MASTER`S PROJECTS

Shiftbrowse
by Abhishek Gupta
[website]

ShiftBrowse is a unique browser geared towards multi-tasking, that visualizes the smaller representations of all opened web pages called Shifters, in a hierarchical, intelligent tree map, instead of conventional tabs that are placed linearly on the tab-bar and used in almost all contemporary browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. It also introduces the concept of a ShiftList - a current page centric tabbed navigation list, showing all parents and either siblings or children of the page depending on the existence of its children. This enables using tabs for quickly navigating to web pages that may be most relevant.

Strip Mall Ethnography
by Adam Rice
[website]

Strip Mall Ethnography explores the dynamic creation of
urban space with a focus on strip malls. The extremely subjective
nature of the project and its labeling as ethnography lends an ironic
tension to the work. As a whole, Strip Mall Ethnography seeks to
document one person's perspective within Atlanta strip malls and to
provoke critical investigation of the tools we use to represent and
engage urban spaces and so-called objective data online.

The Identity Share Project
by Daniel Upton
[website]

While many social communities exist on the web, they generally consist solely of networks of friends, family, and co-workers. Those that do offer the ability to learn about or meet other people are either dating sites or forums based around a single interest. The Identity Share Project approaches the social network from a new angle, facilitating the sharing of identities with others outside of standard networks while not limiting the connections between strangers to a matched subset. Design Document

Conflict Engine: Privileging Drama in Drama Management
by Micah Horvat
[website]

Aristotle and Freytag identify conflict as a motivator of plot progression. The plot curve they describe refers to dramatic tension, an abstract quality correlated with conflict, or crises. It is difficult to imagine authorship or interpretation of dramatic narrative without an understanding of conflict.

Existing interactive storytelling systems focus on simulating complex models of semiotics, physical spaces, and the mind, but do not consider conflict as a computational primitive. Conflict Engine represents conflict as a collection of conflict objects in a story world, tracks these objects through a plot progression, and compares them to a conflict curve representing the fluctuation of conflict through a plot, in order to render interactive drama.

Mechanics of Cooperative Social Environments in Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplay Games
by Christopher Langston
[website]

This project proposes a framework of game mechanics under which players of competitive online games can develop complex social structures that directly impact the evolution of communities within the game space. While many AAA titles support both cooperative and competitive play, few have attempted to integrate these two aspects of play into a single experience. Instead, games operate competitively and cooperatively in parallel, maintaining a fairly strict distinction between the two modes of play. The mechanical framework presented here attempts to bridge the gap between competition and cooperation by providing an appealing play experience through construction of complex social structures. These structures are built and sustained through conflict between players, as well as cooperation between groups of varying size. By making it mechanically appealing to create complex social structures, the game world becomes a habitat within which real-world hierarchies and political structures can be adapted to exist as player-driven entities.

Virtual IKEA: Principles of Integrating Dynamic 2D Content in a 3D Virtual Environment
by Paul Amsbary
[website]

IKEA.com, with a database of thousands of furniture items and customization options, is a rich environment in which to explore the interaction framework of a complex ecommerce experience. This project is a web-based application in which consumers are present in a real-time 3D environment.

The project explores the design implications and intersections between rich media 2D and real-time 3D interactive environments. The design research examines how the choices in 3D virtual spaces are reflected and visualized in the 2D components of the application and how a user transitions between a 2D navigation structure integrated with or adjacent to, a 3D virtual environment.

Virtual IKEA examines the assignment of directional value to navigation movement in the environment and the relationship of those assignments in different spaces of the application. Project explores a broad range of examples, including experiments in interactive television, console video games, websites, and emerging 3D platforms.

Tagging for TV
by Angelique Lausier
[website]

In recent years, television has developed from a limited set of shows constrained by a fixed timeslot into a veritable viewer’s choice of channels, shows, and times. In addition, we have seen the rise of the complex episodic series that encourages replay. This increased complexity, however, has not been met with a more sophisticated solution for navigating shows. The Internet, however, has grown into a media-rich, customizable experience for users who have become familiar with the concept of tagging items with keywords to foster the organization of a network. Broadcast has begun to merge with broadband in many forms, but viewers still have little to help them navigate through a show. This project, Tagging for TV, brings tagging from the Internet to television as a social, viewer-generated means of organizing data.

The Virtual TV Couch: Enabling Shared Viewing Experiences of Television for Micro-social Networks
by Sergio Goldenberg

Watching television is not only an entertainment or aesthetic experience, it is also a social experience that is capable of triggering conversation and discussion, and of creating special communities around its programming.

Currently, the television industry has not been able to offer an adequate product that facilitates the interaction of viewers who are watching the same program, but who are not in the same physical space. In fact, current interactive television applications available focus on programming guides, video-on-demand, and voting features, but not communication tools. Some people have solved this problem using other kinds of communication devices. For example, there are people who talk on the phone while watching television so they can discuss the programs they are watching. This project develops novel interactive television applications that enable enhanced communication to promote the sharing of experiences and active discussions of small viewing groups, such us those composed of family members, friends, and classmates.

Key and Lock Puzzles in Procedural Gameplay
by Calvin Ashmore
[website]

This project is an attempt to model and simulate key and lock puzzles in the style of Shigeru Miyamoto games, specifically the Zelda and Metroid series. Much of the gameplay in these titles is oriented around encountering obstacles, and then locating an item that allows the player to circumvent the obstacle.

The project is built on top of Charbitat, another project built on Unreal Tournament 2004, which produces procedurally generated space in response to the player's actions.

Switchboard: A real-time art toolkit
by Jeffrey Crouse
[website]

Emerging technologies have made it possible for artists to use a wide range of live, external data sources to give their work relevance and impact. Works that use these live data sources share certain strategies, values, and influences. Not only does this type of art have much artistic potential, but it can help the Web by encouraging the development of machine-understandable, Semantic data formats. What kind of tools would give some coherence to real-time art and facilitate its creation?

Broadband News Aggregator
by Negar Farhi
[website]

The dramatic increase in the amount of news content available has created the problem of finding what is actually of interest to the individual viewer. It has become harder to keep up with all the news information available and there is a great need for effective filtering mechanisms. Broadband News Aggregator proposes a broadband interactive TV application that delivers news from multiple sources. The prototype offers features such as feedback, enhanced content, immediate access, archive and retrieve, and personalization.

On-Demand Advertising Model for Digital Television
by Engin Erdogan
[website]

An on-demand advertising interface, where the ads are visible if and only if they are triggered by the viewers.

This project is based on the assumption that if the medium is desaturated from deceptive advertising conventions, and more user friendly ones are introduced, consumers will be eager to explore ads.

Lab 27: Learning About Biology
by Grace Ou, Jeff Weese
[website]

An example of the possible use of experiential media in the classroom - a 3D real-time virtual environment of a eukaryotic cell to augment teaching core concepts in cell biology to beginning life science students.

eLive Sports
by Drew Cogswell
[website]

eLive Sports is an Enhanced Digital Television service designed to enhance the experience of watching and interacting with broadcast sports. The service delivers real-time game data and player statistics, on-demand video of game plays, custom highlight reels, and customizable game and player notifications, all within a single television medium.

Agency: A Character Centric Role-Playing Game
by Heather Logas
[website]

The table top role-playing game offers an experience unique in the gaming world, an experience somewhere between interactive narrative, improvisational performance, and games. It has the potential to allow for powerful moments of transportation of a player into the role of another person in another time and another place. Although many attempts have been made at translating the role-playing game into the digital medium, this sense of transportation has never been successfully carried over.

Bronc Busters, Bomb Designers and Me
by Gunthar Hartwig
[website]

Bronc Busters, Bomb Designers and Me is a multi-media documentary work on DVD-Video. There are two components to the piece. The first is an exploration of the United States defense laboratories located in the town of Livermore, California. This element combines personal memoir, interviews, and historical research to paint a picture of the community. The second component is a work of experimental documentary that incorporates interactive digital technologies and storytelling techniques. These techniques were selected for their ability to enhance the presentation of the content and provide a more powerful experience for the viewer.

Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, and Worlds (thesis)
by Chaim Gingold
[website]

Discusses the structure, construction, and aesthetics of game worlds, branching possible worlds, point of view in games, and the design of Comic Book Dollhouse.

The Crystal Cabinet
by Stephen Guynup

The Crystal Cabinet is a VRML piece which gives a visual voice to William Blake's text. Virtual space offers a unique opportunity to fold meaning and metaphor inside an explorable enironment. Although The Crystal Cabinet is a 3D environment, it is not a game. Because this is not what most viewers are accostomed to when entering 3D environments, we decided to pull our content from an earlier artist, poet and visionary in order to help set the stage for a greater understanding of the medium. It is poetry that surrounds, a painting becomes a journey, a realization of the philosophy of William Blake.

Triptych
by Alex Cook, Yu-Cheng (James) Hsu

Triptych is a digital installation that explores the narrative possibilities of a hybrid environment. The three sided architecture merges with a projected video, sound, and the image to create a dynamic story space. Unlike the cinema screen or computer monitor, Triptych gives the viewer multiple perspectives and an active role in the experience through their own participation and performance. When viewing the installation, navigation becomes a physical act. Users choose which screen to view and what characters to follow. Their users spatial location creates their narrative perspective and their trajectory determines the outcome.

CinemaScape
by Patrick Quattlebaum
[website]

CinemaScape allows researchers to analyze, annotate and compare films in a collaborative environment. The project integrates multiple tools from film studies into a single interface, bringing scholarship closer to the the object it examines and comments upon.

Reliving Last Night
by Sarah Cooper

Reliving Last Night is an interactive narrative video in which the protagonist, Claire, lives out the possibilities of her parallel lives at the whim of the interactor. The interactor can both influence the story by making choices for Claire and navigate between the alternate realities that these decisions generate. Claire wakes up one morning and finds herself in a small mystery. Upon returning to her room from her shower, she finds something or someone tossing about in her bed, and she can't remember who or what it could be. The story flashes back to the previous night. Throughout the story the interactor is signaled by filmic conventions to choose what Claire wears, what drinks she serves and what music she plays.

Bufordhighway
by Michael Mosley

bufordhighway is a multiform interactive narrative. There are two primary characters (and, correspondingly, two primary story-lines) who are travelling, over a four hour period, on or near Buford Highway. These characters are located, at every moment, at one of thirty-six spatial locations. Corresponding to both locations and character actions, are seventy-six brief sub-stories which are tied to the central narrative. Two spatial mapping systems allow the user to interact with these characters, locations, and sub-stories.