Workshop Proposal
UCAmI’2011 (Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence)
Theme: Using Technology for a More Playful Real Interaction: Urban and Pervasive Games
Organizers:
Eduardo H. Calvillo Gámez – Universidad Politécnica de San Luis Potosí – eduardo.calvillo@gmail.com
Víctor M. González – Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México – victor.gonzalez@itam.mx
Víctor M. González – Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México – victor.gonzalez@itam.mx
Description of the Workshop Topic
The workshop will focus on games that are based on ubiquitous, pervasive and ambient intelligence. It will be a showcase to show the game development, but also an academic endeavor that will provide tools, theories and frameworks to understand and assess games and the experience of playing games.
The objective of the workshop will be to show games, but also to share expertise when working with games.
Justification of the Workshop
Games are important aspect of cultural and technological development. From the cultural perspective, they help us as society to identify common ground and develop both a personal and group identity [2]. From a technological perspective, games have taken advantage of the state-of-the-art. A clear example would be the Nintendo Wii or Xbox Kinect that use motion recognition allowing using the body as an input device. Towards this end, current research is trying to develop interaction paradigms that create more real interactions [3] in an effort to improve the user experience.
Besides being a paramount for technological advances, games are also of importance to be used as a medium to learn about other issues, such as in serious games [4], or as research instruments to study other phenomena [1]. But everything games take from the technological corner, they pay back in showing how to use the technological advances, as well as with knowledge for other areas. This were the importance of games resides; they help us to showcase technological development as well as to study other issues.
The objective of this workshop would be to present advances in the usage of technology based on real interactions, ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence in developing videogames. The games could be just for ludic purposes, serious games, or to be used as tools to study other phenomena.
We are looking for papers and case studies of game development, as well of theories and frameworks that help to study and develop this type of games.
Structure of the Workshop
We propose a half a day workshop, with the following organization:
· Introductions and welcoming to the workshop (30mins)
· Paper presentation (2 minutes per paper). 20-30 Minutes.
· Poster or prototype presentation of all the accepted papers. 1 hour.
· Round table discussion, groups of 5. 1 hour.
· Presentation of Results of the Discussion. 1 hour.
Estimated audience:
We expect to accept 10-15 papers to be published on the proceedings of the conference. Papers presented in the workshop could also be presented in the main conference.
Brief CV of Organizers
· Eduardo H. Calvillo Gámez
o PhD in Human Computer Interaction, UCL, 2009
o Tutorials Chair: CLIHC’2011
o Guest Editor: Elsevier’s Entertainment Computing, special issue on Video Games as Research Instruments. 2011.
o Program Chair: MexIHC’2010.
o Workshop Organizers: Video Games as Research Instruments at CHI 2010.
· Victor M. González & González
o PhD in Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine, 2006
o Program Chair: CLIHC 2007
o General Chair: MexIHC 2010.
o Workshop Organizer: Social Networks at CHI 2009.
References
[1] Calvillo-Gámez, E. H., Gow, J., and Cairns, P. Video games as research instruments. Entertainment Computing In Press (2011).
[2] Huizinga, J. Homo-Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Beacon Press, London, UK, 1950.
[3] Jacob, R. J., Girouard, A., Hirshfield, L. M., Horn, M. S., Shaer, O., Solovey, E. T., and Zigelbaum, J. Reality-based interaction: a framework for post-wimp interfaces. In CHI ’08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 201–210.
[4] Michael, D., and Chen, S. Serious games: Games that educate, train, and inform. Muska & Lipman/Premier-Trade, 2005.
