Digitainment Symposium Leiden, 11/05/2005 by Stefano Bocconi To explain the event, I will first report how the organizers intended it to be: The topic of the symposium is, as you can expect from the name 'Digitainment', Information technology for entertainment in the future. The speakers will talk about topics like computer games, films, digital storytelling, entertainment robots and video on demand. The central question that this symposium will try to address is: "What will IT-powered entertainment look like in the future?". Three viewpoints will be used to look at the subject: from a business point of view, from a society point of view and from a technological point of view. Each viewpoint will be illustrated by (international) speakers from the business and academical world, who will give an easy-to-follow introduction over their activities and vision about entertainment and Information Technology. From this introduction it is apparent that, at least on paper, there were 'two souls' giving life to the event: a desire to treat a broad range of complex topics (digital storytelling for example) but at the same time to make them accessible to students, the main target group of the day. The presence of Glorianna Davenport looked in my eyes to support the complex topics front, and for this reason and also to meet her again (together with other possible interesting people) I decided to go and attend the symposium. In short, the day really turned out to be more a display of (supposed to be) catchy projects than providing insights in any of the fields discussed in the presentations, confirming the idea that the real force animating the event was to attract labor force to the field, i.e. lurk students into university or industries interested in digital entertainment. Microsoft was the official sponsor, Cap Gemini and Info Support other two sponsors from industry, and almost all technical universities in the Netherlands were the educational sponsors. The chairman of the day was Rob van Kranenburg, whom I did not know but he looks like one of these interesting persons very into multidisciplinary activities and with different collaborations in the academic, policy-making and business worlds (de Balie, Virtual Platform, consultancy). Unfortunately I could not find him during dinner time to know more about how to become a super hero in the Dutch media scene. Glorianna Davenport gave a talk that provided a sort of overview from the MIT Media Lab point of view of the research foci in the last 40 years in the field of media, together with a look at the future. She said that the focus of the 60s-70s was on personalization (I did not quite get why), from 80 to 95 on being digital, from 95 till now on pervasive digital and from now on for the next 10 years will be on augmentation and partership, i.e. application a la Wikipedia (collaborative) but more intelligent (and with media too). Glorianna used several MIT Media Lab projects as examples of the development in media research during the years (a long list indeed). Glorianna, educated as a documentarist, gave her opinion and wish about how narrative is evolving. In her definition, narrative is composed by a teller, a tale, an audience and a system producing the narrative. The role of the teller is shifting from a single person to one or more users, to the point that stories (the tales) will be about ordinary people and made by ordinary people (this is the augmentation and partership the future will bring us according to her). This strongly reminds me about Marc Davis' motivation in collecting metadata from all media-generating human beings, allowing events like the war in Iraq to be told by ordinary people i.s.o. by official sources. After her presentation I went to talk to her, but she was very busy giving an interview and she had to leave shortly after, so I just had a short social talk. The day went on for me with a lecture from Prof. Ryohei Nakatsu about robots and entertainment, his main point being how robots can provide the physical experience that is lacking in screen animations like avatar. You can learn from a robot how to dance, to do tai-chi, you can hug it (her/him) and he showed several impressive videos of robot performing very human like movements, only a bit more slowly and with a background of rusted mechanisms spinning in the background. The second lecture I attended was also from the track Media and interaction, and was given by Dr. Erik Geelhoed from Hewlett-Packard Laboraties in Bristol (UK). He illustrated several projects based on location-related informations, i.e. applications that according to your position in a physical environment like a city provide you with ad-hoc information. An example of this is Riot 1831, a guided audio tour of Queen square in Bristol where a riot took place in 1831. The audio fragments tell the story and are the sounds of the events that took place in different part of the square. The participants could wander around and would get the information depending on their position. It is interesting to notice that from the evaluation of this project resulted that the layman liked it, while people like media students thought they could do better, since nothing was really new in the project's approach (but hey, HP is a company and has practical goals, even tough they partner up with several partners also from academia). I went to that talk because I liked another analogous talk, which was actually better: if you want to read about an interesting mobile application that has something new, have a look at "Uncle Roy all around you" (http://www.uncleroyallaroundyou.co.uk/) or my report about it at http://homepages.cwi.nl/~media/trip-reports/Trends.html The last talk was from Dr. Stefan Grünvogel, one of the founder of Nomads Lab (http://www.nomadslab.org/). Have a look at their homepage as their 'mission statement' is really appealing (at least to me). Unfortunately the talk was very accessible, which during this day was synonymous of trivial, and form me it sparkled shortly when, after presenting the famous 'form follows function" design principle, he counterargumented presenting an experiment entitled "what is beautiful is usable" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V0D-41TMVFN-2&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2000&_alid=138038022&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=5644&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0c87705e4f94b69073b17b286e107846) that showed the correlation about the user-perceived beauty of an Automatic teller machine and the user-perceived usability of the system before and after using it. During the dinner I hang around a bit to see if I could catch some of the speakers, but I only saw Ed Tan heading to the door. While in the queue for food I was also video-interviewed but that was for an internal Microsoft report to the high-level management, so it will not be public, sorry fans.