May 12, 2009
arg, demonstrations, lisa fouks grand, Million Story Building, reality ends here, Twitter
MEML notes 27 March 2009
These sketchy meeting minutes are mostly concerned with the design of the database for the Million Story Building iPhone application. We wanted the demo of the app to show how scanning a simple QR code could reveal a world of information. The QR codes, mounted next to movie posters in the School of Cinematic Arts, were linked to entries in a WordPress database. Each entry contained information in multiple fields, including most of the ones listed below.
-quote
-location (Steve Hanson)
-QR Code #
-gallery w/thumbnails
-use images as separate meta entries-film title
-director
-date
-length
-country
-actors-film ID – use IMDB numerical imdb
external content
-movietagger data
-proximity grab bag
Mar 6, 2009
andreas kratky, arg, augmented reality, meml, Million Story Building, movietagger, reality ends here, scott fisher
MEML notes 6 March 2009
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_____________________________
Peter ==
quartz thingy will read various xml containers and display content
thingy can also respond to bluetooth presenceto 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 techniquesJen ==
mockups pt 2
new icons appearing
messages appearing in “your media” AKA “HISTORY”
anomalies appearing in the appWill ==
data server… logging tables for different users, tracking info — log ins, scans, etc
really basic content database
CODE references via WordPressAndreas ==
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 infobuttons 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 emailAR 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?
MSB Statement of Objectives
…to deepen the relationship between the building and its inhabitants…
The Million Story Building/Building Story project has three interrelated objectives:
- To provide a playful and interactive ambient storytelling system that enables the occupants of the new SCA building to explore the rich history of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
- To provide opportunities for members of the SCA Community to add to or otherwise enrich this system.
- To “accelerate serendipity” by fostering the development of productive connections between faculty, students and divisions within the SCA Community.
These objectives will be achieved by the following means:
- Interactive “easter eggs” placed throughout the new SCA building. These easter eggs will take a variety of forms, each of which features some kind of computational mediation. Some of the proposed easter eggs include:-a series of location-embedded QR code glyphs that trigger the playback (on mobile devices or screens) of interviews or other media materials concerning the history and output of the SCA and its alumni;
- Profile-sensitive sensors and affiliated display systems for on-the-fly “social discovery” within the building. Building on the existing SCA Community infrastructure, student and faculty profiles and status updates will be linked to the new SCA Building system. By connecting this data to RFID tags or cell phone numbers associated with individual SCA Community members, the proposed system will enable students and faculty to share information across screens and mobile devices through the local WiFi network. For example, a production student seeking a writer could consult the system to find writers with unproduced scripts; faculty members wishing to make announcements to subsets of students or other faculty could do so by submitting these announcements to the SCA Community; and so on. The Building would “render” this information in a variety of ways, including display on screens, broadcast to mobile devices and posting on the SCA Community website.
- An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) linking together the various elements and motivating the exploration of SCA history. As visitors, students, faculty and other building occupants examine the various easter eggs and other media artifacts embedded in the structure, a fictional “story” will emerge, a mystery that will require a deeper investigation into the SCA’s history (and its place in in the history of Los Angeles and the world at large) in order to solve. This story will involve additional “secret” media artifacts that will be accessible only after puzzles involving the easter eggs embedded in the building are solved.