After having a lecture with Professor David Benyon, at the Centre for Interaction Design at Edinburgh Napier University, Farmingdale and Napier students put their learnings to use and identified commercial examples of Blended Spaces. Blended Spaces in which digital content and physical environments merge. The students identified commercial experiences below and noted whether the blend was “seamless” or “broken” from the users’ point of view. Here are a few examples of their findings.
Farmingdale and Napier Students explore the land sculptures, installations, and artwork of Jupiter Artland.
SUNY Farmingdale State College in NY and Edinburgh Napier University in Edinburgh Scotland have kicked off their five-day Blended Spaces Workshop. Students from both institutions have teamed up at the Centre for Interaction Design to dive deeper into Professor David Benyon’s interaction design research in Blended Theory.
The first-day kick-off meeting focuses on fundamental principles of Blended Theory and its framework. Professor Benyon leads the lecture into looking more closely at Conceptual Blending and the metaphors we use to understand interactive services around us every day. For example, how a waiting line (cue) provides us with an enough contextual, social and visual information so that we don’t confuse a waiting line with a military line waiting in attention.
These principles and more are designed to prepare both Farmingdale and Napier students with a trip to Jupiter Art Land. There we will explore blended spaces in concert with sustainable agriculture.
The Mobile Experiences for Tourism Project has been working closely with nineteenth century period actors and actresses (otherwise known as interpreters) to create augmented reality content to supplement educational lessons at Genesee Country Village & Museum (GCVM). RIT students and faculty from Human Computer Interaction, Computer Science and Imaging Arts & Sciences have created a historically accurate digital narrative that enables visitors to move through GCVM via mobile devices.
“The Mystery of the Missing Child” is our first digital narrative about a girl (Alice) whose younger brother (Jamie) has been missing for several days. Alice requests the aid of the visitor(s) to help her family find her younger brother. With a series of nineteenth century augmented characters, the visitor explores the Pioneer Settlement while learning 19th century, childhood responsibilities (child labor), building materials (blacksmith trade), cultural norms (teachers were harsh), education standards (girls were typically not required to go to school), medical treatments (onions can be used to treat burns) and being bullied as a child is not a new phenomenon. When the visitor concludes the experience, the visitor is presented with a digital representation of their visit and learns the fate of the protagonist.
Levasseur Photography, a small business from recently graduated RIT students, have been doing excellent work creating multimedia videos for augmented reality content. With their artistic direction, we have spent two days at GCVM video shooting actors and actresses recreating historical facts and stories. We had the unique pleasure to create in the Davis Hall, the opera house built in 1884, into an augmented reality green screen studio theatre. With six augmented reality nineteenth century actors and actresses we plan to have our first full feature prototype evaluation starting August 6, 2013. Come on out to GCVM between August 6th–10th to experience our prototype first hand.
