Andruid Kerne

Streaming on twitch: fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media

Previously, video streaming sites were at the fringes of online social media. In the past two years, live streams of video games, on sites such as Twitch.tv, have become very popular. Live streams serve as meeting grounds for player communities. The Twitch streaming medium combines broadcast video with open IRC chat channels. In conjunction with gameplay, viewer participation and community building gain emphasis. Twitch streams range in size and nature, from intimate communities with fifty viewers, to massive broadcasts with tens of thousands. In this paper, we present an ethnographic investigation of the live streaming of video games on Twitch. We find that Twitch streams act as virtual third places, in which informal communities emerge, socialize, and participate. Over time, stream communities form around shared identities drawn from streams? contents and participants? shared experiences. We describe processes through which stream communities form, the motivations of members, and emergent issues in the medium. Finally, we draw from our findings to derive implications for design of live mixed-media environments to support participatory online communities.

ZeroTouch: an optical multi-touch and free-air interaction architecture

ZeroTouch (ZT) is a unique optical sensing technique and architecture that allows precision sensing of hands, fingers, and other objects within a constrained 2-dimensional plane. ZeroTouch provides tracking at 80 Hz, and up to 30 concurrent touch points. Integration with LCDs is trivial. While designed for multi-touch sensing, ZT enables other new modalities, such as pen+touch and free-air interaction. In this paper, we contextualize ZT innovations with a review of other flat-panel sensing technologies. We present the modular sensing architecture behind ZT, and examine early diverse uses of ZT sensing.

Collection understanding

Collection understanding shifts the traditional focus of retrieval in large collections from locating specific artifacts to gaining a comprehensive view of the collection. Visualization tools are critical to the process of efficient collection understanding. By presenting simple visual interfaces and intuitive methods of interacting with a collection, users come to understand the essence of the collection by focusing on the artifacts. We discuss a practical approach for enhancing collection understanding in image collections.

The Team Coordination Game: Zero-fidelity simulation abstracted from fire emergency response practice

Crisis response engenders a high-stress environment in which teams gather, transform, and mutually share information. Prior educational approaches have not successfully addressed these critical skills. The assumption has been that the highest fidelity simulations result in the best learning. Deploying high-fidelity simulations is expensive and dangerous; they do not address team coordination. Low-fidelity approaches are ineffective because they are not stressful. Zero-fidelity simulation develops and invokes the principle of abstraction, focusing on human-information and human-human transfers of meaning, to derive design from work practice. Our principal hypothesis is that crisis responders will experience zero-fidelity simulation as effective simulation of team coordination. We synthesize the sustained iterative design and evaluation of the Team Coordination Game. We develop and apply new experimental methods to show that participants learn to cooperate and communicate, applying what they learn in practice. Design implications address how to employ the abstraction principle to develop zero-fidelity simulations.

Scanning FTIR: unobtrusive optoelectronic multi-touch sensing through waveguide transmissivity imaging

We describe a new method of multi-touch sensing which can be unobtrusively added to existing displays. By coupling individually controlled optoelectronics to the edge of a planar waveguide, our scanning approach overcomes prior disadvantages of optoelectronic multi-touch sensing. Our approach allows for a completely transparent touch surface and easy integration with existing LCD displays.

CollageMachine: temporality and indeterminacy in media browsing via interface ecology

CollageMachine synthesizes artistic and computational practices in order to represent media from the World Wide Web (WWW). It functions as a process-based art work, and as a special browser which can be useful for searching. Media elements are pulled from Web pages and composed into a collage which evolves over time. The evolving art work / browsing session can be shaped by the user. The temporal composition of the collage develops with relation to its visual composition and semantic content. The CollageMachine engine combines structured randomness and the users expression of preferences and interests with design rules and semantic rules to make decisions about the collages layout, and about which media to retrieve. My approach in blending music composition strategies, visual art aesthetics, and computer science techniques into this interactive environment arises through application of the theory of Interface Ecology.

Using Metrics of Curation to Evaluate Information-Based Ideation

Evaluating creativity support environments is challenging. Some approaches address people’s experiences of creativity. The present method measures creativity, across conditions, in the products that people make. This research introduces information-based ideation (IBI), a paradigm for investigating open-ended tasks and activities in which users develop new ideas. IBI tasks span imagining, planning, and reflecting on a weekend, vacation, outfit, makeover, paper, internship, thesis, design, campaign, crisis response, career, or invention. What products do people create through engagement in IBI? Curation of digital media incorporates conceptualization, finding and choosing information objects, annotation, and synthesis. Through engagement in IBI tasks, people create curation products. This article formulates a quantitative methodology for evaluating IBI support tools, building on prior creative cognition research in engineering design to derive a battery of ideation metrics of curation. Elemental ideation metrics evaluate creativity within curated found objects. Holistic ideation metrics evaluate how a curation puts elements together. IBI support environments are characterized by their underlying medium of curation. Curation media include lists, such as listicles, and grids, such as the boards of Pinterest. An in-depth case study investigates information composition, an art-based medium representing a curation as a freeform visual semantic connected whole. We raise two creative cognition challenges for IBI. One challenge is overcoming fixation—for instance, when a person gets stuck in a counterproductive mental set. The other challenge is to bridge information visualization’s synthesis gap, by providing support for connecting findings. To address the challenges, we develop mixed-initiative information composition (MI2C), integrating human curation of information composition with automated agents of information retrieval and visualization. We hypothesize that MI2C generates provocative stimuli that help users overcome fixation to become more creative on IBI tasks. We hypothesize that MI2C’s integration of curation and visualization bridges the synthesis gap to help users become more creative. To investigate these hypotheses, we apply ideation metrics of curation to interpret results from experiments with 44 and 49 participants.

Everyday ideation: all of my ideas are on pinterest

We develop new understanding of how people engage in digital curation. We interview twenty users of Pinterest, a social curation platform. We find that through collecting, organizing, and sharing image bookmarks, users engage in processes of everyday ideation. That is, they use digital found objects as creative resources to develop ideas for shaping their lives. Curators assemble information into new contexts, forming and sharing ideas with practical and emotional value. We investigate cognitive and social aspects of creativity that affect the digital curation practices of everyday ideation. We derive implications for the design of curation environments that support information-based ideation.

ZeroTouch: a zero-thickness optical multi-touch force field

We present zero-thickness optical multi-touch sensing, a technique that simplifies sensordisplay integration, and enables new forms of interaction not previously possible with other multi-touch sensing techniques. Using low-cost modulated infrared sensors to quickly determine the visual hull of an interactive area, we enable robust real-time sensing of fingers and hands, even in the presence of strong ambient lighting. Our technology allows for 20+ fingers to be detected, many more than through prior visual hull techniques, and our use of wide-angle optoelectonics allows for excellent touch resolution, even in the corners of the sensor. With the ability to track objects in free space, as well as its use as a traditional multi-touch sensor, ZeroTouch opens up a new world of interaction possibilities.

Zero-fidelity simulation of fire emergency response: improving team coordination learning

Fire emergency responders rely on team coordination to survive and succeed in high-stress environments, but traditional education does not directly teach these essential skills. Prior simulations seek the highest possible fidelity, employing resources to capture concrete characteristics of operating environments. We take a different tack, hypothesizing that a zero-fidelity approach, focusing on human-centered aspects of work practice, will improve team coordination learning. Such an approach promotes simulation focus by developing an alternative environment that stimulates participants to engage in distributed cognition. The costs of simulation development are reduced. To supplement preparation for burn training exercises, 28 fire emergency response students played the Teaching Team Coordination game (T2eC), a zero-fidelity simulation of the distributed cognition of fire emergency response work practice. To test our hypothesis, we develop quantitative evaluation methods for impact on team coordination learning through measures of communication efficiency and cooperative activity. Results show that participants improve cooperation, become more efficient communicators, differentiate team roles through communication, and leverage multiple communication modalities. Given the context of the study amidst the educational process, qualitative data from the students and their expert instructor supports the ecological validity of the contribution of the T2eC zero-fidelity simulation to fire emergency response education.