Cross-Media + Transmedia Entertainment

Yes, that is right. Earlier this year I co-unorganised the first BarCampSydney (at the same time many BarCamps were held in Australia). I had a great time the first time around, as you can see from my write-up of the event. Now, due to popular demand (!) BarCampSydney is back! You can come along and present or provoke conversation about anything. Be warned if you do present that you will have active participation from the crowd. In fact, it is a great way to have intelligent conversation about lots of things.

Saturday 25th August
Building 10, University of Technology, Sydney (Jones St entrance)
9am-5.30pm

Signup at the wiki: http://barcamp.org/BarCampSydney2

Hope to see you there!

The DIMEA 2007: Second International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts will be held on the 19th – 21st September 2007 in Perth, Western Australia. DIMEA 2007 is organised jointly by Murdoch University and ACM SIG CHI (Singapore Chapter).

DIMEA 2007 is a cross-disciplinary conference that will bring together researchers from the areas related to digital interactive media in entertainment and arts. The conference will accept different submission types that present new scientific ideas, improvements to existing techniques or provide a new way of examining, designing and using digital interactive media. Suggested topics for the conference include, but are not limited to:

Entertainment Art and Technology
New Media Emerging Technologies
Code Art
Digital Visual Media
Moving Media
Culture of New Media
Interactive Stories

Check out: www.dimea.org

The next PerGames conference will be held in Salzburg, Austria, on the 11-12th June.  

The PerGames series of international symposia addresses the design and technical issues of bringing computer entertainment back to the real world with pervasive games.

At the conference, IperG, the pervasive gaming design research group, are also running a series of tutorials:

PIMP – A SENSOR-ACTUATOR PLATFORM FOR PERVASIVE GAMES – Karl-Petter Åkesson, Olov Ståhl
BUSINESS OF PERVASIVE GAMES – Mattias Svahn
GAMEPLAY DESIGN PATTERNS IN PERVASIVE GAMES – Staffan Björk, Jussi Holopainen
AUGMENTED REALITY IN PERVASIVE GAMES – Irma Lindt
HANDHELD AUGMENTED REALITY – Daniel Wagner
HYBRID USER INTERFACE DEVELOPMENT – Carsten Magerkurth
ETHICS OF PERVASIVE GAMING – Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, Annika Waern

Wish I could go! 

Check out: www.pergames.de

Whew! What a title. AXMEDIS looks interesting. The conference is being held on the 28-30th November at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain.

In the Internet as well as in the digital era, cross-media production and distribution represent key developments and innovations that are fostered by emergent technologies to ensure better value for money while optimising productivity and market coverage. AXMEDIS2007 aims to explore all subjects and topics related to cross-media and digital-media content production, processing, management, standards, representation, sharing, protection and rights management interoperability, to address the latest developments and future trends of the technologies and their applications, its impact and exploitation. We are particularly interested in exchanging concepts, requirements, prototypes, research ideas, and findings which could contribute to academic research or could be beneficial to business and industrial communities.

Areas they cite that are of interest to me:

• * Formats and models for multi-channel content distribution and interoperability
• * Web services for content distribution
• * Semantic Web for multimedia production and distribution
• * Collaborative models and tools
• * Context Awareness
• * Synchronisation technologies and solutions
• * Systems and approaches for content production/distribution on demand
• * Content adaptation
• * Accessibility and multimodal user interfaces
• * Novel applications and case-studies of relevant technologies

The CFP has been extended to the 27th April.

Thankyou Monique for the heads up.

I missed the CFP for this conference but for those interested here is some info:

Nordic Society for Interarts Studies is pleased to announce its eighth conference, to be held at Vaxjo University, Sweden, 25-28 October 2007.

What is intermediality? To answer this question, one must first ask: What is a medium, and where do we find the gaps that intermediality bridges? In a similar way, the questions What is interartiality? and What is multimodality? require that the supposedly crossed borders be described before one can proceed to the “inter” and “multi.” And how are the notions intermediality, interartiality and multimodality actually related? Are they simply varying words, used by scholars from different disciplines, but basically denoting the same phenomenon? Or are there substantial differences that justify different labels for dissimilar conceptions?

Conference website: www.kult.lu.se/kul/Norsis/INDEX.asp

English info here: http://www.bek.no/Members/lossius/lostblog/838

Thankyou Sal for the heads up on this great event. The Human-Computer Interaction Design Department at School of Infomatics, Indiana University, are calling for workshop participants. The workshop ‘Transmedial Interactions and Digital Games’ is held in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (http://www.ace2007.org/ ) on June 12th in Salzburg, Austria.

[Workshop Aims & Goals]

As virtual worlds and games grow in importance, present limitations in access to them limits their ability to achieve their potential. In persistent online worlds, peer actions and event changes have cumulative effects that are consequential to individuals, whether or not they are available, just as in real life.  But unlike real life, where we have plenty of tools to help us juggle multiple responsibilities, access into virtual worlds today occurs through a single access point; active participation requires a significant stationary commitment. Even the most dedicated users have difficulty keeping up with the dynamic information. To remain active and included, users need better ways to communicate, cooperate, and coordinate. Transmedial access, in which players access to a game and their characters/data is made possible across different devices, offers a promising solution to this problem. It also inaugurates a new category of interaction design: transmedial interaction.

This workshop explores the state of the art of transmedial interaction in games, which today unfortunately is often at most mere afterthought. It provides a participatory environment in which attendees can chart new paths forward, from developing viable business models and understanding the technical infrastructure to developing critical vocabularies and evaluative frameworks.

The workshop is intended for a broad audience, which will collaboratively achieve the following:

* Review current state-of-the-art examples of transmedia interactions in entertainment computing, especially video games

* Survey the technical infrastructure needed for transmedia interactions in digital games (e.g., feedback, adaptivity, etc.)

* Understand how the strength and weakness of different media channels shape player experiences during transmedia interactions

* Construct design guidelines for transmedial interactions and determine the components needed for successful and seamless transmedial interaction design

* Consider evaluation criteria for transmedial interactions
 
[Submission]

We encourage participation from diverse academic disciplines including design, HCI, computer science,, media and game studies, strategic communications, and psychology, as well as industry experts and practitioners, for a total of 15-20 people. Specifically, this workshop will create a synergy among the following target audiences:

* Online and mobile game designers interested in developing appropriate mechanisms to overcome the difficulty of designing for multiple media channels and cross-media experiences

* Interaction designers and researchers interested in human-human and human-machine interactions across devices, including mobile and ubiquitous computing

* Gaming industry pioneers interested in the exploration of novel ways to extend and integrate different media channels capacities to create cross-device and cross-network experiences for their target customers

* Entertainment computing marketers interested in identifying key challenges and solutions in promoting transmedial experiences

Sounds fabulous: http://hcid.informatics.indiana.edu/ace2007/

Max Giovagnoli – a long-time cyberspace and cross-media colleague and Head of Cross-Media.it, Link Campus, University of Malta Rome — is running the Cross-Media event in Italy. This is Max’s second cross-media event. It will be held in rome on the 24th of March and it looks like he has flown another colleague, Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon, over to present.

I wish you all the best with the event Max. 

Check out: http://www.cross-media.it/

I’m on the Conference Management Committee of this wonderful event. I hope to see alot of you there…

The Fourth Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, 2007

3-5 December 2007
Storey Hall, RMIT University
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.ie.rmit.edu.au/

SUBMISSION DEADLINES:
*Proposals for panels and abstract for individual papers: 30th May 2007

Full Papers (max 8 pages): 15th June 2007

Short papers (max 3 pages): 15th June 2007

[Both full papers and short papers will be refereed by an international program committee]

Introduction
The Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, in its fourth year, is a cross-disciplinary conference that brings together researchers from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, media studies, drama, HCI, psychology, interactive media, cultural studies, graphics, audio, as well as researchers from other disciplines working on new game specific technologies or providing critical analysis of games and interactive environments.

In an epoch marked by convergence, cross-platform media and the rise of social software/ networks, how are the digital industries – most especially gaming – being transformed? What types of new genres and modes of interactivity are evolving? And how are these social technologies informed by cultural context? The 2007 Interactive Entertainment conference considers the difference between convergence as rhetoric and practice, imaginary and reality.

The conference will accept innovative submission types that present new scientific ideas, improvements to existing techniques or provide new ways of examining, designing and using computer games. Accepted papers will be blind-peer refereed.

Topics of interest
The papers and presentations should include original and unpublished contributions. Suggested research topics include but are not limited to:
* Artificial Intelligence
* Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality
* Art, Design and New Media
* Convergence and cross-platform media
* E-learning and the roles of games in pedagogy
* Technology, co-presence and place
* Pervasive (location aware) mobile technologies  
* Policy and legislative responses to mobile and locative media
* Cultural and Media Studies on Computer Games
* Education, Training, and Edutainment Technologies
* Graphics/Animation Techniques
* Interactive Digital Storytelling
* Mobile Media
* The rise of social software and networking (technical and social)
* Sound and Music

*Abstracts should be between 300- 500 words. Abstracts and full papers should be emailed to: ie2007-submission@ieconference.org
General inquiries should be forwarded to: ie2007@ieconference.org

The 2007 IE conference co-chairs are: Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University) and Esther Milne (Swinburne University of Technology) Program committee chair: Yusuf Pisan (University of Technology, Sydney)

Tracey Swedlow, the lady behind the ultra informative [itvt] is holding an industry conference, TV of Tomorrow Show. I have mentioned this before, but thought a reminder post was due since it is being held on March 13-14th in San Francisco, California. The event will include the announcement of the winners of the inaugural Awards for Corporate Achievement in Interactive and Multiplatform Television. I am interested to see who receives an award, hopefully it will be a work that is truly innovative and is quality. Interesting sessions include: Read the rest of this entry »

TransISTor is a training initiative organised by CIANT – International Centre for Art and New Technologies in cooperation with FAMU – Film and TV Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague supported by the MEDIA Training Programme of the European Union.

TransISTor focuses on computer games technologies while opening up their creative potential for non-gaming storytelling domains including art, cinema, TV, educational applications and cross-media productions.

Session 1: Game modifications and machinima films

From combination of comics and video games to films created with game engines. This session will provide an overview of tools and techniques used for customizing and expanding computer games. We will examine issues of game design and game play in the context of cross media production. The goal is to explore the basics of how to create and modify game levels. In the intensive 4-day workshop your will create your first machinima film.

Session 2: Motion capture and stereoscopy for games and film

During the intensive 4-day workshop you will investigate different motion capture techniques and carry out a collaborative project. Experienced tutors will explain the different motion capture systems, the process of setting sensors, recording sessions and the computer data post-processing. The goal is to experience the latest technologies, to integrate them and to create your own stereoscopic film with special effects.

Session 3: Serious games, web 2.0 and future cinema

This session is focused on the alternative forms of games and web 2.0 applications that are used for entertainment as well as for non-entertainment purposes such as art, edutainment, marketing, simulations, management and public policy. We will look closer at how these technologies are used for non-gaming events and processes, including simulations of business and military operations, psychotherapy or medicine. In the workshop you will create your own serious game scenario and experiment with web 2.0 applications, e.g. Google map mashups in art, business and cinema.

Check it out: http://transistor.ciant.cz