touching and feeling things simply is key for our ability to remember and to learn. The average person will remember almost twice as much of what they read in a printed book compared to an ebook.

The human brain is fascinating, and as it turns out the turning of pages and touching of paper makes us remember better than reading through words on a screen. It’s the same with most any situation where physical objects come into play. We learn better if we take notes during a lecture, we can grasp a process better if we explain it with lego’s and we manage our money better if we have actual bills and coins.

However a world without digital media would not be optimal either, to say the least. Returning to the world of paper and ink is just not an feasible road forward in human evolution. Luckily there is a third way to live and even though most of us don’t realise it, we are marching towards it in rapid pace.

It has names like “the tactile web” and “the internet of things” and it’s a world where everything digital can be touched and felt, and everything physical can be manipulated as digital code. It’s a not so distant future where digital and physical work together so naturally that we hardly notice.

A lot of the technology is already here, it’s just not refined and matured yet. There are apps that enable you to create “augmented reality” by pointing your smartphone at physical objects like buildings, to get information like who is living in that building. You can use a pen like the Livescribe to “translate” what you write on paper into digital text, and products like Nintendo Vii and Leap Motion will let you control apps and games using hand gestures and body moves.

However that technology is going to get a lot more advanced on the end only the engineers see, and a lot more simple and convenient on the end you see as a user. In the future every inch of the walls around you will be lined with tiny sensors and pixels, allowing you to watch media and information most anywhere there is a surface, and without the tight boundaries of a screen edge. The same technology will be embedded in paper, so books can appear with moving images and live content, like the current ebooks, but with tactile pages you can touch and flip.

You will be able to pass things between devices just like you grab a physical object, so your favourite photo can be tossed to the friend next to you, or a movie can be pushed to the wall in front of you, and devices can connect and work together or control each other, and communicate in ways that adapt to you as you move through your world.

For too long man has been forced to adapt to machines and develop unnatural habits and behaviors that eventually grind us down and destroy us.

But this is a paradigm of the past. With the mobile revolution we have the chance of making machines adapt to humans and how we naturally use our mind and body.

For us this means finding inspiration in physical life and converting it to something digital. Quite simply because physical life is playful by nature if you allow it to be, and we don't see why digital life shouldn't be playful too.

Most of all it means creating narratives. Telling each other stories is how we evolve, get inspired and share our inspiration with the world. Without narratives each of us would be an island of emotional dust with no vision for the future.

To show what we mean, we made this little clay animation, which you will also find on our website.

Enjoy it, and whatever you do - keep it playful!

The next big thing in consumer technology is most likely not one thing. It’s a lot of things at once, and that’s part of the dynamics of the world we live in at the moment. It’s fragmented, and it’s going to continue to get even more fragmented. Whatever next big thing out there has to deal with that in some clever way.

Looking at the consumer tech world at the moment it’s lead by great tools that allow spontaneous action. For instance camera apps on smart phones. Sports tracker apps to help us figure out where we have been. And of course the social media to express our pictures, hiking results and thoughts top of mind.

All natural

At BLIND SPOT we believe in being as natural as possible to develop as good as possible. It’s a simple question of looking at what we do naturally as human beings and transferring the core principle of that into the digital world. At least that’s our way of serving people - and not machines.

So what would be the most natural thing to do in order to find your interactive way in this fragmented media world? Well, first of all you have to be able to find the media files you are interested in. Tags and a search engine come in handy there. Then you want to find other people interested in the same subject. They might have a take on it that inspires you. Social media guides you here.

Finally you want to have a simple way of organising and linking the media files you like the most and allowing others to be inspired by them. Preferably people you already know are interested in the subject. Some kind of interactive player would make sense in that aspect.

Linear thinking retires

In fact, we think the next big thing in consumer technology is going to be interactive something in all kinds of areas. The linear mindset is going into retirement at the moment, and non-linearity is becoming the natural order of things. We will only see more interactive products in the years to come - including interactive media.

If there is anything that is all about communicating in non-linear fashion it’s interactive narratives. Your experience of them will be entirely different from mine since we choose different paths through the narrative. It allows us to have something to talk about afterwards. Something to connect on. And, it’s both a very natural way to express ourselves and to absorb whatever is useful to us.

With the news of Panasonic launching a high quality camera you wear on your ear and don’t need a helmet for, the market for wearable media technologies becomes just a tad more interesting.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/panasonic-launches-hx-a500-wearable-4k-camcorder/#!BjQ9d

It’s yet another example of how the going technological trend is machines adapting to humans instead of the other way around, and for the interactive storyteller it’s great news. Simply because the media capture becomes that more natural and integrated with for instance an interview situation, a sports event or even dodging bullets as a war correspondent.

The greatest thing, though, is that you use your regular devices to control the capture device. In the Panasonic example it’s your phone. It gives you a quick work flow with your other apps and opens the door for publishing on social media, Vimeo or Youtube in a snap.

Serious trend

As an interactive storyteller this is a trend we should take very seriously. Interactive storytelling is still in its cradle, and no one has yet claimed the big consumer platform on the market. But it would be a natural next big thing in the publishing industry, and why not with interactive wearables as the driver?

If wearable technologies are the next big thing in media capture, then surely interactive media has to embrace them to develop its way of storytelling. Not that it would be that much different. Linking together the four different media types is pretty simple in itself. The question is what kind of content is on the media files, and with wearable capture devices that content is going to change quite a lot.

Let’s say you are doing a video capture of a martial art training session with a wearable camera, and you combine that with a pulse measurer that records the sound of your heart beat. You would get a really intense and interesting capture of how you see everything as the punches are thrown at you, how you react emotionally through the heart beat, and the general sound scenario of the situation.

Since all the captures are controlled from your iPhone you quickly edit your material, add a couple of short texts of what you were thinking during the training sessions, and link all the pieces together. You have now created an interactive narrative of your experience during the training session and what it did to you.

Personal capture

To me that’s a lot more interesting to watch than the traditional reportage from a TV crew taking a few shots of you training, doing a small interview with your sweaty face afterwards and trying to wrap it up with an entertaining remark by talking to the camera. I have seen that too many times, and it has become a cliché to such a degree that I ca barely watch.

No, I want to experience your experience through you! I want you and you alone to be the storyteller. Not with you talking to the camera, since that’s really boring, but with you actually capturing what’s going on around you and inside you in whatever situation you find interesting. That’s what I learn from as a human being. That’s what inspires me to try something similar myself. That’s what moves me to a different place.

Playfulness is a serious matter. If you are too serious about things they become dull and boring. They just dont resonate very well. Seriousness needs a boost of playfulness to come alive. It loosens everything up and makes it easier to see things in a different perspective.

With playfulness in your heart you become an optimist. You see opportunities instead of limitations. You begin to dance instead of standing still. You enter a path of discovery and exploration. You sprout with ideas, and start to express yourself in funny ways that inspire others and make them laugh.

The mobile revolution has made it easier than ever. With just a single gadget we can play around and express ourselves in a myriad of ways. Some more playful than others, of course, but that’s part of game. The point is we have the option to do it our way. Playful or not.

It’s natural Chances are it will be playful one way or the other. We are all born with playfulness as the main driver for our personal development. From the first discovery of our own hands to climbing in trees and jumping over waves at the beach it’s all about playfulness. Without it we are nothing.

We use playfulness to discover who we are and express it so that others may see it, hear it, smell it, taste it or feel it. They get either attracted to it or run away screaming, and that is how we meet our fellow human beings and build ties to each other.

Basically, playfulness is key to life and human development. It gives creativity a musical dimension, which is much more nuanced and innovative than creating out of bare necessity. Life is more than just surviving - it’s living with a feeling of fulfillment - and playfulness is the master ingredient for that.

Is there an app for that?