Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

Ontario Augmented Reality Network (Lies Here)

At the Immersive Worlds conference they have a half-day dedicated to the Ontario Augmented Reality Network. This network is based in Toronto, Niagara and London (Ontario.) They have academic partners, commercial partners and government.

Robert MacDougall from Western gave the first talk about augmented reality games. He argued that history is the original transmedia narrative. You have books, movies, statues, plaques and so on. The historical plaque or statue is an old fashioned form of augmented reality annotation. They “superimpose information on reality” the way QR tags can.

Tecumseh Lies Here (PDF) is an augmented reality game that plays with history that MacDougall is developing. The game will be run this summer (which is why parts of the article linked are blacked out.) Lies here is a game for the conference launched from QR tags that show different versions of plaques that tell different versions of local history.

Now I have to get up an play.

Dyson and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games

At Interacting with Immersive Worlds J. P. Dyson gave a great talk about “Immersion In and Out of Virtual Worlds.” He is the Director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) in Rochester which is associated with the Natioal Museum of Play and the National Toy Hall of Fame.

He mentioned how some of the toys inducted into the Hall of Fame include the Cardboard Box and Stick.

The ICHEG has some 27,000+ artifacts including video games, game system hardware, arcade games (in cabinets) and papers from people like Ralph H. Baer and Will Wright’s. They have an interesting interpretative framework online titled, Concentric Circles: A Lens for Exploring the History of Electronic Games (see bottom of page for link to PDF).

Dyson’s talk traced a history from toy soldiers (H. G. Wells and “Floor Play”) to Dungeons and Dragons to text adventure games. He talked about Romanticism and changes is our ideas about childhood and play. He talked about the new (for Victorians) places for play like the nurseries and gardents, the availability of toys, and the leisure time for play or other foms of immersion (like reading novels.) I’m convinced we need to pay a lot more time to the history of toys and children’s play in order to understand computer games.

BBC – Domesday Reloaded

Thanks to Paul I came across the BBC Domesday Reloaded. The original Domesday Book was commissioned in 1085 by William the Conqueror.In 1986 the BBC published a Laser-Disk based Domesday Project that gathered articles, amateur photographs and other materials. The Laser-Disk Project only ran on a properly configured BBC computer which was hard to find in Canada. I actually played with the system (and the Domesday Project) when I was working at the University of Toronto Computing Services. It was a phenomenal example at the time of computer-based multimedia even though it was limited to a particular play-back system.

Now the Project has been remediated for the web by the BBC as Domesday Reloaded. You can search the content and the places. They have crowdsourcing features to let people add an updated article about a place. Some of the content seems to be inaccessible from outside the UK.

Game Pitches

Sean sent me to Game Pitches: The repository for video game pitches and design documents. The actual documents are in Scribd and they have about 35 documents at the moment. It is good to see such documents being gathered and made available. The site is aimed at helping game designers:

This site serves to be a free resource to game designers offering them the web’s largest single collection of game design documents and game pitches. Be they famous or obscure, big or small, successful or not, this site is intended to be a resource for learning how better to design and pitch games in the spirit of sharing information and improving the state of the art through freely available knowledge. Let’s make great games! 🙂 (From the About page.)

In the academy we also need to think about archiving such documents. We should find ways to help such projects.

NFB: Out My Window

Joyce pointed me to a National Film Board (NFB) interactive work, Out My Window: Interactive Views from the Global Highrise. The work, directed by Katerina Cizek documents the lives of people in apartments through their apartments. For each apartment there is a 360 degree view that you can pan around (sort of like QuickTime VR.) Certain things can be clicked on to hear and see short documentaries with the voice of the dweller. These delicate stories are very effective at giving us a view of apartment life around the world.

Does information wants to be free?

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “information wants to be free” by Steward Brand according to Chris Anderson in Free: the future of a radical price (see chapter 6). Brand originally saw this as a paradox between information want to be expensive and wanting to be free,

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. (Brand, 1984)

Anderson in Chapter 6 of Free goes back to Brand to find out why he anthropomorphized information instead of saying “information should be free.”  (Brand felt it sounded better and that it focused attention on information, not people.)

While the phrase is memorable as it is (and because it ascribes intention to information) I suspect it would be more accurate to say that “information infrastructure is designed to promote free access.” The web was not designed to facilitate payment for information (as Ted Nelson imagined his Xanadu docuverse would be.) The design and economics of our infrastructure brought the cost of publishing and dissemination down to the cost of having an internet connection and an account on a server. That made it easy for all sorts of people who have non commercial reasons for sharing information to publish free information. It did not, however, mean that all information is available free. There are still people who resist sharing information for all sorts of reasons. In particular I am interested in indigenous communities that resist sharing their stories because that would turn them into information. Their stories are meant to be told in a context by someone who has rights to that story to others who are ready for the story. Posting it on the net decontextualizes the story and reduces it to mere information which in its freedom is neither really free or informative as the original telling.

For a useful web page on the phrase, its origin and uses of the aphorism see Roger Clarke’s ‘Information Wants to be Free’.

Making Books : Encyclopaedia Britannica Films : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

On Boing Boing I cam across a reference to this Encyclopedia Britannica short video on Making Books (Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, 1947). It is remarkable how many specialized machines there were for printing books. Nicely reminds us of a moment in the history of information technology.

IEEE Spectrum: Ray Kurzweil’s Slippery Futurism

From Slashdot I was led to a great critique of Kurzweil’s futurism, see the IEEE Spectrum: Ray Kurzweil’s Slippery Futurism. I’ve tried to tackle Kurzweil in previous posts here (on Singularity University), but never quite nailed his form of prediction the way John Rennie does.

Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil’s brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books, and to have cofounded Singularity University, where executives and others are paying quite handsomely to learn how to plan for the not-too-distant day when those disappearing computers will make humans both obsolete and immortal.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 20th anniversary

From Humanist I found out that the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) recently celebrated its 20th anniversary on November 28th, 2010. BMCR is a hybrid e-journal with print backup for classicists that has been edited for all these years by James O’Donnell and others. On the 28th he posted a message about the 20th anniversary that includes the original post. The original post includes how to FTP back issues – a technology we no longer have to teach.