These notes were taken at a hectic mid-semester meeting of the MEML group. By this time, the three main streams of the Million Story Building project were well underway: the iPhone “building app,” the transmedial ARG prototype, and the “movietagger” system.

Each of these streams are discussed in these minutes. First, regarding the Building App, the issue of motivation once again rears its head due to the Apple-enforced iPhone limitation on background processing (ie, Apple won’t allow it, at least not at the time of writing). The problem, recorded here in ALL CAPS (“NO BACKGROUND PROCESSING”) boils down to this: since we can’t have the Building App persistently running in the background on every user’s phone, we need to somehow encourage users to take the time to fire up the application themselves — that is, to take the active step of “turning on” the system, instead of having it run passively in the background. This is where things like the ARG, the SCA History Project and the Provenence Project all come into play: by enriching the building with opportunities for discovery and interaction that can only be accessed via the Building App, we encourage users to actively participate…in theory, at least.

The second main issue discussed in at this meeting relates to the MovieTagger Project led by Andreas Kratky. For our demo of the system, we wanted users to be able to tag movie clips in the building’s database, and we wanted them to do so by controlling plasma screens with their iPhones. Here, we discuss what, if any, fixed data fields should be used for categorizing/tagging the clips. In the end, we settled on a more or less “freestyle” approach, similar to the folksonomies of popular social media sites like flickr, for the demo.

The last few bullets in these notes refer to some ideas we developed for the future of the Million Story Building project. One of these ideas, the “digital commons” (an augmented reality interface for adding info-bubbles to the main courtyard of the SCA Building), would later appear in our demo, albeit in mockup format.

TFOTS MEETING NOTES
March 06 2009

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Peter ==

quartz thingy will read various xml containers and display content
thingy can also respond to bluetooth presence

to display: IMD stuff, movietagger stuff, SCA stuff, History Project

Jen ==

mockups
Scott: what happens when App goes into background/closed?

Will ==

no no no — NO BACKGROUND PROCESSING
find ways to keep it on — via MOTIVATION/Modal techniques

Jen ==

mockups pt 2
new icons appearing
messages appearing in “your media” AKA “HISTORY”
anomalies appearing in the app

Will ==

data server… logging tables for different users, tracking info — log ins, scans, etc
really basic content database
CODE references via WordPress

Andreas ==

mySQL for the movietagger?

movietagger: what kinds of fields do we want to attach to these movies?
e.g. scene descriptions, dialogue lines versus one or two word tags
tag-based EDL using submitted tags
different kinds of keywords and tags: “interestingness algorithms”
stripping out useless info

buttons on phone — list of vids
what is the reward for this? shoe tagged things appearing on the other screens?

size and style of database questions, etc FREESTYLE

could Emily do some of this?

scott: figure out how much we’re going to have to support this, demo it pre-mobile…

Scott ==

statue as focus for “digital commons” and Archive
could you “send your stories” to Douglas Fairbanks

“letters to douglas fairbanks”

how do we force people to be at the statue when they submit, and what can they get back?

icon that appears only when you’re in front of the statue

what about voice?
tie-in with ARG
sending email

AR Toolkit stuff

BIM meeting monday morning

Hide ==

let’s setup some kind of iPhone app for ARToolkit so we don’t have to walk around with laptops

Jen ==

ambient music tags following around the people in the bldg
different sounds in the elevators?