Public installations provide art, information, and/or interaction with an environment. Sensors and/or personal devices provide a means to interface with these systems.

In this project, the team will study interactive environment design, within an installation context; they will select a purpose for an interactive installation system (this could be "event" style, where users will check out hardware and use it in a specified location and time or "exhibit", where a specific location is computationally augmented). Students will specify the hardware and software requirements for their project, based on those available (either existing in the laboratory, or owned by the team members).

During the course of the project, the team will go through several prototyping stages, iteratively improving the design based on user study feedback. Iterations will proceed from conceptual mockups, to wizard-of-oz style demonstrations, to computationally enhanced environments. Participants are expected to gain knowledge in the areas of interactive installations, game design, environmental sensing, and the real-world use of computation in synesthetic environments. A team that does a thorough job surveying the prior work, evaluates weaknesses in prior contrubutions, and builds upon these contributions to create new ideas in the field of

expected benefits

• learn to develop interactive installation applications that exist in the uncertainty of the real world
• understand advanced sensors; deal with uncertainty and reliability while interpreting values from the device
• learn about information visualization, augmenting the real world with data

design constraints

• system must provide computational augmentation and work in the real world.

bonus objectives

• system includes a meaningful social component (multiplayer, incorporates social network, etc.).
• makes use of Interface Ecology Lab frameworks (ecologylab.xml, OODSS, Interaction Logging Framework).

provided development platform

• Mac workstation with Xcode
• Apple Student Developer Access (for semester; includes ability to publish to App Store)
• Floating license for Max 5
• Interface Ecology Lab Inter-Platform Languages

provided deployment platform

• 4x 32gb iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4
• Mac workstation with 1024x768 projection and amplified audio

required reading

• Art in your Pocket
• selections from Where the Action IS (Paul Dourish) [electronic reserve]
  • 4. "Being-in-the-World": Embodied Interaction (p99-126)
• selections from Rules of Play (Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman) [electronic reserve]
  • 22. Defining Play (p300-311)
• Churchill, E. F., Nelson, L., Denoue, L., Helfman, J., and Murphy, P. Sharing multimedia content with interactive public displays: A case study. In DIS '04: Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems (New York, NY, USA, 2004), ACM, pp. 7–16.
• Scheible, J., and Ojala, T. MobiSpray: Mobile phone as virtual spray can for painting big anytime anywhere on anything. In SIGGRAPH '09: ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 Art Gallery (New York, NY, USA, 2009), ACM, pp. 1–10.
• Aley, E., Cooper, T., Graeber, R., Kerne, A., Overby, K., and Toups Dugas, P. O.Censor Chair: Exploring censorship and social presence through psychophysiological sensing. In MULTIMEDIA '05: Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (New York, NY, USA, 2005), ACM, pp. 922–929.
• Deutscher, M., Hoskinson, R., Takashashi, S., and Fels, S. Echology: An interactive spatial sound and video artwork. In MULTIMEDIA '05: Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (New York, NY, USA, 2005), ACM, pp. 937–945.
• Feldmeier, M., and Paradiso, J. A. An interactive music environment for large groups with giveaway wireless motion sensors. Computer Music Journal. 31, 1 (2007), 50–67.
• Milgram, P., and Kishino, F. A taxonomy of game installation visual displays. IEICE Trans. Information Systems E77-D, 12 (1994), 1321-1329.

required viewing

• SMSlingshot
• Boundary Functions
• Body Paint
• MobiSpray
• six-forty by four-eighty
• Camille Utterback Portfolio
• Small Design Portfolio
• David Rokeby Portfolio

project-specific deliverables

• interaction. -- determine how your piece will engage participants and encourage interaction. how will feedback from your system change the social dynamic? why is changing it in this way valuable? what ideas will participants develop while interacting with your system?
• place. -- installation art is centered around our notions of place and space. find a place that would be suitable for your team's installation idea. photograph it, document it, plan out how you would set up the installtion and integrate it with the environment. this may include blueprint, schematic diagrams, or sketching.
  do this for two seperate locations, and make sure that at least one of the places is somewhere you could install the piece without needing to ask for too much permission. (i.e. an installation in the community garden is more realistic than an installation in the middle of kyle field.)