About
Jeff Watson is an artist, designer, and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Games at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
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Category Archives: Blog
An essential archipelago of opportunity
Nicholas de Monchaux’s WPA 2.0 entry, Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial data to map the thousands of abandoned city-owned lots scattered across North American cities. But this is more than just a data viz project: de Monchaux conceives of these spaces as “an essential archipelago of opportunity” for making cities more livable, functional, and sustainable. Continue reading
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Tagged nicholas de monchaux, parametric design, sustainability, urban space
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Mogees: Realtime Gesture Recognition with Contact Microphones
Bruno Zamborlin’s Mogees project — “an interactive gestural-based surface for realtime audio mosaicing” — implies all sorts of interesting futures for musical instruments and performance: http://youtu.be/erz-9f4M9B4 Via @elejansen
Innovation Ecotones
An ecotone — literally, a place where ecologies are in tension — is a transitional area between different biomes, such as the boundary between grassland and forest or between different kinds of forests. Such places are sites for evolutionary dynamism, … Continue reading
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Tagged ann pendleton-jullian, dissertation, ecology, education, innovation ecotones, pervasive games, pervasive learning, transmedia
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Using location data to predict where people will be, when they will be there, and who they will be there with
Never mind the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance-by-smartphone of where people are. Next up is keeping track of where they will be. University of Illinois researchers Long Vu, Quang Do, and Klara Nahrstedt have prototyped a system that analyzes the movements of … Continue reading
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Tagged jyotish, long vu, mobile media, prediction, surveillance
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Address is Approximate
Like Toy Story, but for graphic designers. Via Flowing Data.
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Tagged animation, google, stop motion, street view
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Engine 29 “pop-up arts journalism lab” pays a visit to the @scareality Game Office
Doug MacCash of the New Orleans Times-Picayune caught this footage of me talking about Reality Ends Here when he and several other brilliant Engine 29 Annenberg Fellows paid a visit to the Game Office. Also included in this video: über-player … Continue reading
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Tagged doug maccash, engine 29, game office, reality ends here, video
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The secret #scareality experience at #diydays
Thanks to Lance Weiler and the rest of the DIY Days crew for helping us run a “bite-sized” version of Reality Ends Here/SCA Reality at this year’s conference. The game as we ran it was very lightweight. We kicked things … Continue reading
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Tagged conferences, diy days, lance weiler, los angeles, reality ends here
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Henry Jenkins interviews me about Reality Ends Here
Special thanks to Henry Jenkins for conducting a wide-ranging two-part interview with Simon Wiscombe, Tracy Fullerton, and me about my dissertation project, Reality Ends Here (A.K.A. SCA Reality, “The Game”, etc): All of this cloak and dagger stuff was part … Continue reading
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Tagged arg, dissertation, reality ends here, sca, simon wiscombe, tracy fullerton, transmedia, usc
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Reality@IndieCade
Special thanks to the IndieCade organizers for asking us to appear at this year’s festival, and to all the players from the “real” game who showed up and helped make Deals with the general public.
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Tagged dissertation, indiecade, reality ends here, sca
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Embedded papercraft objects are better than embedded digital objects
Responsibility has yet to be claimed for the beautiful papercraft sculptures that have mysteriously popped up in Scottish libraries and arts centers, each accompanied by notecards featuring the Twitter handles of relevant authorities or personalities. Tangible artifacts like these have … Continue reading
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Tagged augmented reality, books, locative media, papercraft, scotland
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