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Rumors on Project Natal

Blogs are buzzing and word got out that we might expect a launch of the infrared based XBox controller-free control thingy (basically a 3D camera) in Nov. 2010. 14 games using Natal are planned and a price tag of 55$ is mentioned

Grand Challenge Winners? In a way :)

While its certainly not the newest piece of information I’m still happy top blog about it myself: Christoph Kofler and Mathias Lux (that’s me, right) have won the Best Presentation Award of the Multimedia Grand Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2009.

It’s not the main proice, but we are quite happy with it If you want to see why we got this price, just check out the video. For more information please refer to our paper: Dynamic Presentation Adaptation based on User Intent Classification

Long long time ago …

Quite some time since my last post and a lot of things happened. First of all reports from the GC in Cologne triggered a lot of response, so Google canceled my Adsense account due to “misuse” so no more ads here! For myself: I took a teaching assignment at FH Kärnten, a university like academic educational institution, and had a lot of work to do there with 8 h teaching a week there. Since this is the last week, I look forward to catch a breath again

ACM Multimedia 2009: Project Natal in the Brave New Topics Session …

Yesterday the “brave new topics” session took place. Initially it was meant to present challenging ideas and new things without the demand for extensive evaluation or being picky or realistic. Hrvoje Benko from Microsoft presented a lot of things regarding new output and input interfaces and closed his presentation with the ad for Project Natal. While some of the audience were astonished I still have to point out that especially the multimedia research community has to get a bit closer to gaming. Many of the engineered solutions there can be applied to common problems in multimedia and the other way round. At GDC europe people said problem in game developments are streaming and asset management. On the other hand gaming provides us with cool I/O devices (Dualshock, Sixaxis, Wiimote, etc.) So get together guys

Caliph & Emir @ ACM MM – Presentation on Thursday

I’m currently attending the ACM Multimedia conference in Beijing (nice city by the way, one only has to survive traffic). Tomorrow is out big day for our user intent classification tool “Intent inside” and the day after Claiph and Emir are presented by myself. If you are also her, I’d be happy to meet & greet and talk about further developments, etc.

CfP 2nd International Conferences on Advances in Multimedia

MMEDIA 2010 aims to provide an international forum by researchers, students, and professionals for presenting recent research results on advances in multimedia, mobile and ubiquitous multimedia and to bring together experts from both academia and industry for the exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges in multimedia fundamentals, mobile and ubiquitous multimedia, multimedia ontology, multimedia user-centered perception, multimedia services and applications, and mobile multimedia.

>> more information

Workshop on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies (SeMuDaTe2009)

Call for Contributions

The workshop is collocated with the 4th International Conference on
Semantic and Digital Media Technologies

2-4 December 2009
Graz, Austria

Continue reading Workshop on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies (SeMuDaTe2009)…

GDC Europe 09: Peter Molyneux

Game mechanics, especially choices, were the main topic of Peter Molyneux’s (Lionhead Studio) talk. He motivated the whole idea by an example from Populus, were one could choose the color to be a blue or a red god. While this had no effect on the gameplay people liked the idea of choosing between good and evil and – ka-ching – Black & White worked out. With Fable three theyare now working on a system of choices, which are based on judgements the player makes as king/queen. A further mechanic will be the action of touching AI characters in the Fable III world. Touching will create an emotional bond affecting gameplay and story as well as choices later on.

GDC Europe 09: Keynote of David Cage (Quantic Dream)

Second keynote for today was David Cage from Quantic Dream, which one might already know from Fahrenheit or from their title in development Heavy Rain. He made – unsurprisingly – a good chain of arguments against the mainstream game insdustry. In his opinion games are more or less build on primal emotions and feature no or only a very simplistic story. The sequence of narrative elements is constantly interrupted by action sequences, an people just play it for the action scenes …. just like a porn movie (David’s word )

He outlines a way to create games for a mature audience featuring more social and complex emotions. According to the figures he presented (which looked valid according to the studies I’ve read) 75% of the people buying games are 18+ years old, in average 35. This indicates that there actually is a mature audience. His propsed tool for this is interactive storytelling. You might now go and see a video (from E3 2009) of Heavy Rain, so I can stop writing :)

Byline: I found my seat beside the editor in chief of a major german game magazine, which I won’t mention but rhymes on games-car. By trying to communicate I found the complete absence of humour and small talk ability in  this guy. I’m again impressed by the selectiveness of journalists towards people they don’t know.

GDC Europe 09: Telltale Games

I just heard the talk of Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games. For those of you who are not familiar with the company: they buy licenses for existing franchises and publish story telling games in episodes. They latest big hit in the news was Tales of Monkey Island (originally Lucasarts). He said that they understand themselves as story telling company, while not so much being a game company. In a world of people trying to make  AAA games they focus on short  dev times (e.g. 8-10 months) and small and fast sequels (e.g. 4-6 months). Judging from the history of Telltale Games thihs approach works out fine  They focus mostly on digital distribution, also based on their own platform.

Buying licenses is an interesting thing as Dan stated. Companies either give them away with the freedom of telling the story on and on, while other need to be involved or have lots of handbooks with do’s and don’ts.