A lot of new projects appearing this month in this blog, maybe because for once I have been around a little more so I actually saw some of what is going on..
During the seminar on cross media at Cinekid Patrick Crowe introduced this brilliant project for teens, called Total Drama Island, by the multiple award winning Xenophile Media (interactive Emmy for alternate reality games Fallen and Regenesis. oops, sorry, Regenesis is an EXTENDED reality game). The interactive format makes fun of the various Survivor and Big Brother-style TV formats, and creates a highly ironic universe in which the system is basically the same, with a twist. The interaction architecture is all but obvious, and I found the ironic approach very educational, as irony may be the only defense left when one grows into a mature viewer.
If you wish to have your avatar selected for the Total Drama Island TV show, you should win a lot of games online - have fun!

November 16 is the deadline for the overly interesting call for projects by Cancer UK research, to produce an ARG to raise attention about, and most importantly funding for, cancer research.
There is no real prize (a meagre £1000 per team) but the winners will receive infinite publicity and will get production tips and assistance from some seriously creative (and famous) professionals. Here it is.
One comment: I really hope this will be a great fundraising event, but I also hope the winner ARG won’t create a model for commercial ARGs devoted to less noble purposes..
Also, when I started thinking about an actual game project, after some minutes I begun feeling this urge for knocking on wood, which I guess is also the average reaction of average people when thinking about cancer; I am really curious to know how the winner project will be able to overcome this attitude.

Technorati Tags: alternate reality games, Call for papers, educational, games, participatory, pervasive games, serious games

Very strange conference this Picnic conference - after months of network building on the picnic network site, and very cool network features, like when you see to each event the profiles of the other participants, I was almost hoping you could rank the presentations, before and afterwards. The apparently chaotic organization made so that at each meeting you would meet completely different people (ok, I was missing the main conference, there must have been a stable group there). Anyway, that really felt the social network come alive, the natural emergence of the popular, and the spontaneous aggregation.
I still wonder if that strong feeling of “2.0″ has been only a side effect of a slightly messy although charming organization or a planned strategy to give that “In” feeling. In the latter case, wow.

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, event, Web 2.0

The Waag Society in Amsterdam developed, already in 2002, a “non verbal remote communication tool to support emotional communication”, targeting 80+years old.
Storytable offers a “multimedia jukebox” to stimulate memory and reminiscing and to encourage social interaction in elderly persons.
The Storytable is “intelligent furniture with footage from the 1920ies ot the 1950is”, also offering an Oral History database, continuously adjourned. Let’s see how it is works:
“This interface, designed in close cooperation with seniors, makes it possible for them to listen to or play digital multimedia clips from a large database. These multimedia clips contain songs, TV commercials, news broadcasts and other images from the 1900’s to present day. These clips are designed to reflect important events in a senior’s life. The Storytable’s navigation system was designed to make modern technology easily accessible to seniors. Thus, two “intelligent” buttons provide access to search and play the multimedia clips”.

Some weeks ago I discovered the educational project “Hole in the Wall” by Sugata Mitra, addressing children from Indian villages, and although that is not the same, it is interesting to note how we tend to forget that a large part of the population lacks the basic “technical literacy” to enjoy the wonders of Web 2.0.

Still at the Cross Media Week, interesting talk today to about social networks and open ID. While waiting for the ideal open ID to use everywhere without worrying about your personal data being stolen by terrorists etc., they were proposing to connect all social networks, so that it would be possible to : federate - have a friend on another network follow my content like it was on his;
synch - make the content visible in the same way from platform to platform;
move - move from one platform to the other very easily;
after this, the talk became too technical for me and I stopped understanding.
What I got, is that : social networks, like cross media, are fighting too to find common standards for more fluid communication. Technical convergence, personalization, and transferability are the main issues. The idea of an open ID, or digital identity, was fascinating, as was the concept of “shared secret”, that reminded me of secret societies where hundreds of thousands could mix with the crowd and still be connected although not personally acquainted (I think free masons and similar), an uncanny thought when related to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
By the way, here you can see Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (who looks exactly like my friend Alvise, ciao Alvise )

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, social networks, Web 2.0

After discovering the attempt made by Sky Vivo to produce participatory television in Italy, I kept thinking that was nothing new, and I remembered reading a post by Robin Good, one of my favorite blogs, in 2005 about Nessuno TV, wonderful italian experiment of participatory channel, dating back to 2002, 4 year earlier than Al Gore’s Current TV.
In this post, Robin Good describes a “virtual talk show” presented by Nessuno TV, with real guests in the studio and other guests on screens inside the studio interacting via webcam. The program was broadcasted in streaming and on satellite TV at the same time.
What I am trying to point out is how grassroots production most of the time leads the way for mainstream communication, and, like in Maurizio Costanzo’s case, how can we preserve the potential of the new communication methods so that they promote better communication, better understanding, a more democratic approach to media, and avoid cross media to be used just as a gimmick to add a novelty flavor to an otherwise very conventional approach to television.

Sky Vivo, italian satellite tv, is going to launch this July the first (? if I am wrong please correct me) officially cross media program, entitled “Stella: are you ready to change?”. One of the more venerable talk show conductors in Italy, Maurizio Costanzo, is going to moderate a daily talk show featuring every day via webcam connection four italian families, interacting with guests and stars in studio.
The conversation will also be influenced by spectators from home, via sms, email and the Stella web portal. Sms will be visually present in the studio through projection on a large luminous sphere in the middle of the studio.
The broadcast will be also available later on in streaming.
While the information structure might sound “young”, in fact the themes treated, like the debate on stamina cells and embryos (this is a hot theme in Italy, check out the lovely activist game of Molle Industria), safety on the streets, precarious work etc, seem to be addressing an older audience.

Costanzo himself, age 69? 71?, an institution in Italian television since 25 years, is hardly as cool and young as the network tries to portray him. Maybe this is the only way to introduce innovative forms of communication in an “old-fashioned” country such as Italy. I wonder how the situation like is in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and other countries where “institutions”, like in Italy, tend to slow down change and innovation.

Technorati Tags: iTV, Web 2.0

Another main feature of Pergames and ACE conference is what I would like to call “participatory fitness”, that is technology-mediated sociable situations to exercise together.
The recent proliferation of “sociable fitness tools” is perhaps unrelated to the mild success of EyetoyTM: Kinetic, pseudo-game to exercise with your Playstation, and maybe is rather dependent from the latest fashion of motion detection devices.
Anyway, Pergames features a number of “networked exertion games”, like “Breakout for two”, cross between soccer and the computer game “Breakout”. Both players kick a ball against a physical wall, where is projected a lifesize videoconference image enabling the players to interact with each other (why should people play soccer indoors instead of simply meeting outside, I don’t get) - “Airhockey over a distance” repeats the same concept, of two players separated each with an airhockey table, and “PushN’Pull”, in which two remote players are basically pulling the same exercise bar in opposite directions (the two exercise bars remotely communicate data about strength and direction); “Table Tennis for Three” enhances the concept involving remote players, while “Jogging over a distance” offers social joggers a “jogging together experience” although geographically apart, via headphones and devices to track the joggers’ speed. “Fitness Adventure”, from another research group, tries and combine location based games with fitness, enhancing sociability and the opportunity for face to face interaction.

The common tract of this new generation training projects compared to the Playstation is SOCIABILITY; the main goal is to do something (in this case fitness) and do it together.
Some try to connect persons living in different places, as the web does, others try and organize LOCAL GROUPS, in the style of web 2.0, a virtual stratagem to create connections in real life.

As usual, new technologies supply to insufficiencies in (western) society to provide aggregation sites and motives - when will all these “sociable systems” be noticed by State organs, like for instance social security, and be employed for public use?
The social potential of pervasive, locative and mixed reality games is huge, I want to read more from the Convergence Consortium at MIT and see if Jenkins and the group actually talk about a “participatory revolution”, although the word “revolution” is not so hot anymore.

Technorati Tags: conference, location based games, participatory, social interactive television

If you want to see the dreams you dreamt as a kid reading science fiction (if you actually did that as a kid) and see the magic wand, the butler house, the intelligent table and much more check out the Amigo-TV project and Philips research center in Eindhoven, Netherlands

Here I am in Amsterdam, enjoining a couple of free days after attending the conference EuroITV 2007. This is not strictly a cross media event, but it features plenty of connections with cross media and it has been a good source of inspiration (and update, to see what is actually happening out there).

Compared to previous editions of the same conference, this year’s focus was not on EPG’s and problems of compatibility between platform as before but was instead all about sociability and about integrating interactive television in a broader scheme of media interaction.

Presentations about extended homes, ambient entertainment, swarm intelligence, mobile TV and a one-day seminar on social interactive television seem to indicate that the “push the red button” era is definitely over.

Another main feature of the conference was “Social Interactive Television”, a hybrid form incorporating the structure of interactive television with features from Web 2.0, notably the community aspect and the possibility to share - the present moment, opinions, content.
To make isolate and remote TV viewing a collective experience, once again.

A very interesting seminar dedicated to it (social interactive television) featured the following project presentations:

Living@Room (it is such a rare pleasure for me to see some (indie) italian presentations!) borrows the tools of a live chat such as a web cam to share the viewing experience;

CollaboraTV, wary of the role of the choir in ancient Greece’s theatre, shows the silhouette of an audience at the bottom of the screen and post-synchronizes comments and reactions to the show in order to create the illusion of simultaneity even when conversations happen at very different times;

ConnectTV seems inspired by the graphics of MSN messenger and allows you to share content from your computer to other TV viewers and have “Genrebuddies” to stay tuned on your choices and to send you suggestions (interesting how the speaker had to admit that in one month of street and web advertising for the project, that is very much in development, they manage to get only 4 subscribers, who also where a single group of friends);

Find-a-Friend, “another way of meeting people in your neighbourhood”, connects people through their zone code during live broadcasting;

MyHome from the University of Salzburg, examining the D-box2 by german Premiere, highlighted the extremely interesting point that “the user is the innovator” showing that, as we see in videogames and all sorts of open software, users tend to improve even the set top box according to their tastes AND technical capabilities.

(I found amazing the number of features added or costumized by the users: not only the interface, but also the possibility of sending audio video data stream over to the network, a simple game console, video and mp3 player, image gallery/slide show, notifier of incoming calls or emails, weather reports or stock market tickers.)

Finally Celia Quico from TVCabo, Portugal, spoke of participatory culture, and presented a truly cross media project called Total Explorer that spans from TV to the web and into the real world in something similar to locative games to show kids the hidden treasures of Portugal (real cool!).

Some buzzwords of this EuroITV conference seem to be:

asynchronous communication (that is, software allowing the audience to be in synch with each other, adjusting broadcast timing to their conversation);

user generated content : the most quoted models are YouTube and Google video and Flickr (sons of YouTube are the japanese GoromiTV and the dutch Tribler);

metadata/text matching basically the semantic web and XML applied to iTV for various goals, like recommendation systems, buddies systems, and costumization;

P2P-TV and sharing (content and experience) basically “altruistic” (thus sociable) systems transported to iTV

It is really amazing to see how the themes of Web 2.0 are protagonists of a conference entitled after iTV; television viewing, mobile TV viewing and ambient entertainment experience are of course different but they are talked about implicitly like they were at the same level or belonging to the same field; when I went to EuroiTV 2004 in Brighton such an approach would have been unthinkable. Things are really changing fast.
Cross media may not be the most popular of terms in this set (I still have to find out WHY—?) but the concept of cross media (or media convergence or participatory media) was deeply present in most of the presentations. How long before scholars and the market come to a common agreement with regards to its name?