Media in the Ubiquitous Era: Ambient, Social and Gaming Media

Artur Lugmayr (Tampere University of Technology, Finland), Helja Franssila (University of Tampere, Finland), Pertti Näränen (TAMK University of Applied Sciences, Finland), Olli Sotamaa (University of Tampere, Finland), Jukka Vanhala (Tampere University of Technology, Finland) and Zhiwen Yu (Northwestern Polytechnical University, China)

ISBN13: 9781609607746|ISBN10: 1609607740|EISBN13: 9781609607753|DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-774-6

Description

Media in the ubiquitous area is undergoing a tremendous change. Social media and Web 2.0 are applied in ever more diverse practices both in private and public communities and digital games and play are currently undergoing many transformations. Traditional communication and expression modalities are challenged and totally new practices are constructed in the collaborative, interactive media space.

Media in the Ubiquitous Era: Ambient, Social and Gaming Media focuses on the definition of ambient and ubiquitous media from a cross-disciplinary viewpoint. This book is unique in the sense that it does not only cover the field of commerce, but also science, research, and citizens. Through a set of contributions to the MindTrek, a non-profit umbrella organization for societies working in the fields of digital media and information society, this book is a must have for anyone interested in the future of this area.

Topics Covered

The many academic areas covered in this publication include, but are not limited to:

Collaborative and Social Tool Design
Community Innovation
Geo-Tagging and Microblogging in M-Learning
Human-Centric Approaches
Locality in Online Communities
Mobile Game Evaluation
Multimedia over P2P
Semantic Tagging
Social Networking
Teaching via Digital Games
Ubiquitous Services
User Behavior in Digital Games

Reviews and Testimonials

With this great number of chapters and different viewpoints on the latest developments in the field of media, we compiled an interesting book that can act as future reference and teaching material. We advise the reader to follow up with the latest trends by following the Academic MindTrek series on www.mindtrek.org, or activities related to ambient media as undertaken by the Ambient Media Association (www.ambientmediaassociation.org) with the Semantic Ambient Media Workshop (SAME) series.

– The Editors

Table of Contents and List of Contributors

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Preface

Media in the ubiquitous area is undergoing a tremendous change. MindTrek (http://www.mindtrek.org), the yearly conference in Tampere, Finland, devotes its focus on the latest trends in the wider field of media. As part of its program, MindTrek organizes an academic conference – the Academic MindTrek Conference - attracting a worldwide academic audience. In the years 2008 and 2009, one major focus of the academic part was on research of media in the ubiquitous era. This edited book collects a selected set of extended contributions to both academic conferences discussing the latest trends of social media, ambient media, and digital games.

Social Media
Social media and Web 2.0 are applied in ever more diverse practices both in private and public communities. Traditional communication and expression modalities are challenged and totally new practices are constructed in the collaborative, interactive media space

Ambient and Ubiquitous Media
"The medium is the message" - This conference track focuses on the definition of ambient and ubiquitous media from a cross-disciplinary viewpoint: ambient media between technology, art, and content. The focus of this track is on applications, theory, art-works, mixed-reality concepts, Web 3.0, and user experiences that make ubiquitous and ambient media tick.

Digital Games
Digital games and play are currently undergoing many transformations; gaming devices are becoming truly connected, players are finding more possibilities for collaboration, and simultaneously, games are being applied in novel ways and mobile usage contexts.

This book is structured into four major sections, each one highlighting another aspect of the latest trends in the field of media:

Consumer Experience, Customer Research, and User Profiling;
Learning, Training, Knowledge Sharing;
Novel User-Interfaces, Emerging Forms of Interaction, and Media Theories;
Communities, Mediated Social Interaction, and Digital Community Networking.

Each section compiles a set of chapters discussing issues, research, and cases contributing to this viewpoint. The first section “Consumer Experience, Customer Research, and User Profiling”, has a clear consumer oriented focus and contains the following four chapters:

Andrea Botero et Al. (Exploring the Ecosystems and Principles of Community Innovation) discuss grassroots culture and the development of media to support and foster innovation within the scope of their chapter. They elaborate what communities drive to develop innovations and how tools can support this process with the help of practical examples. The focus is especially on community driven innovation processes and the implications on the innovation process as such.
Janne Paavilainen et Al. (Comparing Two Playability Heuristic Sets with Expert Review Method - A Case Study of Mobile Game Evaluation) focus on the evaluation of the user-interface design of digital games. Consumer experience is one crucial factor in the production of games. This chapter devotes in the development of a heuristics that help in user interface evaluation as well as in the playability of game designs.
Hiroshi Tamura et Al. (Lovely Place to Buy! – Enhancing Grocery Shopping Experiences with a Human-Centric Approach) present ubiquitous services as a huge business potential for grocery stores, however, also for increasing the shopper’s experience. This chapter devotes especially the issue of exploiting the possibilities of ubiquitous services while shopping. It presents clear guidelines and implications for the development of systems aiding the consumer through their shopping activities.
Stefan Uhlmann et Al. (Portable Personality and its Personalization Algorithms: An Overview and Directions) give insights in the increasing amounts of multimedia content requiring techniques to exchange, enrich, and gather information about consumers and their preferences. However, this chapter goes far beyond existing solutions for managing personal profiles. The described concept is based on a digital representation of a consumers’ personality and presents algorithms for advanced to associate personal profiles with multimedia services.

The second section “Learning, Training, and Knowledge Sharing” focuses on applications of digital media in the context of learning and sharing of knowledge. The following chapters contribute to this thematic:

Christian Safran et Al. (The Integration of Aspects of Geo-Tagging and Microblogging in m-Learning) emphasize location based services, social media as e.g. Wikis, mobility, and learning as major parts in today’s world of media. The chapter focuses on the development of a mobile micro-blogging platform for educational purposes. The application shall foster learning via geo-tagging services.
Conor Linehan et Al. (Teaching Group Decision Making Skills to Emergency Managers via Digital Games) researches digital games, which can be played for fun, but also emerge in environments for training certain risk groups on specific disaster scenarios. This chapter focuses on the training of emergency managers in group decision skills in emergency situations as learning experience. The developed game emphasizes the learning experience in a simulated environment.
Sari Vainikainen et Al. (Exploring Semantic Tagging with Tilkut) see collaborative bookmarking and adding metadata to tags as common services in social media. By adding semantic meaning and ontologies to these kind of services, social bookmarking becomes to a powerful tool for knowledge sharing. Within the scope of this chapter consumer studies for enterprise use for a social bookmarking service are presented to gain insights in the requirements for social bookmarking services on enterprise level.
Ning Li et Al. (A Knowledge-Based Multimedia Adaptation Management Framework for Ubiquitous Services) discuss that the emergence of more and more multimedia services, devices, and delivery networks require smart mechanisms to adapt content to available resources. The suggested system provides a solution to perform this challenging tasks in a context aware environment to enable interoperability and smart media distribution.

The third section “Novel User-Interfaces, Emerging Forms of Interaction and Media Theories”, emphasize the development of new user experience based on user-interfaces, new forms of interaction, as well as the development of new forms of content types. The following chapters devote to this issue:

Teresa Chambel et Al. (Interactive Visualization and Exploration of Video Spaces through Colors in Motion) discuss appropriate techniques for the visualization and exploration of digital spaces as one main problematic with the increasing amount of digital information. This chapter focuses on the description of an application that allows the exploration of videos with a novel designed user interface utilizing advanced visualization techniques for browsing and interacting with large scale video repositories.
Thomas Schieder et Al. (Issues on Acting in Digital Dramas) focus on creating a theory for the development of a plot for digital games based on theories in acting. Interactivity patters shall support consumers in the development of drama in newly emerging interactive environments such as e.g. iTV. The empathize is on the development of the ‘digital theatre’ based on commonly known theories coming from acting.
Alison Gazzard (Re-coding the Algorithm: Purposeful and Appropriated Play) presents a more media theoretical discussion is the content of this chapter. The chapter discusses various play types of videogames and how games can be explored outside of the intended rules of the actual games. It gives conclusions, theories, and research insights into reality games and their communities.

The last section of the book entitled “Rising Principles in Virtual Communities, Mediated Social Interaction, and Digital Community Networking”, prioritizes social developments that are emerging with the introduction of digital media. The following chapters devote to this thematic:

Andrea Botero et Al. (Exploring the Ecosystems and Principles of Community Innovation) discuss grassroots culture and the development of media to support and foster innovation within the scope of this chapter. What communities drive to develop innovations and how tools can support this process is discussed on the example of practical examples. The focus is especially on community driven innovation processes and the implications on the innovation process as such.
Sanna Malinen et Al. (Supporting Local Connections with Online Communities) research online communities, and how they support social interaction through regional networking is within the scope of this chapter. A survey underlines the importance of locality in the forming process of online communities, maintaining friendships, and the connection of activities performed locally and digitally. A main focus is on the identity of residents and attachment to their local environments and the role this attachment plays in online community forming.
Jiehan Zhou et Al. P2P SCCM: Service-oriented Community Coordinated Multimedia over P2P and Experience on Multimedia Annotation Service Development) see that collaborative consumption and tagging of media content became part of today’s world of digital media. Within the scope of this chapter, a technical solution based on P2P technology for annotating content is presented. The presented technical infrastructure allows the creation of multimedia intense web services via converging networks, platforms, and services.
Sal Humphreys (Unravelling Intellectual Property in a Specialist Social Networking Site) emphasizes co-creation and cooperation on online social networking site and the impact on intellectual property. IPRs are playing a more and more important rule when various people contribute to each others’ digital works. This chapter discusses the problems around these issues from a legal aspect viewpoint.

Author(s)/Editor(s) Biography

Artur Lugmayr describes himself as a creative thinker and his scientific work is situated between art and science. His vision can be expressed as to create media experiences on future emerging media technology platforms. He is the head and founder of the New AMbient MUltimedia (NAMU) research group at the Tampere University of Technology (Finland) which is part of the Finnish Academy Centre of Excellence of Signal Processing from 2006 to 2011 (http://namu.cs.tut.fi). He is holding a Dr.-Techn. degree from the Tampere University of Technology (TUT, Finland), and is currently engaged in Dr.-Arts studies at the School of Motion Pictures, TV and Production Design (UIAH, Helsinki). He chaired the ISO/IEC ad-hoc group "MPEG-21 in broadcasting"; won the NOKIA Award of 2003 with the text book "Digital interactive TV and Metadata" published by Springer-Verlag in 2004; representative of the Swan Lake Moving Image & Music Award board member of MindTrek, EU project proposal reviewer; invited key-note speaker for conferences; organizer and reviewer of several conferences; and has contributed one book chapter and written over 25 scientific publications. His passion in private life is to be a notorious digital film-maker. He is founder of the production company LugYmedia Inc.

Heljä Franssila is a project manager and researcher in University of Tampere, Hypermedia Laboratory, Finland. Finding efficient and human-centered ways to couple the new information technologies and interaction styles with work practices and business processes is her central multidisciplinary research interest and motivation. At the moment she works in close research co-operation with several commercial enterprises to find and design meaningful and sustainable ways to support and energize diverse communities in working life with social media and web 2.0.

Pertti Näränen (b. 1962 in Finland) is Senior Lecturer of media studies at TAMK University of Applied Sciences, School of Art and Media. His doctoral thesis title was "Digital television: Analyses on early history, challenges to media policy, and transformation of television" (2006, University of Tampere, dept. of Journalism and Mass Communication). The dissertation is available in electronic format at http://acta.uta.fi/english/teos.phtml?10822. Previously Mr. Näränen has worked as researcher, lecturer and journalist in print and radio media. He also has background in cinema studies and in various new media projects. Home page: http://www.tamk.fi/~narper/.

Olli Sotamaa completed his PhD at the Tampere University in spring 2009. The dissertation discussed player productivity among game cultures and player-centred design. Currently I'm heading a project called Games as Services (GaS). I'm also actively involved in teaching our masters students. His areas of competence are: digital popular culture, game cultures, player production, player-centred design. His current research interest is player-created content on game consoles, Game industry as cultural industry. More about Olli on https://153.1.6.41/hyper/henkilokunta/sotamaa_en.php.

Jukka Vanhala is a professor at the Department of Electronics at Tampere University of Technology and the director of the Kankaanpää Research Unit of Wearable Technology. He received his MSc at the Software Engineering Laboratory in 1985, Licenciate of Technology at the Microelectronics Laboratory in 1990, and doctor of technology at the Electronics Laboratory in 1998, all at TUT. He has been appointed to the professorship of electronics at TUT in 1997 and to the docentship of interactive technology at Tampere University at 2005. His career also includes six years of work in the industry both in Finland (Tele Finland (Sonera), SoftPlan (Nokia), Instrumentation) and in USA (IBM). His expertise is in ambient intelligence, embedded systems and wearable technology.

Zhiwen Yu is currently a professor and Ph.D. supervisor at the School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, P. R. China. He received his B.Eng, M.Eng and Ph.D. degree of Engineering in computer science and technology in 2000, 2003 and 2005 respectively from the Northwestern Polytechnical University. He has worked as a research fellow at the Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies, Kyoto University, Japan from Feb. 2007 to Jan. 2009, and a post-doctoral researcher at the Information Technology Center, Nagoya University, Japan in 2006-2007. He has been a visiting researcher at the Context-Aware Systems Department, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore from Sep. 2004 to May 2005. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Mannheim University, Germany from Nov. 2009 to Oct. 2010.

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