Interactive Arts Commons^™

Automated Cinematographer For Vr Viewing Experiences, Zihan Wu

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

As the virtual reality (VR) industry continues to evolve, the question of how to effectively capture VR experiences for an audience remains a challenge. The predominant method of showcasing VR applications through first-person recordings lacks cinematic interest, failing to capture other viewpoints and the essence of the moment. Meanwhile, manually setting up cameras and editing videos requires technical expertise on behalf of the user. In this paper, we propose the use of machine learning (ML) to automatically select the most compelling predefined viewpoint in a VR environment, at any given moment. Our models, trained on actor motion and voice volume, …

(Meta-)Physical Artworks: Digital Augmentation In Art Observation, Macy A. Toppan

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Augmented art— the subgenre of art that incorporates physical and digital artwork— is a rapidly growing field driven by advancing technology and a new generation for whom that tech is a given. Yet the presence of media like augmented and virtual reality in exhibition remains a controversial subject. Rather than focusing on the many theoretical debates about whether digital pieces can qualify as "good" art, we study it in practice through the eyes of the casual art observer. This paper highlights the audience in a within-participant study that asked viewers to take in a physical sculpture intentionally built with virtual …

Performative Mixing For Immersive Audio, Brian A. Elizondo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Immersive multichannel audio can be produced with specialized setups of loudspeakers, often surrounding the audience. These setups can feature as few as four loudspeakers or more than 300. Performative mixing in these environments requires a bespoke solution offering intuitive gestural control. Beyond the usual faders for gain control, advancements in multichannel sound demand interfaces capable of quickly positioning sounds between channels. The Quad Cartesian Positioner is such a solution in the form of a Eurorack module for surround mixing for use in live or studio performances.

Diffusion/mixing methods for live multichannel immersive music often rely on the repurposing of hardware …

Creating Project Contrast: A Video Game Exploring Consciousness And Qualia, Pierce Papke

Honors Projects

Project Contrast is a video game that explores how the unique traits inherent to video games might engage reflective player responses to qualitative experience. Project Contrast does this through suspension of disbelief, avatar projection, presence, player agency in storytelling, visual perception, functional gameplay, and art. Considering the difficulty in researching qualitative experience due to its subjectivity and circular explanations, I created Project Contrast not to analyze qualia, though that was my original hope. I instead created Project Contrast as an avenue for player self-reflection and learning about qualitative experience. While video games might be just code and art on a …

Procedural City Generation With Combined Architectures For Real-Time Visualization, Griffin Poyck

All Theses

The work and research of this paper sought to build upon traditional city generation and simulation in creating a tool that both realistically simulates cities and their prominent features and also creates aesthetic and artistically rich cities using assets that combine several contemporary or near contemporary architectural styles. The major city features simulated are the surrounding terrain, road networks, individual buildings, and building placement. The tools used to both create and integrate these features were created in Houdini with Unreal Engine 5 as the intended final destination. This research was influenced by the city, town, and road networking of Ghost …

The Oceans Above Us: An Augmented Reality Experience, Chris Nalani Dimeo

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Augmented reality holds the potential to be the new fabric of our everyday lives.

Also known as AR, augmented reality is any technology that superimposes graphical information over a real-world environment, whether it be through a smartphone screen or visually projected onto the environment. Though it has existed in various forms for decades, augmented reality development is still widely considered the work of experts in technology-related fields.

In November 2019, however, Adobe unveiled a new augmented reality development platform, Project Aero, along with boasts that the app’s intuitive design and integration with other Adobe programs would place AR creation into …

Programming Proletarian Literature: Kobayashi Takiji’S "Kani Kôsen" And Gaming As Reading, Jacob Philip Fisher

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Abstract

This project translates a novel, Kobayashi Takiji’s, Kani Kôsen (The Crab Cannery Ship, 1929) into a video game. As a joint project between Computer Science and Japanese, its focus is to develop a game for the original Game Boy (1989) narratively based on a work of Japanese proletarian literature. Specific tools used in development were the Game Boy emulator: bgb, the Game Boy Developers Kit (gbdk), the Game Boy CPU manual, as well as a foundation in the C programming language, and some lower level systems experience. Being based on a novel, the play style utilizes text …

Card Tricks: A Workflow For Scalability And Dynamic Content Creation Using Paper2d And Unreal Engine 4, Owen Gottlieb, Dakota Herold, Edward Amidon

Presentations and other scholarship

In this paper, we describe the design and technological methods of

our dynamic sprite system in Lost & Found, a table-top-to-mobile

card game designed to improve literacy regarding prosocial

aspects of religious legal systems, specifically, collaboration and

cooperation. Harnessing the capabilities of Unreal Engine’s

Paper2D system, we created a dynamic content creation pipeline

that empowered our game designers so that they could rapidly

iterate on the game’s systems and balance externally from the

engine. Utilizing the Unreal Blueprint component system we were

also able to modularize each actor during runtime as data may be

changed. The technological approach behind Lost …

Mobile Indoor Positioning For Augmented Reality Systems, Robert B. Glass

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the creation and setup of a prototype that allows users of the device to interact within an indoor real world environment and a virtual environment simultaneously using high-tech common technology. The prototype is comprised of a small mobile device such as a cellular mobile phone, Raspberry Pi computer, a battery powered handheld Pico projector, and software developed for the Android OS. The software can easily be ported to other mobile and non-mobile operating systems. The mobile device must contain accelerometer, magnetometer, and gyroscope embedded sensors as well as 802.11 wireless network chip. The prototype software implements an …

A Look Into The Industry Of Video Games Past, Present, And Yet To Come, Chad Hadzinsky

CMC Senior Theses

Since its inception, the video game industry has been both a new medium for art and innovation as well as a major driving force in the advancements of many technologies. The often overlooked video game industry has turned from a hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry in its short, forty year life. People of all ages and genders across the world are playing video games at a higher clip than ever before. With so many new gamers and emerging technologies, it is an exciting time for the industry. The landscape is constantly changing and successful business models of the past …

Embodied Tuning: Interfacing Danish Radio Heritage, Christian Hviid Mortensen, Vitus Vestergaard

Journal of Interactive Humanities

Most museum exhibitions favor vision, not hearing. When there is audio in exhibitions, it tends to take on a secondary role as a soundtrack or commentary. In some cases, however, audio should be the primary object of interest. Radio heritage is such a case. The traditional way of showcasing audio is through webaccessible archives or through listening kiosks in the exhibition. Neither one takes advantage of the unique affordances of the spatiality and physicality of an exhibition. We therefore propose an alternative way of exhibiting radio heritage in a listening exhibition where users move around and explore the physical gallery …

Modding The Humanities: Experiments In Historic Narratives, Elizabeth S. Goins, Christopher Egert, Andrew Phelps, Chandra Reedy, Joel Kincaid

Journal of Interactive Humanities

While the ludology versus narratology debate raged within game studies circles [1], game designers continued building games and developing methods to improve player experience. Today however, while designers may have their personal preferences, there is no longer any doubt that both mechanics and story can have an important role to play in a game [2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

You Have Died Of Dysentery: A First Attempt At Navigating A Course In Educational Games, Adrienne Decker, David Simkins

Journal of Interactive Humanities

This paper describes our experiences developing and piloting a course in educational games. We discuss the structure of the course, the topics we included in the course, as well as the final projects the students created for the course. Of particular interest to non-technical educators interested in exploring games in their courses is the fact that our course incorporated many critical thinking skills as part of the coursework. We felt that an important part of the student’s immersion in this material was not just the production of the game, but also a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding education and …

Interview: Joel Slayton, Christine Laffer

SWITCH

Interview with Joel Slayton, Professor of Computers in Fine Art at San José State University, and Director of the CADRE Institute. Slayton discusses the history of the Cadre Institute and details his views on the relationship between art and new technology. Slayton describes the role of artists in exploring the possibilities and ethical implications of emerging technologies such as genetic engineering, nano-techology, robotics, and artificial life. He describes installations and in-progress work focused on ubiquitous video surveillance. The interview concludes with a discussion of Slayton’s use of the DoWhatDo model for artistic collaboration and of his piece "Conduits," presented in …