Stories of Magic: Digital Interactive Storytelling

Stories of Magic: Digital Interactive Storytelling 

Monday 15th October 5:30 – 6:30 pm 

Culture Lab

Dr Samuel Mann. Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand/ Aotearoa

http://bitweb.tekotago.ac.nz/cfm/staff.cfm?name=smann

 

Sam Mann’s dual background in IT and land management fires projects ranging from heritage to environmental modelling, including a major current undertaking, “SimPā”, which aims to integrate participatory digital interactive storytelling with Māori culture, tikaka (culture) and knowledge.

Samuel Mann is an Associate Professor within Creative Technologies at Otago Polytechnic.  He has three strands of intertwined research: augmented experiences; sustainability; and computer education.  He and his students work on systems that harness the power of technology to help engage people with information: the goal is to make the computer invisible and to instead focus on promoting engaging experiences.    

A major current project, “SimPā” aims to integrate participatory digital interactive storytelling with Māori culture, tikaka (culture) and knowledge.  In short, the project aims to provide a means of telling whānau (family), hapu (sub-tribe) and Iwi (major tribe) Māori stories in 3D game format. This development has benefits in terms of both technology and cultural awareness and the fusion of these two: Iwi digital content. The project will achieve this through active engagement and participation with Iwi through Runaka engagement and member participation to build the games.

The focus of Sam’s research which informs the SimPā project derives from augmented experiences, especially visual representation of knowledge spaces and the interaction of technology and art/narrative in exhibits. Sam has been examining developments that fall outside traditional development processes with the intention of identifying emergent themes that we can generalise back to the wider computing sphere.  His research in creating technology-based exhibits, or as Walker (2001) puts it: “in trying to hide the computers while making exhibits come to life” puts the interaction of art and computing at the forefront of both cultures.  His recent exhibit based works include “Pengy,” a collaborative inquiry based robotic agent development with a group of young scientists; “Timed Lapse” a long running collaboration with photographer Lloyd Godman; “Fish n’clicks” an augmented exhibit that provides a cross over between virtual and real life; and “Metamorphamatic” a large scale tropical habitat development.  These developments have in common an interactive basis.  All are driven by computing that is non-trivial.  In their finished form, none involve a traditional screen-keyboard-mouse arrangement. We find a different role for functional requirements, differing measures of success, a complex role of interactivity that is closely intertwined with narrative and educational parameters.  Perhaps the most important aspect is that of reality, not in terms of virtual reality but in terms of the integration of real and not real in the forms of interface, story and engine.

This development is more complex than a miniaturization of the technology; such a development is a perhaps indicative of a paradigm shift, as Weiser argued, the goal of “trying to conceive a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.”   The search for precedents for this shift, and the attempt to identify implications of it, led to the current work.

 

Pre-history

After studying Geography and Botany at the University of Otago, Sam worked for the Otago Regional Council in the early 1990s to develop local farmers’ understanding of sustainable land use. His first academic paper argued that running sheep and rabbits on land in Central Otago was not sustainable. The fact his parents now grow olives on that same land perhaps proves the point he made. But at the time too few farmers listened, so Mann returned to complete an MSc then PhD at Otago (with a little work in Manitoba modelling climate change meanwhile). He developed Environmental Informatics models predicting the environmental consequences of farming practices that engaged farmers to build a shared understanding of how the land behaved under their stewardship. Once more employed by the regional council, Dr Mann then instituted computer-based systems helping farmers easily produce the environmental plans that allowed them to meet regulatory and industry standards for land use.

Published: 27th September 2007