3rd FLOOR DEMOS
PIXI LAB – Platforms and Infrastructure for Experimental Interactions
ICEbox: An Easy-to-Use Network Provisioning Appliance
Location: Room 333
Demo Description: The ICEbox (for installation, configuration, and evolution box) is a network appliance that acts as a logical front door to the home network, serving as a central point of control for the home network, and providing a unified interface for easy home network configuration and management that shilelds the user from the technical details of the network. The ICEbox addresses common problems with device configuration, network security, and monitoring and troubleshooting. A simple physical pointing interface is used for initial client device configuration; a graphical interface combined with physical controls on the ICEbox provides access to management functions, including network security. Results of a series of our user studies indicate that our study participants found this appliance both useful and usable as a network configuration and management tool.
Faculty: Keith Edwards, keith@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Jeonghwa Yang
Designing an Media Sharing Infrastructure in Digital Home Environments
Location: Room 333
Demo Description: Recently, industry and academia have been putting their effort to build a “digital home” environment where multiple digital devices in the home are connected to each other through home networking and thus digital contents flows freely between them. For instance, movie files stored in a media server are played on a networked media player hung on a wall and music files stored in a pc in a living room are played on a networked stereo system in a bedroom. One question is how to support digital media sharing in digital home environments. In this project, I want to design an infrastructural platform to support media sharing in digital home environments. Especially I focus on media sharing among homes and devices in those homes.
Faculty: Keith Edwards, keith@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Jeonghwa Yang
Perceptions of Technology Among the Homeless
Location: Room 333
Demo Description: Technology is all around us, and while we consider new and novel uses for mobile and ubiquitous computing it is also important to consider how these kinds of technologies affect members of our society who do not have access to them. We have begun looking at this problem by conducting an qualitative study of the homeless in Atlanta, specifically talking with them about their use and perceptions of technology. This study is the first piece of a large body of planned work to explore how marginalized and underserved communities deal with a world increasingly dependent on technology.
Faculty: Keith Edwards, keith@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Christopher A. Le Dantec
ELECTRONIC LEARNING COMMUNITIES LAB
Science Online: Knowledge Building in Wikis
Location – Room 322
Demo Description: What do people learn from writing on Wikipedia? How do young people learn to be smart about where information comes from? Science Online is a wiki-based learning environment where student authors construct articles about science topics. The site runs on the same software as Wikipedia, but with special extensions that support careful citation. By participating in the construction of a science resource for the public, students have a unique opportunity to reflect on where scientific information comes from and to engage with issues of epistemology and values in science.
Faculty: Amy Bruckman, asb@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Andrea Forte
Creative Collaboration in Online Flash Animation Communities
Location – Room 322
Demo Description: How do members of online communities work together on highly creative projects? To help answer this question, we empirically investigated the collaboration practices of Adobe Flash multimedia artists across several online communities. We used a mixed-methods approach, including quantitative data harvested from these websites and qualitative interviews conducted with 17 Flash artists of diverse backgrounds. We found that many Flash artists participate in collaborative animation projects called collabs, and that these collabs differ substantially from other kinds of online collaboration examined in the literature.
Some key differences include: (1) an informal decision-making hierarchy topped by a creative director; (2) terminable working processes leading to a "finished product"; (3) strongly-held conceptions of ownership and authorship; and (4) a set of distinctive, emergent patterns of collaboration. Collabs operate in these ways due to a combination of influences, including website histories, professional goals and values, and technical pragmatism. Our findings provide implications for designers of online communities who seek to support highly creative collaboration among their members.
Faculty: Amy Bruckman, asb@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Kurt Luther
GameLog
Location – Room 322
Demo Description: GameLog is an online blogging environment for supporting reflection on gameplaying experiences. GameLog differs from traditional blogging environments because each user maintains multiple parallel blogs, with each blog devoted to a single game. GameLog was used in two university level games-related classes. Our results indicate students perceived writing GameLogs as a positive learning experience for three reasons.
First, it improved their relationship with videogames as a medium. Second, it helped them broaden and deepen their understanding of videogames. Third, it provided a vehicle for expression, communication, and collaboration. Students found that by reflecting on their experiences playing games they began to understand how game design elements helped shape that experience. Most importantly, they stepped back from their traditional role of gamers or fans and engaged in reasoning critically and analytically about the games they were studying. Our analysis of the students GameLog entries supports the students^ perceptions. We identified six common styles of entry: overview, narrative, comparative analysis, plan/hypothesis, experiment, and insight/analysis. These styles align with practices necessary for supporting learning and understanding. We propose that blogging about gameplay experience, as a reflective writing activity, can help lay the foundations on which further learning and understanding of games can happen.
Faculty: Amy Bruckman, asb@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Jose Zagal
Splat!
Location – Room 322
Demo Description: Splat! is a Facebook application to engage youth in creating innovative and expressive multimedia projects in a public, networked space. Splat! involves a series of contests in which youth are challenged to create movies, 2D or 3D animations, games, and stories in an external programmable media application, such as Flash or Scratch. Youth participate in the contest by uploading their projects into Splat!, describing how they made it, and sharing their project with other Facebook users, who can then rate the project and pass it on. Winning applications will be selected based on the viral nature of the project-number of times it is shared-and peer ratings. Splat! is designed to leverage the power of youths' existing social connections to enable them to create, share, filter, and critically reflect on the role of media production in their lives.
Faculty: Amy Bruckman, asb@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Sarita Yardi
Facebook Construction Kit
Location – Room 322
Demo Description: We are building a Facebook application would allow the user to build virtual objects (e.g.: house, car, computer, etc.) from scratch using customizable building blocks of various shapes, sizes and colors. Facebook users can share and modify these objects with their friends.
Faculty: Amy Bruckman, asb@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Chandan Dasgupta, Sarita Yardi
Augmenting Reality with Second Life
Location – 3rd Floor Foyer
Demo Description: In this project, we are exploring how to leverage the power of MMOs for authoring and deploying augmented reality systems and experiences. We have created a custom client for the MMO Second Life (SL) that integrates augmented reality technologies, including living video capture and various tracking systems, and a set of in-world objects and conventions that allow us to align a part of the SL virtual world with an area of the physical world. The result is a mixed media environment where physical humans and virtual avatars meet and interact with physical and virtual objects.
Beyond studying how an MMO can be used to create AR experiences, we are exploring specific genres of experience that seem particularly appropriate to this configuration of technology. Initially, we are exploring both movie creation (a kind of "AR Machinima") and performance studies. This demo will focus on performance and the dramatic possibilities that open up with such a system.
Faculty: Blair MacIntyre, Jay Bolter, Michael Nitsche, Kathryn Farley
Students: Tobias Lang (visiting from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich)
IMAGINE LAB
Design Visualization
Location – Room 323
Demo Description: A collection of projects ranging from Pre-Visualization Animations to Interactive Real Time Environments for the Georgia Aquarium, the Peachtree Corridor Taskforce, and Georgia Tech Campus will be shown. The Imagine Lab specializes in processing large datasets from a variety of sources to create urban scale 3D environments.
Faculty : Tolek Lesniewski, tolek.lesniewski@coa.gatech.edu; Jonathan Shaw, jonathan.shaw@coa.gatech.edu
WiiArts
Location – Room 326
Demo Description: WiiArts is an experimental video, audio and image processing art project that makes use of pre-existing sensing technologies provided by Nintendo Wii Remotes and a sensor bar. The WiiArts project invites the viewers into a collaborative and expressive art experience. In its current form, three interactors can collaboratively work together to create and compose both images and sounds at the same time. Several pieces have been created based on this concept: Illumination, Beneath, WiiMusic, Time Ripples and Waldo.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Hyun Jean Lee, Hyunsin Kim, Gaurav Gupta
COMPUTER GRAPHICS
Animating Physics for Motion Pictures and Video Games
Location - Room 317
Demo Description: Artists who create motion pictures and video games often simulate physics to produce a variety of special effects. We display several results of simulated physics in order to make motion-picture-quality animations. Specifically, we animate gooey viscoplastic materials like slime and putty, we simulate erosion and corrosion due to acid as it eats through metal, and we use state of the art optimization techniques in order to control simulated clothing on animated characters.
Faculty: Greg Turk, turk@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Chris Wojtan
Synthesis of Interactive Virtual Human
Location: Room 317
Demo Description: We introduce a novel optimization-based approach to interactive character animation, emphasizing physical realism and user controllability. Our framework allows us to define a controller as a set of high-level commands and preferences formulated as constraints and objectives. We compose a set of simple controllers to create complex behaviors, and show that the framework easily adapts to new characters and environments without the need for obscure parameter tuning.
Faculty: Karen Liu, karenliu@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Sumit Jain, Yuting Ye
Allotting Exceptional Treatment to Your CAD Entities
Location: Room 321
Demo Description: Hierarchies of patterns of features, of sub-assemblies, or of CSG sub-expressions are used in architectural and mechanical CAD to eliminate laborious repetitions from the design process. For example, a single CAD model is used for all of the occurrences of a seat in the digital mock-up of an airplane. The corresponding hierarchy of pattern may for instance define a pattern of 42 rows, each being a pattern of 8 seats. A simple translation is used to specify the relative position of each occurrence of seat or row in the parent pattern. Yet, often the placement, shape, or even existence of a selection of the occurrences in the pattern must be adjusted. For example, the last two seats of each row must be displaced to leave room for the aisle and the last seat of row 12 should be deleted to clear the access to an emergency exit. The specification of the desired selection of occurrences in a hierarchy of patterns is often tedious (involving repetitive steps) or difficult (requiring interaction with an abstract representation of the hierarchy graph). The OCTOR system introduced here addresses these two drawbacks simultaneously, offering an effective and intuitive solution, which requires only two mouse-clicks to specify any one of a wide range of possible selections. On the back-end, it does not require expanding the graph or storing an explicit list of the selected occurrences. It is hence well suited for a variety of CAD applications, including CSG, feature-based design, assembly mock-up, and animation.
Faculty: Jarek Rossignac, jarek@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Justin Jang
Pearling: Interactive Extraction of Tubular Structures From 2D and 3D Images
Location – Room 321
Demo Description: Pearling is a novel approach to the interactive segmentation and modeling of tubular structures from a 2D or 3D image. Given a user-supplied initialization, Pearling extracts runs of pearls (disks in 2D, balls in 3D) from the image, where each pearl is specified by a center position and radius. The runs are combined into a graph, with bifurcations and possibly loops. By treating each pearl’s center and radius parameters as a control point in 3D/4D space, a continuous tubular model is defined via subdivision. Pearling is both computationally efficient and flexible, providing a convenient mechanism for fast, interactive segmentation of a portion of interest in a tubular network.
Faculty: Jarek Rossignac, jarek@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Brian Whited
INTERACTIVE MEDIA TECHNOLOGY CENTER
IMTC is a sister center to GVU co-located on the third floor of TSRB. IMTC undertakes research and development projects in areas similar to GVU, with a more commercial, short-term focus. We collaborate closely with GVU on a number of projects.
IMTC is pleased to present some demos of IMTC/GVU collaborative projects as well as a sampling of other work.
DARPA ASSIST (Advanced Soldier Sensor Information Systems Technology)
Location - 311B
Demo Description: ASSIST is a hardware and software solution that helps soldiers on patrol gather information, generate intelligence, create reports on the spot in the field, and share intelligence in real-time with other soldiers in the field and back at the base. We will be showing a prototype hardware capture platform, as well as ASISSTView, a visual tool to rapidly search data, find events of interest, and generate reports.
Faculty: Ed Price, Peter Presti, Jeremy Johnson, Thad Starner
Students: Tracy Westyn, David Minnen, Dan Ashbrook, Chris Howse, Nirmal Patel
Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Wireless Technology
Location – Room 311B
Demo Description: The Wireless RERC is a federally funded research center looking at wireless technologies and their use by persons with disabilities. The RERC is a joint project of Georgia Tech and the Shepherd Center. We will be discussing this important field and showing prototypes of our work on using wireless devices to provide emergency alerts to persons with disabilities.
Faculty: Ed Price, Maribeth Gandy, Thad Starner, Jeremy Johnson, Brian Jones, Tiffany O'Quinn
MIC (Moving Image Collections)
Location – Room 311B
Demo Description - MIC is a project developed by Georgia Tech, Rutgers University, and the Association of Moving Image Archivists, for the Library of Congress. The project is building a national digital library to search and find moving images in distributed archives across the country. A union catalog of disparate institutions holdings is available for searching, and digital retrieval where available.
Faculty: Tiffany O'Quinn, Peter Presti, Ed Price
Millennium Gate
Location – Room 309
Demo Description: The Millennium gate is a 73 foot high Monumental Arch being built in Atlantic Station in midtown Atlanta, the largest brownfield redevelopment site in the US. IMTC is developing interactive visitor technology for inclusion in the museum in the base of the gate, showcasing the history of Atlanta and the influence of philanthropy on the development of Atlanta and the other great cities in the US. A prototype of the system will be on display. The Gate opens in Spring 2008.
Faculty: Brian Jones, Scott Robertson, Tiffany O'Quinn, Maribeth Gandy, Peter Presti, Jeff Wilson
Searchable Voice Recorder
Location – Room 311B
Demo Description - The searchable voice recorder is a prototype hardware device designed for blind or low vision users to be able to take audio notes, then quickly and easily search for them via audio queries. The system is built upon the patented phonetic search technology developed at IMTC and commercialized by Nexidia, Inc.
Faculty: Jeff Wilson, Jeremy Johnson
Mobile Broadband Gaming
Location – Room 333
Demo Description: We are working to develop a new concept for mobile gaming using multiple players out in the city using media-enabled mobile phones. using 3G networks and video enabled handsets, we have built a prototype game to explore the new paradigm of mobile active gaming as well as to stress the 3G wireless networks to see what changes in network topology, protocols, or bandwidth will be required for future mobile applications.
Faculty: Maribeth Gandy, Jeremy Johnson
Students: Brian Davidson, Fred Stakem
Gates of Paradise
Location - 311B
Demo Description: IMTC worked with Atlanta's High Museum of Art to develop this interactive program to support the exhibition of Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, a set of renaissance doors from the Baptistery in Florence, Italy that are considered a masterpiece of renaissance art, and have recently completed a 25 year restoration process. The interactive program is traveling with three panels from the restored doors that are being exhibited by the High Museum in Atlanta (exhibition complete), the Art Institute in Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Faculty: Brian Jones, Tiffany O'Quinn
CETS-STEM
Location – Room 311B
Demo Description: We are working with Morehouse College on a National Science Foundation-funded effort to teach science to minority high school students through the use of art. The system uses advanced technology such as Augmented Reality to allow students to learn about scientific topics such as light and optics by exploring works of art.
Faculty: Brian Jones, Maribeth Gandy, Scott Robertson, Tiffany O'Quinn
STUDENT POSTER DEMOS
TSRB - 304
Project Title: Reducing Distance Initiative : Bridging the gap between Older Adults and Technology
Team Members: Jasjit Singh, Mohammad Nasir, Ricardo Garcia, Weiguang Wang
Project Title: Battling Childhood Obesity with Technology
Team Members: Chandan Dasgupta, Hyungsin Kim, Anna "Anya" Kogan, Michael "Misha" Novitzky.
Project Title: "Privacy and Technology: Folk Definitions and Behaviors" by Michelle Kwasny
Project Title: "Applications in Persuasive Technology" by Sarah Williams
Project Title: The Voices of Oakland: Creating Dramatic Experiences Over a Mobile Phone
Team Members: Martin Bednar (HCI), Jasper Sluijs (DM)
Demo Index
