Tag: research

7 ways games reward the brain

November 3rd, 2010 · · research 17 comments - Tags: , , , ,

This seems to be the tree I’ve been barking up for a long time now. Summary of Tom Chatfield’s 7 ways games reward the brain

1. Experience bars measuring progress.
	- Give people an Avatar and they can take ownership
2. Multiple long & short term aims
	- 5000 targets not interesting. 5-20 interested
3. Reward effort
	- Every little bit!
4. Rapid, frequent clear, feedback.
	- Immediate is best.
5. An element of uncertainty
	- Uncertain rewards
	- When we predict something wrong we get excited about it.
	- Dopamine, neuron transmitter associated with learning.
6. Windows of enhanced attention.
	- Memory - find moments when people are more likely to remember
	- & confidence - reward system make people will to take risks
7. Other people!
	- The most exciting reward

Engagement!

Doug Engelbart & Ted Nelson interviews

November 19th, 2009 · · research 45 comments - Tags:

I rediscovered this old (1999) interview with Doug Engelbart and consequentially Ted Nelson which both touch on their alternative paradigms to information management. Here are the juice parts extracted. I found the Engelbart to be more lucid that Nelson :)

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Visuals for modern dance augmentation

November 6th, 2009 · · art, life, research 48 comments - Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Alex May just put up a sample of his latest interactive performance instillation which he demos with a dancer.

Shadows of Light from Quadratura on Vimeo.

I saw an Australian dance performance last month here in Berlin called Glow which was a floor dance also with real-time interactive dance visuals.

I like this direction VJing is taking. Slightly above the mundane random images with effects layer on.

Games can alter the structure of your brain

September 1st, 2009 · · life, research 12 comments - Tags: , , ,

Wired has an article on “playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with“:

This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a “challenging visuospatial task” like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.

I wonder if this has anything to do with learning?

Ideas as Visualised Spaces

July 15th, 2009 · · research, work 75 comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

This TED talk by Tom Wujec shows ways that visualising ideas helps to solve the problems. The “Visual Strategy Planning” idea, where a team maps out the entire problem on a wall, together, is a bit like a mind-map and is a nice interface to information.

It also has ramifications for learning in that new concepts could be presented to students as a map instead of a linear text.

Th Laptop-orchestra and the nature of live performance

September 14th, 2007 · · play 19 comments - Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Laptoporchestra Berlin
I just got back from MAGISTRALE Kulturnacht‘s Medialounge in which a good friend of mine has some photos on exhibit. There was a series of laptop audio performances by various artists which climaxed with a live performance of the so called Laptoporchester Berlin. Seven guys on laptops nodding their heads.They opened with a couple of pieces that were lead by a guy on a cool seven string electric guitar which had a body that was just snap on bars in the shape of a traditional guitar (see picture). They then ended with a cover of Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ which I’d only recently discovered being a big fan of Steve Riech.

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Going multi-lingual

January 24th, 2007 · · work 70 comments - Tags: , , , , , , ,

Its a hard problem and not many people are tacking it in the web development world. Heres some research into presenting content in different languages via HTML.

To frame the problem here is a good break down of the three technical issues:

There are three considerations for presenting HTML in non-English languages. First, that the document is delivered in the desired natural language (such as English, French, etc.) and dialect (US, British, etc.). Second, that the document is presented in the correct character set. This is a requirement for most Eastern languages (Russian, Japanese, etc.). Third, that the document is presented in the correct directionality. This is a consideration for languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese that are customarily written right-to-left or top-to-bottom.

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Games and Learning

October 1st, 2006 · · idea, research 25 comments - Tags: , , , ,

Who said computer games can’t teach you anything? This video demonstrates that computer games are the doorway to advanced learning with young people. I think if you can keep it fun with a pinch of competition then you can teach people anything.


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A definition of Consciousness

September 20th, 2006 · · life 21 comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

Suppose ‘consciousness’ could be defined as the ability of a ‘being that can learn’ to understand how its self learns. Thus it then has to ‘decide’, a rudimentary idea in our perception of ‘consciousness’.

I think this explains to a degree then our ‘personality’ which we use to direct our experiences in the world and thus our learning. We, in a manner, feed our learning what it likes best: pleasurable experiences.

If this is true, what does it say about the ‘Turing test’ and there for the way forward for AI research.

Flash as a background and the object tag drama

August 29th, 2006 · · work 119 comments - Tags: , , , ,

The Mission

Use Flash as a background image.

The Problems

There are a multitude of problems with embedding Flash into valid mark-up. Basically:

  • You can’t use the EMBED tag now days and has been dropped in favour of the OBJECT tag. You actually can use the EMBED tag but its not future compatible and your page won’t validate.
  • This presents problems because IE and Netscape/Firefox based browsers handle the object tag differently. If you manage to get a single object tag to load a flash movie in both browsers then IE seems to not stream the movie anymore.

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