Exertion Games Lab

Betty wins the Victorian Premier’s Design Award!

Betty, creator-in-residence at the RMIT Exertion Games Lab, led the creative team who designed The Storytelling Machine. This was the major project of her recent Melbourne Knowledge Fellowship and won the Victorian Premiers Design Award for best Digital Design.

The development of this project was proudly supported by the Centre for Game Design Research.

The Storytelling Machine is an interactive media artwork. It is a digital system that delivers a collective story made from crowd-sourced content. The story is told through text and images that are projected onto surfaces in an exhibition space.

Audiences draw characters, place them into a custom-made photo-booth and watch as their characters are instantly animated across video “worlds”. People also contribute short story texts in any language. The machine generates real-time graphics, randomly displaying audience contributions. Ultimately this installation presents a disjointed contemporary narrative; an imprint of what it’s like to live in digitally connected automated cultures where people oscillate between geographic and virtual realities.

Our CHI PLAY’17 publications are now in the ACM Digital Library:

Brandmueller, F., Li, Z. Guts Game – A Game using Ingestible Sensors. CHI PLAY 2017. Student Game Competition Finalist. 625-631.

Li, Z., Brandmueller, F., Mueller, F., Greuter, S. Ingestible Games – Swallowing a Digital Sensor to Play a Game CHI PLAY 2017. Work in Progress. 511-518.

Sargeant, B., Mueller, F., Dwyer, J. Using HTC Vive and TouchDesigner to Projection-Map Moving Objects in 3D Space: A Playful Participatory Artwork. CHI PLAY 2017. Spotlight. 1-11.

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. Life Tree: Understanding the Design of Breathing Exercise Games. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. 19-31.

Mueller, F., Tan, C., Byrne, R., Jones, M. 13 Game Lenses for Designing Diverse Interactive Jogging Systems. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. 43-56.

We presented our 2 papers, Student Game Competition, Work-in-Progress and Spotlight submission at CHI PLAY’17 in Amsterdam! Here is a photo of Zhuying and Felix presenting their latest “Guts” game, for which they designed their own T-Shirts.

Brandmueller, F., Li, Z. Guts Game – A Game using Ingestible Sensors. CHI PLAY 2017. Student Game Competition Finalist. 7 pages.

Li, Z., Brandmueller, F., Mueller, F., Greuter, S. Ingestible Games – Swallowing a Digital Sensor to Play a Game CHI PLAY 2017. Work in Progress. 8 pages.

Sargeant, B., Mueller, F., Dwyer, J., Using HTC Vive and TouchDesigner to Projection-Map Moving Objects in 3D Space: A Playful Participatory Artwork. CHI PLAY 2017. Spotlight. 11 pages.

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. Life Tree: Understanding the Design of Breathing Exercise Games. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. 13 pages.

Mueller, F., Tan, C., Byrne, R., Jones, M. 13 Game Lenses for Designing Diverse Interactive Jogging Systems. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. 14 pages.

Our Interact 2017 full paper is published:

Khot, R., Stusak, S., Butz, A., Mueller, F. 10 Design Themes for Creating 3D Printed Physical Representations of Physical Activity Data . In Proceedings of IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Interact’17. Springer, 85-105.

The Storytelling Machine has been selected as a finalist in the Victorian Premier’s Design Awards: http://www.premiersdesignawards.com.au/entry/the-storytelling-machine/

Congrats Betty and Justin!

Rohit is an invited panel member at the New Interfaces and Future Applications panel at Interact 2017 in Mumbai, India:

https://www.interact2017.org/panels-accepted

We will present the following 3 publications at CHI PLAY’17 in Amsterdam next month:

Brandmueller, F., Li, Z. Guts Game – A Game using Ingestible Sensors. CHI PLAY 2017. Student Game Competition Finalist. 7 pages.

Li, Z., Brandmueller, F., Mueller, F., Greuter, S. Ingestible Games – Swallowing a Digital Sensor to Play a Game CHI PLAY 2017. Work in Progress. 8 pages.

Sargeant, B., Mueller, F., Dwyer, J., Using HTC Vive and TouchDesigner to Projection-Map Moving Objects in 3D Space: A Playful Participatory Artwork. CHI PLAY 2017. Spotlight. 11 pages.

This is in addition to the two papers we already posted:

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. Life Tree: Understanding the Design of Breathing Exercise Games. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. 13 pages.

Mueller, F., Tan, C., Byrne, R., Jones, M. 13 Game Lenses for Designing Diverse Interactive Jogging Systems. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. 14 pages.

RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Nov 10 – 14, 2017

Please join us to celebrate our presentation of The Playground with an artist’s talk by Dr Betty Sargeant and Justin Dwyer on Thursday 17 August 2017 at 6pm at 101 Barkly Street, Ararat.

The Playground, by Dr Betty Sargeant and Justin Dwyer with Professor Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller, features a co-created sculpture, interactive projection mapping and public participation. Small sculptural pieces will be hidden around Ararat’s main street. To find a piece, the public engage in a treasure hunt, following clues on a printed map or released on social media. When they find a piece they can bring it to the exhibition space and connect it onto a sculptural frame. The Playground physically engages the public with public spaces and personalises the experience of art and technology.

You are invited to experiment with taking close-up photos of brightly coloured textures, lights and material surfaces (not faces or figurative images please!) then upload your photo/s (in landscape format) to The Playground Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/ThePlaygroundArt
These photos will be projected onto The Playground sculpture in a very unexpected way.

The project is supported by Ararat Rural City Council, Creative Victoria,RMIT University, Exertion Games Lab and First National Real Estate Ararat

There is now a video of The Playground:

Betty Sargeant ~ Original Concept + Creative Director

Justin Dwyer ~ Creative Director

Florian ‘Floyd” Mueller ~ Project Advisor

The development of The Playground was supported by:

Creative Victoria through Touring Victoria

Ararat Regional Art Gallery

Exertion Games Lab, Centre for Game Design Research, RMIT University

Betty and Justin are presenting the Playground! The Playground is an interactive media art project that features a co-designed sculpture, interactive projection mapping and public participation. A prototype of The Playground was exhibited at Melbourne Knowledge Week 2017 (State Library of Victoria), where we ran a week of play, creative technologies and art activities. During Melbourne Knowledge Week sculptural pieces were hidden around the State Library of Victoria. The public was invited to find these small sculptural pieces, bring them into the Festival Hub and connect them onto a central sculpture.

The Playground‘s next exhibition will be at 101 Barkly Street, Ararat, Australia, 12-20 August, 2017. This event will feature workshops and an interactive prototype presentation

The public can also connect their small sculptural piece onto the large central sculpture. All photos that have been uploaded by the public will be projection mapped onto the central sculpture.

Through The Playground we seek to personalise audience’s experience of art and technology.

We will present two full papers at CHI PLAY’17:

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. Life Tree: Understanding the Design of Breathing Exercise Games. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. 13 pages.

Mueller, F., Tan, C., Byrne, R., Jones, M. 13 Game Lenses for Designing Diverse Interactive Jogging Systems. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. 14 pages.

Marco has a new journal article published: Tamassia, M., Zambetta, F., Raffe, W., Mueller, F. and Li, X. Learning Options from Demonstrations: A Pac-Man Case Study. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games. Volume PP, Issue 99, 2017, 1-7.

Our TOCHI (ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction) has been published:

Mueller, F., Gibbs, M.R., Vetere, F. and Edge, D. Designing for Bodily Interplay in Social Exertion Games. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Volume 24, Issue 3, 2017, 1-41.

Our Edipulse work on combining chocolate 3D printing with quantified self thinking to facilitate playful body-focused experiences has been picked up by the press as a result of Rohit’s presentation at CHI:

Our talks at CHI’17 in Denver, CO, USA are now available online:

Khot, R., Aggarwal, D., Pennings, R., Hjorth, L. & Mueller, F. EdiPulse: Investigating a Playful Approach to Self-monitoring through 3D printed Chocolate Treats. CHI 2017. Long Paper. 15 pages.

Arnold, P. You Better Eat to Survive! Exploring Edible Interactions in a Virtual Reality Game. CHI 2017. Student Game Competition. 4 pages. WINNER

Mueller, F., Young, D. Five Lenses for Designing Exertion Experiences. CHI 2017. Long paper. 15 pages

Mueller, F., Khot, R.A., Gerling, K. and Mandryk, R. Exertion Games. Foundations and Trends Human–Computer Interaction 10, 1 (2017), 1-86. (presented at special Foundations and Trends session at CHI’17)

Peter Arnold won the CHI Student Game Competition, category “Innovative Interface”, at CHI’17 in Denver, CO, USA! He was already a finalist, and presented his game over two days to a set of 6 international judges and thousands of conference attendees.

Acceptance rate for the competition was 39%. Congratulations Peter!

Peter and the judges.

A happy Peter!

This work explores edible interactions in a Virtual Reality game, highlighting how replacing sensory input in VR offers unique playful social experiences through the other senses. Results from this work can facilitate novel playful digital eating experiences and inform the teaching of what it means to eat well.

Thank you to Alex Joseski for the video work.