This is a summary of our Equator activities to date, with links to further documentation and websites where applicable. Some of the Equator reports are available to Equator partners only (these are marked with *).
Within Equator we are involved in the following projects in the Playing and Learning theme:
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Storytent is being developed to provide an immersive environment for people to interact within to develop our understanding of interaction within virtual environments. A storytent is a tent onto which images can be projected. The project is led by Nottingham and has involved working with a number of external partners and performance artists. Our role has included developing RF arials and items that we can tag, including wearables for tagging people.
We have actively participated at the following Storytent workshops:
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22-23rd March 2001, Nottingham |
This meeting enabled all interested people to meet each other and discuss early ideas for Storytent. |
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13th June 2001, Sussex |
Here discussions included our options for interacting with the environment within which the tent was placed. We had some ideas from Hayley Newman (performance artist) on her thoughts on the potential Storytent themes e.g. a sort of campsite. |
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2-6th July 2001, Nottingham |
The aim of this workshop was to explore the design of a storytent as a portable immersive environment for interacting with virtual environments. This was our first try at integrating and trying out all the technology (RF arials and tags on people, projections, mimio and torches on the tent walls, a draw pad and touch screen) in situation with real children to find out what they enjoyed and could use. View the workshop report here*, and pictures* are available. |
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Sussex is leading the Hunting of the Snark project. The overall aim of the snark adventure game is to enable pairs of children to collaboratively discover and reflect upon new kinds of experiences in mixed reality spaces. Underlying these experiences are novel forms of causality which provide the basis from which the children can plan their activities in order to precipitate further experiences and interactions. Three key discoveries are:
We have collaborated with Bristol, Nottingham and RCA to date. The following table provides a summary of the meetings and milestone demonstrations we have worked towards.
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14-15th June 2001, Sussex |
This was our initial brainstorming for developing the ideas behind the Hunting of the Snark and what the experience should be, include and look like. The workshop report is available here*. |
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6-8th Aug. 2001, Bristol |
Here we developed a list of technologies required for each base station we wanted in the Snark hunting. After the digestion of many many ideas, each partner indicated what could be achieved in terms of technology development by the next workshop, scheduled for September. Workshop report available here*. |
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14th Sept. 2001, Nottingham |
This was a one day workshop to develop our surround sound within the wardrobe. The floorpads were set up and demonstrated by Sussex and the communication between the Snark engine and Director was demonstrated by Nottingham. |
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24-28th Sept. 2001, Sussex |
This week-long workshop enabled all the Snark partners to get together and integrate each snark base station into the whole snark hunt. A scenario was created that allowed pairs of children to explore each area of the hunt and test out both the ideas and our implementation of the technology. The results provided some good user-experience data from the 4 pairs of children who tested out our work for us. More photos on this workshop can be found here. There are two document outputs from this workshop, a user experience document "Experiencing transforms and traversals through the Snark adventure game"* and the Snark Technical Specification [available soon]. |
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20-22nd Nov. 2001, Nottingham |
A three-day workshop at Nottingham enabled us to try out some changes to the cave (aka wardrobe) and flying jacket experiences. Children from a local school were invited to come and hunt for the snark. More information is available here |
If you have access to the Equator document server the following document is also available:
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Chromarium is a mixed reality environment (MRE) to enable children to explore novel ways of creating and mixing colours. By mixed reality (MR) we mean the experience of interacting with virtual objects in the physical world and physical objects in a digital world. The primary objective of Chromarium was to enable children to both experience and reflect upon their MRE interactions. The Chromarium was designed to enhance collaborative discovery of different types of colour mixing by providing a collection of physical and digital tools whereby colour could be freely explored and experimented on. To enable this we provided a variety of interactions, based on the combination of real, digital and ubiquitous forms.
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The following paper has been written on the Chromarium:
Sussex is leading the Ambient Wood project and is collaborating in this work with Equator members at Nottingham, Bristol, RCA and Southampton. The ambient wood is a mixed reality space located at a local Sussex woodland. A playful learning experience was developed where children explore and reflect upon a physical environment that had been augmented with a medley of digital abstractions. The latter were represented in a number of ambient ways, designed to provoke children to stop, wonder and learn when moving through and interacting with aspects of the physical environment.
A variety of devices and multi-modal displays were used to trigger and present the 'added' digital information, sometimes caused by the children's automatic exploratory movements, and at other times determined by their intentional actions. To this end, a field trip with 'a difference' was created, where children discover, hypothesize about and experiment with biological processes taking place within a physical environment.
Two spaces were designed for the initial trial run, and each activity space offered its own aims with focus on the different kinds of technologies and activities that have an overall link into habitat distributions and dependencies. These aims are: Exploring, Consolidating, Hypothesising, Experimenting, Reflecting. Pairs of children around the age of 10 years collaboratively discover a number of aspects about plants and animals living in the various habitats in the wood. Their experiences are later reflected upon in a 'den' area where both pairs of children share their findings with each other and abstract these to hypotheses of what will happen to the wood long term under various conditions e.g. drought or lack of light through the trees.
Following on from a successful run in 2002, we enhanced the experience for children visiting the wood in June 2003. Building on the experiences of last year we continued exploring our theme of augmenting the experience with digital tools. A sound horn was added in, built by our Bristol partners, to enable the children to have more control over when the sounds within the wood were heard. The sound horn provided a way to access sounds representing processes invisible to the eye or events that had happened at a different time.
Our meetings so far:
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7-9th May 2002, Sussex |
This was our initial brainstorming workshop for developing the ideas behind the ambient wood. Attendees were Nottingham, Bristol, Southampton and Sussex (host). |
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30th May 2002, Southampton |
A one day workshop at Southampton to progress the scenario content, devices and interfaces areas. Attendees were Nottingham, Bristol, Southampton and Sussex. |
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26th June 2002, British Museum |
This was a status report meeting to keep each other in pace and introduce our new RCA member Danielle to the team. Bristol, Southampton, Sussex and RCA attended. |
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26th July 2002, Bristol |
An integration meeting was hosted by Bristol. Bristol, Sussex and Southampton attended. |
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5-8th August 2002, Sussex |
Here we came together for an integration of equipment and first run week. We tried out the elvin network and the MUD software, along with the handheld information devices and den table in the real wood. Two pairs of children came and helped with testing out the experience and finding areas for improvements. Bristol, Sussex, Southampton attended for the integration, Nottingham and RCA joined us for the first run through. More photos on this workshop can be found here. |
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24-27th Sept. 2002, Sussex |
This week-long workshop was our "go-live" trial where we implemented our refinements since the August workshop and ran the experience with 4 pairs of children over 2 days. Bristol, Southampton and Sussex attended for the integration and Nottingham and RCA joined for the full run. More information and photos on this workshop can be found here. |
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23-27th June 2003, Sussex |
Following on from our wet "dry run" early in June 2003, we came together for a week-long workshop involving three days of data collection with children from a local school in Brighton (Varndean). Our children came and explored the wood in pairs again, visiting a number of different habitats and reporting back to the den their findings. The experience was again enhanced with PDAs, moisture and light probes and the sound horn, with an occasional shower of genuine rain. Bristol, Southampton, Nottingham and Sussex worked together during this intensive wood week. A news story from this workshop week appeared in the University of Sussex's Bulletin . |
page last updated 27th June
2003 by Hilary