Media Lab Europe & Umea Institute of Design

research continued at MIT Media Lab, Tangible Media Group

Paper: Moving Pictures : Looking Out / Looking In - Incubator, Educators Program @ SIGGRAPH 2005
Vaucelle, C., Africano, D., Davenport, G., Wiberg, M., and Fjellstrom, O. 2005. Moving pictures: Looking Out/Looking In, SIGGRAPH'05 Download .pdf

Media: Video of Swedish children interacting with the system (30 mb)

Background

Moving Pictures, extends our previous work on Textable Movie [Vaucelle, 2002]. In the framework of computational storytelling, Textable Movie promotes the idea of maker-controlled media and can be contrasted to automatic presentation systems. By improvising movie-stories created from their personal video database and by suddenly being projected into someone else’s video database during the same story, users can be surprised as they visualize video elements corresponding to a story that they would not have expected. With Textable Movie, users make their own inference about these discoveries rather than using artificial systems that make the inference for them. They can then create a personal mode of interaction with the system, e.g. mapping keywords to videos, and incorporate new video clips and sound samples to their database.

Evaluations with Textable Movie informed us that more fusion between creating an idea and producing it was necessary. For a revisit of Textable Movie, we wanted to couple mobile technologies to a platform that could materialize ideas and retrieve them seamlessly. We explored the concept of tangibility of digital data as a way for children to gather and capture data around the city for later retrieval. In this case, tangible objects become metaphors of captured elements. We teamed up with the Umea Insitute of design and created Moving Pictures: Looking Out/Looking In, a device using mobile technology combined with tangible objects as metaphors.

Goals
1. Tangible User Interaction with video.
2. Tangible User Interface for collaboration.
3. Tangible User Interfaces for authorship.

4. Video Jockeying.

Digital media / space and time questions

We analyze how pre-teenagers learn cinematic language -reverse, reaction, different shots, notions of space and time- and we focus on the issues that resulted in the design.

temporal - how do pre-teenagers cut a movie so that the audience thinks there is temporal
continuity or so the audience is conscious of a jump in time

spatial- how do pre-teenagers cut a movie so that the audience gets a strong sense of the arrangement of 3d space

temporal and spatial - how do pre-teenagers match cuts in a movie (an action happens and they cut to another view right in the middle)

In later studies, we would like to show that working with the Moving Picture platform, it not only helped pre-teenagers learn cinematic language but it also helped them learn issues around 3D space and time.