News

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is giving a talk in the HCI group at Hasso-Plattner Institute at Potsdam University in Germany on “What I’d wish I’d known before becoming an academic” on 11 Nov 2016 at 3.30-4.30pm.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is the opening keynote speaker at the GameZFestival’16 in Zurich, Switzerland. GameZfestival is a festival “for the culture of game, play and gamedesign” from 4-6th of November 2016.

Want to be a senior academic in games? We have a job opening as Senior Lecturer in Games:

http://yourcareer.rmit.edu.au/mob/caw/en/job/555916/senior-lecturer-games-design

Our presentations at CHI PLAY 16 are live now, congrats to Ruth and especially Rich, who won an Honorable Mention award:

Paper:

Huerga, R.S., Lade, J., Mueller, F. Designing Play to Support Hospitalized Children. CHI PLAY 2016. Full paper. ACM. 401-412.

Paper:

Byrne, R., Marshall, J., Mueller, F. Balance Ninja: Towards the Design of Digital Vertigo Games via Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation. CHI PLAY 2016. Full paper. ACM. 159-170.

Sarah Jane Pell has been interviewed by The Glacier Hub about her Mt Everest Adventure and subsequent Ubicomp paper:

Technology in Adventure: Lessons from an Everest Attempt

Paper:

Mueller, F., Pell, S.J. Technology meets Adventure: Learnings from an Earthquake-Interrupted Mt. Everest Expedition. Ubicomp’16. Full paper. ACM. 817-828. Talk video.

We received an “Honorable Mention” for Rich’s Digital Vertigo Game work at CHI PLAY’16 in Austin, TX, USA!

The paper:

Byrne, R., Marshall, J., Mueller, F. Balance Ninja: Towards the Design of Digital Vertigo Games via Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation. CHI PLAY 2016. Full paper. ACM.

Vertigo experience during the presentation at CHI PLAY: pic.twitter.com/VTt1CElwZj

We will present two full papers and a work-in-progress at CHI PLAY 2016 in Austin, Tx, USA:

Byrne, R., Marshall, J., Mueller, F. Balance Ninja: Towards the Design of Digital Vertigo Games via Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation. CHI PLAY 2016. Full paper. ACM.

Huerga, R.S., Lade, J., Mueller, F. Designing Play to Support Hospitalized Children. CHI PLAY 2016. Full paper. ACM.

Andres, J., de Hoog, J., von Känel, J., Berk, J., Le, B., Wang, X., Mueller, F. Exploring Human – eBike Interaction to Support Rider Autonomy. CHI PLAY 2016. Work-in-Progress. ACM. 85-92.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is giving a talk in the HCI group at the Hasso-Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany, on 13 Oct 2016, 2pm, on two topics: “Designing digital vertigo play” and “Designing games for kids in hospital”.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is giving a talk at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, at 22 Sept 2016, 2pm, in the Amalienstr. 17: “Designing Interactions for an Active Human Body”

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller and Sarah Jane Pell’s talk at Ubicomp’16 is available now:

Associated paper:

Mueller, F., Pell, S.J. Technology meets Adventure: Learnings from an Earthquake-Interrupted Mt. Everest Expedition. Ubicomp’16. Full paper. ACM. 12 pages

We are looking for emerging researchers as part of our Vice-Chancellor’s Fellowship Scheme (details below). We are therefore seeking emerging researchers interested in human-player interactions, in particular the intersection between HCI/Interaction design and games, especially play experiences that put the body in the centre of the experience. If interested, please contact us via email with the words “FELLOWSHIP” in uppercase in the subject field to discuss mutual research interests along with your CV well before the deadline below.

Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme

RMIT University is now inviting applications from emerging researchers who have the potential to become high performing researchers.  Applications close:  4 September 2016.

These 3 year Fellowships are aimed at recent PhD graduates with up to 5 years’ experience post award of PhD (relative to opportunity) or those who will shortly satisfy the requirements for the award of PhD. Fellowship recipients will be located in Schools and undertaking research which is aligned with at least one of RMIT’s 8 Enabling Capability Platforms.

Benefits:

The Research and Innovation Portfolio will fund 100% of salary and on-costs (up to Academic level B/2) for a period of three years, plus a research support allowance of  $10,000 per annum for the three years.

The School will support the Fellow with:

•  a research only position, embedded in a high performing research team for at least the duration of their VC Postdoctoral Fellowship;
•  any relocation and visa costs;
•  workplanning which includes mentoring and research training and development planning;
•  full support for the appointee as per any academic staff member, including but not limited to, space and infrastructure sufficient for the position.

If you have any questions or queries regarding the Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme, or the VC Outstanding Researcher Scheme more generally, please visit the website.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is visiting the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, in particular Narcis Pares from the Cognitive Media Technologies Group, who are famous for their interactive playground works, especially the interactive slide, on Fri, 22 Jul 2016.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is giving a talk on “Designing Interactions for an Active Human Body” at RMIT Europe in Barcelona, Spain, on 21 Jul 2016, 1pm.

The Adventure paper by Floyd and Sarah has been accepted to Ubicomp’16, to be presented in Heidelberg, Germany, in September. Acceptance rate was 23.9%.

Summary: Based on an earthquake-interrupted Mt. Everest expedition, we propose seeing adventure-technology through 2 dimensions (expected-unexpected and instrumental-experiential) and identify four roles: technology as coach, rescuer, documentarian and mentor.

Mueller, F., Pell, S.J. Technology meets Adventure: Learnings from an Earthquake-Interrupted Mt. Everest Expedition. Ubicomp’16, ACM, 12 pages

Floyd’s radio interview on SYN‘s panorama program about mixed-reality games:

Floyd is going to be on the radio today talking about mixed-reality games and in particular Pokemon Go:

4.30 pm AEST on 90.7 FM for Panorama, SYN‘s flagship news and current affairs show.

We have a new book chapter out:

Mueller, F. Designing for the active human body in a digital-material world. In: Sarah Pink, Elisenda Ardèvol and Lanzeni, D. eds. Digital Materialities – Design and Anthropology, Bloomsbury, 2016. 137-156

Betty has won the Consensus Innovation Award!

Justin picked up the award last night in Sydney for Betty (while she is still in Beijing) and delivered the acceptance speech for her.

“The Consensus Innovation Awards recognise excellence in Australian and New Zealand companies. The stringent  judging process focuses on innovation, performance and potential. The 2016 award was presented to Betty Sargeant in recognition of the ‘rigorous research’ behind the design of her children’s educational story app ‘How Far is Up?’. The award also recognises the innovative nature, performance and the wider market potential of Betty’s work.”

Consensus is the organizer of Consensus Awards and was established in 1999 and runs 7 Awards Programs, all focused on identifying the most innovative technology designed and developed in Australia. Consensus have over 120 registered judges and an envious track record (9 out of 10) of identifying the best technologies that have gone on to perform exceptionally well internationally. They call it: “The Most Successful Awards Program in the World”.

Thank you everyone who participated in our Jogging at CHI SIG in San Jose, it was a wonderful day to run and talk about sports and HCI!

Mueller, F., Marshall, J.,Khot, R.A., Nylander, S., Tholander, J. Jogging at CHI. CHI 2016. SIG Special Interest Group (organizing). 4 pages