Basic Digital Cinematography Concepts IEEE Multimedia, vol. 5 no. 2, April-June 1998, pg 91. 1998-04-00 00:00:00
Davenport G

A review of "Digital Cinematography" by Ben de Leeuw (AP Professional, 1998, 265 pages, ISBN 0-12-208875-1); Includes CD-ROM.

ZZZZ 6.199 Advanced Undergraduate Project report 1996-05-24 00:00:00
ZZZZ

\"Just Plain Better\" and Radically New: Focus on the Aaton LTR BFVF Visions, vol. 13 no. 1, Spring 1989, pp. 4-5. 1989-00-00 00:00:00
Davenport G

I first used an Aaton LTR in 1982 and have subsequently been involved in a variety of film projects using this camera...

Who Controls Intellectual Property? MIT Faculty Newsletter - February, 1990 - pg. 15. 2003-00-00 00:00:00
Davenport G

At an institution such as MIT, where learning and research are inextricably intertwined and where professional recognition is requisite to academic survival, developing a framework for issues concerning intellectual property is a Rubicon awaiting most members of the junior faculty. Designation of authorship is probably the most common port of embarkation. A publication, proposal, presentation, or patent application may launch your raft. Incentives, prior art, control over distribution means, and sponsor interests are pockets of white water, likely to be traversed between shore and shore...

Distributed Responsive Stories on Ad-Hoc Network Platforms 0000-00-00 00:00:00
Doyle L; Davenport G; Nisi V; O\'Mahony D

Ad-Hoc networks can be exploited in many application areas. One such exciting area is that of distributed responsive storytelling. In such systems the story evolves depending on how the audience interacts with the story and the choices the audience makes. This paper describes how an ad-hoc network deployed in public space is used for these types of stories. The ad-hoc platform does two things. It brings the story alive by distributing it in the real world around the audience rather than confining the story to the book, the CD, or the TV. And more importantly the inherent features of the ad-hoc networks both on the application and underlying technology sides. Novel applications such as this can only further that evolution.

ConTour -- Boston: Renewed Vistas Advertising Sheet 1995-05-00 00:00:00
Davenport G; Murtaugh M

ConTour is an example of a "software editor," a system that dynamically determines the next material to display based on the viewer's interrests and those materials shown in the past...

Jerome B. Wiesner: A Random Walk through the Twentieth Century Advertising Sheet 1996-11-00 00:00:00
Davenport G

"Jerome B. Wiesner: A Random Walk through the Twentieth Century" is a storytelling system implemented on the World Wide Web. The system guides the viewer through a collection of video clips and text documents; through their interaction, the viewer constructs a contextual understanding of Jerry Wiesner and events of the Twentieth Century.

The interfacce seeks to constantly situate a particular story or document in the context of the rest. As opposed to a conventional chronological telling of history, the system suggests ways to move to related materials connected by person, theme, or period of time...

LeviTABLE: Electromagnetic Topographical Display Project for: MAS 843, Tangible Interfaces 2001-12-00 00:00:00
Kelliher A; Pangaro G

This paper describes the design of LeviTABLE, an electromagnetic controlled topographical display device. The electromagnets control the movement and displacement of an array of vertical rods. The height of these rods represents individual points of elevation in a landscape.

We describe the iterative design and implementation of LeviTABLE, discuss design issues and suggest further research directions and applications.

Identity Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality unpublished paper 1992-01-00 00:00:00
Bruckman A

It is 3:30 AM EST, and I am talking to my friend Tao in my quarters aboard the Federation Starship the USS Yorktown. Actually, I am in Massachusetts and Tao is in South Carolina. We are logged onto a Multi-User Simulation Environment (MUSE) based on a Star Trek theme. At this moment, there are thirty-six people logged on from all over the world. My character name is Mara. Anything I say or do is seen by Tao, since he is in the same room; anything which is announced is seen by all thirty-six people logged on. Our private conversation-- about gender roles and the ways female characters are swarmed with attention6-- is interwoven with a public conversation filled with computational puns and Star Trek references...

Digital Life 2002-00-00 00:00:00
Davenport G

I was asked to speak about a vision for "Digital Life." Digital Life is the name of a research consortium at the Media Laboratory that explores a world of seamless connectivity. In a broader sense, the term reflects something about the quality of our life in the e-society; in particular, it emphasizes how digital networks provide connectedness that enhances long-distance as well as near e- communication. Digital Life enables constructionist learning, and delivers appropriately contextualized, computational augmentations of everyday activities.

Increasingly, the convenience of distributed communication through cell phones, e-mail, the World-Wide Web, camcorders, and wired households informs and affects the character of the e-society that we are discussing here. One theme of digital life has to do with extending the language of connectivity and storytelling. Before jumping into this and other appropriate themes, I would like to say a few things about storytelling and my own journey into digital life via documentary filmmaking. I will follow this introduction with some observations about emerging philosophic recognition of today's e-society. Finally, I will look at how these technical trends combine with social trends to create a more sociable interface for audiovisual storytelling applications.

Practice, Learning and Reflection: A Video Diary Experiment paper for MAS.965 :: Nature of Constructionist Learning 2002-04-29 00:00:00
Kelliher A

“Leafed through the diary a little. Got a kind of inkling of the way a life like this is constructed.”
Entry from Kafka’s Diary, kept while writing “The Trial”

For centuries, people have used diaries, journals and commonbooks to record the events of the day, interesting anecdotes, their thoughts and their hopes for the future. Writing in diaries helps people reflect and make sense of their lives, by allowing them to document initial observations and feelings about an event that they can subsequently revisit and review at a later date. In my current research I am looking to explore this process of chronological documentation and reflection, within the context of an online, multimedia domain. Specifically, I am interested in developing a software tool that will provide users with a functional and uncomplicated method for publishing their video content online, using a diary format as the display and distribution framework. The goal of the application is to provide for a casual and natural approach to moviemaking, where the process of producing video content becomes embedded in the activities of daily life, and as straightforward and manageable to do as making a written entry in a traditional diary.

To facilitate the development of this research, I decided to embark upon a learning experiment of my own, whereby I set out to design and produce my own online video diary. I was interested in gauging not only the difficulty, commitment level, enjoyment and ideal form of activity pertinent to producing a video diary, but I was also intrigued to ascertain how this particular display and distribution format would impact, among other things, my own moviemaking process. This paper recounts this experiment as an exercise in constructionism and describes my experiences relative to the theories of learning espoused by leading writers in the field of epistemology and learning, such as Jean Piaget, John Dewey and Seymour Papert.

Reading the Look and Feel: Interface Design and Critical Theories paper for CMS 800 2001-01-07 00:00:00
Seo J

This paper attempts to place current principles and debates in computer interface design within the broader context of media and culture using the tools of critical theories. Most writing on interface design has narrowly focused on specific design techniques and software training. Given the growing folk understanding of both the interface as a medium and interface design as a creative endeavor, there is a need to take a closer look at the interface beyond implementation issues. The World Wide Web provides a rich sample of diverse works produced along competing lines of thought in interface design. These schools of thought and their conflicting views will be studied in relation to concepts of immediacy and hypermediacy, authorship and auteurism, and evolution of a new artistic medium. It should be noted that the word “interface” has multiple meanings. This paper will focus on visual software interfaces for human-computer interaction, displayed on a screen and operated with a mouse, with an emphasis on such interfaces for websites. While exciting developments can be found in the field of tangible and haptic interfaces, they are out of scope for this paper...

Computer-assisted schizophrenia: a multitrack video sampler for poor improvised theatre 2003-00-00 00:00:00
Lew M; Cullinan C

Since the beginning, cinema and theatre have been rivals. But not always. In the 20s, film projection was used with performance. In the 60s, video started to be used on stage. Today, the potential of screens on stage is explored by some avant-garde theatre performers like Marcel.li Antúnez (Spain), Robert Lepage (Canada), Station House Opera (UK) or the Wooster group (US).

The combination of live digital video and real-time image processing in performance is generating hybrid new forms that blend the natures of live and recorded arts and open new visual dimensions to scenography.

This glove is a multi-track video sampler for a solo performer. It lets a single actor record up to 4 looped video tracks of himself, at a touch of his finger, while he is performing, controlling loop duration at the frame accuracy.

It is meant to be used for schizophrenic theatrical improvisation, with minimal props, costumes or set design, in the tradition of Grotowski’s poor theatre. The actor can construct scenes where different selves interact on the screen and where live action and recorded action become indiscernible to the audience. This apparatus is also great as a real-time compositing environment for experimental mise-en-scene or for spatio-temporal studies a la Muybridge.

The remote controller is embedded in a glove as a low-power RF wireless emitter : each finger is a contact switch that controls recording and playback of one of the four distinct variable-length loops of video. Each track is stored separately, decompressed and composited in real time.

Authoring for a Distributed Digital Medium 2003-00-00 00:00:00
Wood A; Davenport G

ABSTRACT This paper presents our arrival at a method for authoring a responsive digital narrative that is fragmented and distributed for the audience in space and time. We framed a simple, generalizable framework for use by content creaters. Our method emerged via exploration of one user scenario: an audience wandering across a remote outdoor landscape with a handheld computer and a few mobile environmental sensors, including GPS. We developed a prototype set of narrative bits and an application on the iPaq which allowed participants to physically navigate the story web, collecting and screening weather-based audio and images. With this narrative scenario we sought to provide media scenes that would be experienced in particular outdoor places in order to amplify the setting (rather than compete with it). We sought to provide a coherent cumulative story experience, ensuring character development, narrative climax, and a singular conclusion to everyone regardless of their strategy for navigating the story space. In this paper we expand on these goals in context of their inheritance and departure from existing work in the field. Then, we detail our challenges in developing a narrative which fulfilled these goals, including a description of the final story framework, which may be reused. We discuss the results of user trials and suggest future application possibilities. Our method of arrival at the framework, in addition to the framework itself, may be adapted to other creators of distributed, context-aware digital stories.

Enhanced Reality Live Role Playing 0000-00-00 00:00:00
Soderberg J; Waern A; Akessson K; Bjork S; Falk J

Live role-playing is a form of improvisational theatre played for the experience of the performers and without an audience. These games form a challenging application domain for ubiquitous technology. We discuss the design options for enhanced reality live role-playing and the role of technology in live role-playing games.

Spelunk! Presented at Interval University Workshop, Palo Alto, CA. 1997-00-00 00:00:00
Lachman R; Schutte A

It was a dark and stormy night. A shot rang out. A web surfer was gliding effortlessly through cyberspace when she suddenly stumbled and fell. Holes in the Net are common: "404: File Not Found".

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another surfer reaches for the same bad link. Mere seconds before the frustrating error can strike its target... Spelunk!

...the ground crumbles out from under him. He falls past animated creatures taunting his every move, sees his neighbor telling light-bulb jokes to a laptop... and, smiling, drops into the dimly-lit caves beneath the World Wide Web...

Welcome to Spelunk!, a shared environment of humor, hysteria, and HTML.

Design Thinking Foundations A Design Workshop a the Industrial Technology Research Center, Hsinchu, Taiwan 2006-01-02 00:00:00
Lee H

The 3-part design workshop will expand our understanding of the theory of design methodology as it relates to the practice. We will be discussing the process of idea generation, research, and creative development; the workshop will allow us to refl ect on the interrelationship between humans and objects that help defi ne contemporary behaviors then and now. More particularly, the workshop will develop our understanding of time and feedback as these apply to idea generation and object construction. This is a hands-on interactive workshop; therefore expect to get your hands and minds busy with work!

Glorianna Davenport: December 20, 1994 Interface NYC on-line interview 1994-12-20 00:00:00
Walker K

Glorianna Davenport is head of the Interactive Cinema Group at M.I.T.'s Media Lab, and has been working on subjects like navigating video spaces and producing interactive news and documentaries. She spoke at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. The questions below are from various students...

Building a Video-Centered Web Community UROP report 1999-01-00 00:00:00
Blackwell J

My UROP consisted of assisting Pengkai Pan with designing and implementing a portion of the software and web pages necessary to construct a web community centered on video content (I-views)...

Video as an Object-to-Think-With paper for MAS.965 :: Nature of Constructionist Learning 2002-05-21 00:00:00
Kelliher A

Writing in the 1960’s, Mekas astutely points out the paucity of opportunities for children to creatively engage and explore with the process of filmmaking [Mekas 1963]. This situation is perhaps not entirely surprising given the expensive and specialized nature of equipment up until this time. However, Mekas’ Village Voice article was published on the cusp of a wave of tremendous changes in the field of moviemaking as the advent of the home-movie dawned. He predicted that “films will soon be made as easily as written poems, and almost as cheaply.” Writing in 1997, Seymour Papert uses cinema as an example of how it takes time for “a new culture to emerge with new categories of people – in the case of cinema, the great directors, stars, and special-effects wizards – performing functions that were unimagined and largely unimaginable” [Papert 1997]. Where are Mekas’ “moviemaking for everyone” sentiments here? In Papert’s invocation, cinema is still a big-industry enterprise where highly specialized people perform breathtaking tasks, thus placing moviemaking outside the realm of ordinary folk. Perhaps it is time to reevaluate and enlarge our understanding of the categories and functions of people engaged in moviemaking given the developments within this field not included in Papert’s description?

Palm Fiction Technical Documentation UROP report 1999-12-10 00:00:00
Tan, Philip

Although interactive fiction has made great strides on the desktop computer, one enduring criticism remains common: "You can't curl up in bed with a hypertext narrative." Readers use trimmed-down or full-blown HTML browsers on both desktop and palmtop computers, but authors have to use workarounds to bend HTML to narrative purposes. Portable digital assistants (PDAs) allow users to read material with greater freedom of location, but HTML is ill-suited for the pixel-scarce screens of PDAs. Current software requires authors of multi-sequential stories to learn complex programming languages and to use structurally elaborate programming constructs to perform conceptually simple, repetitive tasks..