The G3 research team are preparing for their first field research session this coming weekend. They are planning to snowball the initial research sessions- a program of microethnographies of gestural game-play- into an expanded array of game players. They have an ongoing request for people who are willing to be interviewed and videotaped while playing games on the Wii digital game console.
Amanda got a few more gestural input mechanisms prototyped on the “modular pong prototyping platform” and is integrating the work that Shyam did on that earlier this week so that it’s easy to switch around and compare many different
control gestures. She also worked with Lynn wrestling with budget and funding planning as well as organising an overview of the TAG lab’s activities. A more procedural and visual representation of our research is now visible on one wall of the lab.
The LuV team have been focussing on hand-held devices as platforms for their projects. Perhaps most importantly, they bought an ipod touch (32G), downloaded Leaf Trombone, I am T-Pain, Spider (and am getting better at eating bugs) as well as a few accelerometer percussion apps. This research unit has been playing around with VocaForm, an iPhone/Touch performance synth app as application worth exploring for then Victorianator. Has anyone played with this one before?
Heather has made a bit of progress on was research for various engines to develop iPhone games. Unity is well known but she would like to look at others, such as GameSalad, Cocos2D and others based on Blender and compare. She has also entertained the possibility of exploring other platforms, primarily Google’s Android.
Peripherally, Jason is developing an outline for an intermedia project to be installed in the MB Atrium during Congress in May, and this one time poetry-installation project got him thinking about new media applications of old media, so that has to be useful for the Victorionator.
The 5a7 Symposium featured a lot more coding, with an introduction to game prototyping software for the assembled crowd, and Amanda gave a quick demo of the controller testing system she and Shyam are working on. Katian and Adam are initiating the process of creating a (grad) student’s organisation to support the symposium and non-faculty researcher’s TAG related work.