Chelsea here, returned from representing the Social Game Lab at Unite 2009 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.  For the uninitiated, Unite is as conference for Unity3D dev environment and it was chock full of the the whole spectrum of users from academic to indie all the way up to the major publishing houses.

It was refreshing to interact with such a diverse group of users and the actual Unity developers in an environment where the motto is “share share share” the presentations AND project content for the talks will all be shared online.  People connect on the forums and solve each others problems while sharing the solutions and most of the developers share their contact info and talk to users on a first name basis.

One of the best moments for me was during the “One on One” sessions where I spoke with Aras Pranckevičius , lead rendering engineer for Unity for advice on some procedural graphic effects I had been working on.

The Social Game Lab is working on another release and I’ll put putting all this experience to use.  This picture taken from Unite’s blog includes me!  Can you spot the purple hair?

Widget here!

Just wanted to share what I’ve been doing off hours from the social game lab.

I’m part of a project to make “old and obsolete” mobile devices open-source and useful.  Right now we’ve been putting linux on ipods and making sample playing beatboxes out of them.  Here’s a short demo video taken the night before our first public performance at http://www.3rdward.com/

You can find out more about this project and how to put Linux on your old devices:http://re-ware.org/

State of Play VI Press Release:

The Sixth Annual State of Play conference returns to New York City this summer!

On June 19-20, 2009, New York Law School’s State of Play VI Conference will convene in New York to examine the past, present and future of virtual worlds. In conjunction with the University of Southern California Network Culture Project at the Annenberg School for Communication, and with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the conference will focus on the startling rise of virtual worlds and multiplayer online games, and ask whether these worlds have reached a plateau in their development. At the same time we will question whether we have reached a limit in our understanding of these worlds, and ask whether there are useful research questions still left to pursue.

This is the sixth time we will host the State of Play conference, having previously run successful conferences in New York and Singapore.  As before, this conference will bring together scholars, games developers, industry leaders, government leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, social scientists and policy–makers to set the agenda for the development and study of virtual worlds.

The State of Play series is the conference series that takes the study of these environments seriously, and this year’s conference is no exception.  We’re looking forward to the discussions that will emerge from panels focused on the special challenges faced by public and private institutions in online environments, opportunities and efforts in learning and education facilitated by virtual spaces, how youth-related virtual worlds differ from adult spaces, developments in the ongoing conversation regarding ownership of virtual property, tax, and regulation, and the special concerns of government in relation to terrorism, security, and money-laundering.

Moreover, we are eagerly anticipating the first Graduate Student Symposium at State of Play.  We are supporting around thirty graduate students from all over the globe to come to Tribeca to present and discuss their work, and receive commentary and criticism from the experts and industry leaders whose work has shaped the virtual world studies and entire conference series.  The Graduate Student Symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas between the newer generation coming up in the study of virtual worlds and those who built and studied virtual worlds in their infancy.

Between the accomplished and remarkable speakers scheduled for panel discussions and the number of attendees already registered, State of Play VI is set to be a stand out in the legacy of the State of Play Conference series.

Visit us at: www.nyls.edu/stateofplay

RAWR!

Wriggle 2.0?  We haven’t fully explored the extension of gesture-ability via tentacle attachment.

The Social Games Lab went on a field trip to the Game Developers Conference a few weeks ago and it was a blast!  The group set up a temporary station and conducted over 20 interviews with a range of developers and scholars in attendance.  The enthusiasm and intuitions were amazing and I was honored to meet a lot of inspiring people.

Widget here!

We recently attended the 2009 CHI conference in Boston, MA. In addition to so many great talks, courses and presentations, there were workshops, one of which we participated in on the topic of Whole Body Interaction. At this workshop we met with researchers around the world, some of whom make their own games and others looking for insight on the future applications of movement capture and computer response. You can check out everyone’s area of research here, including our own(.doc). The central activity of the workshop was to break off into groups and devise a game, application, or musical instrument that we would like to see developed. Two groups (independently!) created games based off of input coming from people while they sleep. One connected all players in a networked dream game, and the other was a deep analysis of sleep patterns in order to help families diagnose and perhaps fix their sleep problems.  At the end of the workshop, we created a definition for Whole Body Interaction and raised questions that we felt could be researched further.  This definition and set of questions appeared in the poster area the rest of the conference.

Whole Body Interaction (definition):

The integration of physiology, body motion, cognition (embodied or
otherwise), inferred emotion and social context in interaction research
 and design.

Questions raised:

- We are  always moving: How do we differentiate intended from unintended behaviours?

- How do we take into consideration social, political and cultural issues in WBI?

- When do interaction movements become socially unacceptable?

- How do we integrate the different types of Input/Output systems (camera vision, motion capture etc.)?

- How do we investigate the mapping of captured data to system action (and reaction)?

- We need more robust devices with better calibration and registration

- How do we represent data back to users - esp. in multi-user settings?

Honorary Social Game Lab member Jen Ash sent us a link to video of a new wii-platform game that is controller free… sort of. You put your wiimote on a tabletop and tap that surface to jiggle the controller–check it out!

Social Game Lab is proud that NYU has taken this important step toward being a leader in game design education. Lab Director Katherine Isbister is on the Center advisory board.

Katherine recently gave a talk at the Montreal International Game Summit–an overview of the latest techniques in usability and user experience research for games. The conference site has the slides available for download.

The Gaming Lounge Lab will be a comfortable environment for social gaming, including:

There will be

• 42′ Plasma TV
• Comfy Couch
• Nintendo Wii and games