Published at April 2, 2008
in Thesis.
Emitting User Experience through Alternate Reality Games
Keywords: Alternate Reality Game, ARG, User Experience, Fiction, Narration, Immersive Story
In a world where the internet blurs out the border between reality and fiction it becomes harder for internet users to clearly see that distinction. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) make a handy use of this vague distinction by putting fictive stories on the “real” internet. Stories are told by a mix of new and traditional media, artefacts placed in the real world and live happenings.
This master thesis focuses on the user experience generated by ARGs. ARGs have the power of submerging people into a story and bringing them together. This research is focused on why and how this happens, how spontaneous the user cooperation is and how ARG designers can and have to anticipate on this.
For this research an ARG was made and run in a high school. The ARG used some of the school Urban Legends told by the people in the school. One of them is that the school contains a high concentration of asbestos. The asbestos is the start of a string of strange events. During the ARG the focus is on how people will cooperate and how they experience the story.
The slower and woven story of an ARG gives a total new look on how stories can be told. Thanks to this method of narration, ARG designers can give the users an unique experience, they can more efficiently submerge the users into a fictive reality.
Published at March 18, 2008
in Blog.
I’m very sorry and would like to apologize to all my lecturers for not keeping this blog up to date. I see 4 months have pasted since my last post and I’m sorry for not keeping people informed like should be the case.
I have 2 reasons for this: my thesis isn’t going like I planned it would go and the modules didn’t require me to blog. Now I realize that I should have kept blogging. More sooner than later I will upload some stuff I made the last months. I also update my thesis proposition and so on. I’m not going any further into apologizing, no I will start blogging again.
A short list of what you might expect:
- Some stuff and the blog we made for Experimental Media
- Some processing gadgets I made the last months and the 3D model we made for Experiency
- Some interesting YouTube movies, that I want you to see!
Furthermore expect the same old stuff!
Yesterday we got a lecture from Bart, he finally returned from daddy vacation. Some intresting views on media and how medium, concept, message and format all go hand in hand but sometimes stay the same, sometimes not.
During the afternoon session me and my group went filming. I’m not going to go deep into what we filmed because that will spoil the concept. Only thing is that we filmed with the HTC and it actually went quite alright concerning quality and way of filming.
Published at October 23, 2007
in Art Lab.
Yesterday we started working with Pure Data. I already had some classes in Pure Data when I was in Sweden so it was all in all not that hard to follow the basics that were educated. I like the way how Pure Data feels, the graphical way of programming makes it a very friendly and exploring development environment. I hadn’t my laptop with me in class so basically I did nothing but today I went through the tutorials that were demo’d. First time that I used GEM today, in Sweden they didn’t mention GEM. Basically you can use it for making 2D and 3D visuals of data parameters.
I also gave a short presentation of what we did last year in Sweden. For the ones still interested in it: the photos that I showed.
Okay first of all, I installed Windows Mobile 6.0 on our HTC TyTN. It’s not realy a new version of Windows Mobile on first looks just some updates to make it more feel and look like Windows Vista. Than I installed Flash Flash Player 7 for Pocket PC. A bit unfortunate because the Flash Media Server Components work uptimized for Flash 8 off course…
Now the big test of today was to check if I could use the cam and mic on my PDA as a webcam. If that would be possible than we could make flash aps that can record. Now I had some trouble reverse engineering a delivered test application (can be seen in action here) so it would work on Flash 7 so that I could open it on my PDA. Now eventually after some Hocus Pocus it worked and I could open this site on my pda. I had a clear reception on my PDA of the stream that was recorded on my laptop, it had like a delay of half to full a second. I could enter text on my PDA, only thing that didn’t work was that I wasn’t able to send out either an audio nor a video stream from my PDA.
In fact I’m still looking for something to make my cam work as a webcam on my PDA. For pc there are many software programs to do this. I already found something that makes a webcam from your pda, so you can use your pda as a webcam on your pc, but that is not what I’m looking for, however I’m going to give it a shot, you never know it works ;). The software to do this is WebCamera Plus from ATEKsoft, check it out they have some other cool software for your pda as well. However I have a feeling that CoolCamera (also from Ateksoft) might do the trick. I’m checking this out later this evening.
If somebody knows a solution to this problem please let me know 
Edit: in the mean time I made a forum post on the ATEKsoft website with a request for aid.
Some updates of this week, from now on every day updates because I otherwise forget what I’m doing…
Master Thesis: All goes well, bought some books. I’m going through some research papers at the moment. I’m also busy with making some sketches of a game that I want to run during the months November and December. More details this evening when I digitalized all my notes.
Art Lab: For art lab I’m on track for my end project. The thing is that we must make a kind of a mapping. It must be a new media installation that interacts with the public. For the moment I’m working on how people leave traces and how that in a way leaves a mapping of a person, think of bookmarks, going through them tells a lot about the person.
Last week we got ourselves a cool pre presentation of some work. Shortly said it where some laptops that were mounted on some small “cars”. There was a complete set up that made it possible to know where the laptops where and how they were orientated in the area. The screens of the laptops where the representation of what was visible “through” the screens of a movie. So you had to move the laptops to see the complete movie. The screens where thus kinda digital key holes where you could look through.
Experimental Media: Cool courses, straight to the point, only is the assignment not yet very clear to me. However the groups are chosen and I’m leader of my group. This weekend I’m going through some technical stuff; seeing how the Flash Media Services work and what kind of stuff we can do with it. We also got ourselves a PDA/smartphone a cool HTC TyTn.
I bought a new iPod, well I just bought an iPod because I needed an mp3 player to kill the lonely moments on the train and stuff. I bought one in Media Markt. I saw a new type of iPod, hell did I know that there were new iPod Nano. (So that is about how far my Apple love goes) So I had to phone my best friend Sam (Mac addict numero uno, Jobs if you need a stand-in for your keynotes, he’s the guy!) to ask if they weren’t skamming me off with some phoney-iPod-look-a-like-mp3-player.
In the end I bought the silver one, I actually asked a light gray one, but the guy quickly told me it was a silver one. I wonder if have to write it with a capital S or not… Anyway proud of my 200 dollar investment I was telling everybody that I might turn into a mac geek after all. Big was the disappointment that in only a mear two hours my brand new iPod crashed.
It did nothing, the screen froze, the wheel and buttons didn’t respond anymore, the letters of the menu were messed up. I tried everything resetting it like the manual told me, it didn’t do jack shit. On the internet I found that an alternative way of resetting it is holding center button and menu simultaneously. Luckily it worked than, it was hooked up at my pc and it started and so I was able to reset it completely…
Make a mapping about your life, do it with pictures. I am a guy that travels the world through the web. I like reading blogs being busy with ads and techy stuff… I had the idea of making photos about all the web sites I frequently visit (Okay I filtered some ;)). The result you can view here:
http://cmdstud.khlim.be/~nlin/artlab/web/
The internet is about discovering and experiencing products. At least that is what a lot of internet companies should aim for when they are making a website for a customer. These two car sites realy give you a nice experience and you want to go and discover that car. A movie is seen and than you can scroll through the movies to see the features of the cars. A bit strange that two concepts are so similar but than again both did a good job both in production and art direction!
Ford Mondeo
Audi R8
