Ways to Entertain with the Use of Computing Technologies

Introduction

Generally speaking, entertainment used to be meant as a passive or an active amusement or enjoyment. When passive, a person or an audience may feel an emotion while attending a cinematic and theatric entertainment, a spectacle such as opera, movie on a CD, television show, watching sporting events, a video sharing website on a phone or a computer, a tabloid newspaper, or a moving display on a skyscraper. We would list as active entertainment our actions and activities such as playing video games, making photos and videos, sharing them online, dancing, playing and exercising sports, or traveling. We may also want to call an entertainment our recreational, usually unprofitable pastime activities or hobbies, such as reading, drawing, writing, music playing and listening to, seasonal celebrations, craft making, and occupations such as sports or fishing. That means entertainment may or may be not be related to a for-profit industry; it may or may not involve participation in a group in order to provide interest; it may or may not merge with recreation; it may be speculative, reflexive, or even creative or it may involve unproductive transmission of others’ activity; and sometimes it may result from performing yours line of work, if it’s your call. Net art and cell phone art, along with other electronic art media are closely related to the semantic networks and social networking media; many times they provide computational solutions for entertainment.

The next subchapters tell about yet another ways to entertain: Chapter 21 is about electronic games, Chapter 22 tells about visual-and-verbal storytelling, Chapter 23 is about metaphorical representations of a person, and Chapter 24 is about visual music.

Figure 1, “Parkour” ponders how the city becomes a stage for a parkour artist, with both its horizontal stretches and upright heights.

Figure 1.

Anna Ursyn, Parkour (© 2010, A. Ursyn. Used with permission)

Some Examples Of The Ways To Entertain With Computing

Computing contributes to a great number of forms of entertainment. When assuming the role of an audience we often do not realize the essential role the computing plays in a success of an event created to entertain us. Computational solutions may be of use to secure technical proficiency of a production; they may provide laugh and joy but also they influence our thoughts and actions. Moreover, many kinds of entertainment changed its category level from a passive spectacle to an active audience’s engagement into an interactive installation or live performance.

Networks have been subsequently established for the mass use, such as telephone, radio, television, Internet, and then the augmented and virtual environments, providing users with the data, means of communication with visual approach, audio and vision channels, multi-sensory environments, and possibilities for multimodal interaction. Intelligent networks further support the entertainment options, with independent rather than network-provided services. Wireless technology culture contributed to the ways we entertain and amuse ourselves, with portable game consoles such as Nintendo 3DS, participation through cell phones, PDAs such as palmtop computers with touch screens, applications with Arduino Boards, sharing news about life events through Skype, and the Second Life culture. For example, a LED Cube, presented online in many versions is a three-dimensional display of moving lights running on the Arduino basis.