(PDF) Virtual fish

This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Young, Gregory, Foth, Marcus, & Matthes, Natascha (2007) Virtual Fish: Visual Evidence of Connectivity in a Master-Planned Urban Community. In Thomas, B (Ed.) Proceedings of the 2007 Conference of the Computer-human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of Australia on Computer-human Interaction: Design: Activities, Artifacts and Environments. ACM, United States of America, pp. 219-222. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/10578/ c Copyright 2007 the author(s) and CHISIG Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. OzCHI 2007, 28-30 November 2007, Adelaide, Australia. Copyright the author(s) and CHISIG. Additional copies are available at the ACM Digital Library (http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm) or can be ordered from CHISIG (

). Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Submitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appearance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1145/1324892.1324938 Virtual Fish: Visual Evidence of Connectivity in a Master-Planned Urban Community Greg T. Young Marcus Foth Natascha Y. Matthes Queensland University of Technology Queensland University of Technology Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Precinct Creative Industries Precinct Creative Industries Precinct Kelvin Grove QLD 4059 Kelvin Grove QLD 4059 Kelvin Grove QLD 4059 +61 7 3122 8023 +61 7 3138 8772 +61 7 3138 8137

integrated community. It brings together education, residential, health, retail, recreational and business facilities within one precinct. ABSTRACT The rapid densification of urban areas around the world offers exciting opportunities for new place-based artworks and locative media that aim at engaging, informing and entertaining members of local communities. In this paper, we introduce a design competition for concepts of interaction design which display visual evidence of connectivity in a master-planned community. This competition is based in and focuses on one of Brisbane‟s newly built inner urban renewal developments. Furthermore, we introduce the conceptual interaction design of one of the competition‟s winning entries, as well as its potential and its challenges to engage local residents in participation and exploration of place-based information and community media. The Queensland Government, through its Department of Housing, and QUT are working in partnership to revitalise 16 hectares of land at Kelvin Grove, just two kilometres from Brisbane‟s Central Business District. This development hopes to set a new benchmark for inner urban development, and is intended to be a showcase of the „Smart State‟ in action. The master plan of the KGUV describes it as a place where people can easily walk from home to work, have a coffee at the local café, or walk to the city or university for an afternoon or evening lecture. It is a place where people of all ages and stages in life can shop, dine, go to the theatre or gym, and where young entrepreneurs can work next door to leading researchers. The diverse facilities and mix of tradition and innovation are to create a safe, convenient and attractive neighbourhood. Categories and Subject Descriptors H5.m. [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Miscellaneous; H5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces – Haptic I/O. In this paper, we will introduce the specific design challenge and rationale of displaying visual evidence of connectivity in the KGUV. We examine how this challenge was approached by conducting a design competition. We explain the assessment and selection criteria and review related works. We then describe the design of one of the winning entries and how it responds to the design criteria. General Terms Design, Experimentation Keywords Interaction design, community, urban informatics, urban planning, connectivity, touch screen. 2. DESIGN CHALLENGE The KGUV is a master-planned community that demonstrates best practice in sustainable, mixed-use urban development. The master plan includes an objective to “display visual evidence of connectivity within the community” [8]. The term “connectivity” needs to be interpreted widely as encompassing any forms of both technical and social connectivity including humancomputer interaction as well as social communication between people. 1. INTRODUCTION The annual urban population growth in Brisbane is currently at 22%. In other words, a city the size of Rockhampton is added to South East Queensland every year [12]. The Queensland Government is aware that the continuation of a low density urban sprawl is not sustainable. These trends – similar in other areas elsewhere in Australia and the world – have led to the development of compact city policies which are being developed and implemented in all Australian capitals to deal with population pressures and urban expansion. In order to accommodate sustainable urbanisation and population growth within current metropolitan areas, the design and development of mixed-use, master-planned communities are a key component of these policies. The Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) is the Queensland Government‟s flagship urban renewal project. It is the first inner-city development of its kind in Australia where a government and university have come together to plan and build a new OzCHI 2007, 28-30 November 2007, Adelaide, Australia. Copyright the author(s) and CHISIG. Additional copies are available at the ACM Digital Library (http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm) or can be ordered from CHISIG (

). OzCHI 2007 Proceedings, ISBN 978-1-59593-872-5 219 Technical connectivity is established by a fibre-to-the-home and fibre-to-the-node network operated by a carrier within the KGUV. The services can include low or nil cost large bandwidths (for example, Internet Protocol at 100 Mbits/s) within and between points in the KGUV, fibre or wireless network access and quality of service management for multimedia over Internet Protocol. Internet and world wide web access are at commercial broadband speeds and prices. The implementation of the AUD 700,000 infrastructure investment started in 2005. These pipes, wires, ducts and antennas provide the technical connectivity, yet the majority of the infrastructure and certainly the social effect is invisible or unnoticeable. This master plan calls for ideas and strategies to showcase the social benefits of this infrastructure. Rather than limiting our options to the immediate members of the development team, the purpose of the design competition was to ask students and professionals with an interest in the visual and multimedia applications of information and communication technology to submit ideas and proposals for an installation (or multiple, distributed installations) at the KGUV that will display visual evidence of connectivity within the community. 3. Feasibility and sustainability: Is the idea feasible and realistic in regards to physical, budget and time constraints? Can the idea be implemented in four to six months within a budget of approximately AUD 40,000? Does the idea address significant issues of environmental, economic and / or social sustainability? It is envisioned that the design idea once implemented will be viewed, accessed or utilised by the diverse stakeholders who live, learn, work and play at the KGUV. These include, but are not limited to: Residents of the KGUV and nearby areas (including affordable housing residents, seniors and students); QUT staff and students; businesses; KGUV visitors (e.g. theatre patrons, business customers, café goers, etc.); the KGUV Community Association, Body Corporate and Principal Body Corporate of KGUV buildings. 4. Usefulness: Is the idea implementing something that is useful, effective and has a pragmatic quality to the KGUV community? 5. Aesthetics: Is the design idea aesthetically pleasing? In addition to these selection criteria, the following technical and physical considerations had to be taken into account: Context: The work should compliment the character and scale of the KGUV. 3. CONTEXTUAL REVIEW Access: Attention should be paid to ensuring that the design idea can be implemented in a manner that makes it widely accessible to the community. The KGUV design competition was looking for concepts of place-based artworks and locative media that successfully display evidence of connectivity of local community members. Various projects around the world have addressed similar issues by integrating a wide range of different interaction modi to engage participants. A list of project examples was provided for illustrative purposes with the design competition information, including the following two projects. Vandalism: Attention should be paid to ensuring that the impact of vandalism is minimised (e.g. through the use of robust materials and through site selection). Maintenance: Attention should be paid to developing an approach that requires minimum maintenance and in the event of damage is easily repairable at a reasonable cost. The Park Bench TV project is a local community and public art project, that offers localised media via wireless internet in the area of a park bench at Bedford Square in London [5]. However, while this concept limits the display of information to a laptop screen of people accessing the wireless connection, other projects have explored the use of public screens to display usergenerated content and stimulate interaction. The MMS Me project by the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), for example, enables participants to send pictures taken with their mobile phone cameras via MMS to a large projection screen [4]. The immediate display of the imagery successfully engaged participants in interaction with each other – via the screen as well as face-to-face. Implementation: The costs of implementing the work should be identified and should be based upon an indicative budget of AUD 40,000. The cost of operating the work should be identified and be modest. Safety: Consideration of public safety will be an important element in the design process. Longevity: The artwork should have a life span of a minimum of five years but preferably beyond. Planning: If the winning proposal requires planning permission, the entrant will work with the project manager to secure this. With these and other exemplars at hand, the participants of the design competition were asked to create innovative concepts that addressed specific criteria as outlined in the following. The competition ran for five months in 2007. Five entries were received in the open stream and eleven entries in the student stream. A selection committee consisting of representatives from the Department of Housing, QUT as well as an external expert assessed the submissions and selected one winner in each stream. The aim is to implement the winning ideas by mid 2008. The following section outlines the concept of the winning design in the student stream. 4. DESIGN COMPETITION The design call offered two streams: A student stream open to students enrolled at Australian secondary or tertiary institutions, and an open stream which was open to everyone including businesses. Team-based submissions were allowed. Deputy Mayor of Brisbane, David Hinchliffe, presented the student stream winner with AUD 2,000 prize money, and the open stream winner received AUD 5,000 at an award ceremony at the opening of The Next Level Festival at KGUV on 26th Oct 2007. Submissions were requested in digital form including a curriculum vitae about the entrant and a PowerPoint presentation describing the design concept and how it meets the five selection criteria of the competition: 5. VIRTUAL FISH 5.1 Overview The Virtual Fish Community project is a virtual environment where relationships between KGUV community members are visually represented by the actions of fish within a digital aquarium (see Figure 1). Community members can have their face transferred onto a digital fish via a web-based interface (see Figure 2), and these aquatic avatars are then displayed on various screens within the KGUV (see Figure 4). Participants allocate their „friends‟ from a list of other users, and the digital fish react to mutual friendships by swimming close together. The environment is dependent on community input, allows cocreation of content, and will encourage continual usage and emotional investment via regular intervals where customisation of one‟s fish is allowed. 1. Originality and creativity: How originally, creatively and innovatively does the proposed idea address the objective of displaying visual evidence of connectivity within the community? 2. Localness: How specific to and characteristic of the KGUV environment is the idea? Has it been purposefully designed, and / or customised, and / or appropriated to meet the needs of the local KGUV community? 220 port the combination with a real-life fish tank for the touchscreen installation. Multimedia installations that make use of an aquatic theme include the ambient projection of the Thinking Fish by Digit [2]. The installation augments video footage of fish with mind bubbles, hence is playing with the idea of mixing realities. The Activity Mirror is an example of an interactive environment that uses an ambient, virtual aquarium to respond to human behaviour such as tooth brushing with fish animations [10]. Similarly ambient is Frog Design‟s installation for the Amore Pacific cosmetic chain as described by Cameron [2]. Large projections of water respond with inspirational words to the movement of shopping customers in the store. These three projects are thematically related and two of them have incorporated interactive features. However, they do not include engaging interactions for lasting participation as planned for the Virtual Fish Community. Figure 1. Main fish tank installation. All displays will be touch screen enabled to allow people to interact with the fish. The Village Centre will be home to an installation containing a large real-life fish tank, complemented by a wide screen display positioned on the rear wall (see Figure 3). Real and virtual fish will seemingly inhabit the same physical space, the juxtaposition of elements creating a mixed reality of physical and digital experience. This central installation will also host a selection of pre-existing media (narrated slideshows, photos, text and artwork) revealing various historical information about Kelvin Grove, as well as a high-resolution interactive map of the area. An important feature of the Virtual Fish Community‟s concept is the use of touch screen interfaces to enable not only interaction with the fish but also access to information about the KGUV. This engaging interaction method was successfully implemented in a similar context by HIT Lab NZ for the awardwinning Touchscreen project. Designed for the New Zealand pavilion at the 2005 World Expo in Japan, it enabled visitors to access video clips about the country by interacting with virtual bubbles on large projection screens [6]. The Virtual Fish Community project aims to make use of the potential of interactive installations as discussed by Bolter and Gromala: they can be designed as a „window‟ offering a different perspective on certain aspects of human interaction [1]. To this end, the Virtual Fish Community is a window into a virtual aquatic world, as well as a mirror of human interaction. Community members are encouraged to participate in a digital world that reflects their real world relationships in a playful and entertaining way. 5.3 Evidence of connectivity When forming a concept to complement the selection criteria, enabling the KGUV community to be a part of a creation process was paramount. Displaying visual evidence of connectivity within the community all but demands that community members must be able to demonstrate their influence within the work. Entertaining the concept that people are most interested in people led to faces being one of the defining ways in which connectivity would be represented. Taking a playful approach to design resulted in the marriage of fish with human faces, and a personalised source of humour. Mirroring community friendships in a virtual realm by responding directly to interactions of community members was born from one of the primal goals of interface designers as pointed out by Brenda Laurel: the desire to create an imaginary, digital world with a special relationship to reality in order to “enrich our own capacities to think, feel and act” [9, p33]. Figure 2. Prototype of web interface. 5.2 Related works in the field A range of projects have been identified during the initial contextual review for this project that have used a similar aquatic theme, and some of them have inspired the design of the Virtual Fish Community. The aesthetics and calming nature of water were the initial inspiration for the concept and provided a foundation upon which the idea of a mixed-media fish tank developed. The psychological implication of cooling is also particularly appropriate to an urban environment with a subtropical climate. One of the most prominent visual references is the fish tank scene in the Monty Python movie “The Meaning of Life” [7]. The faces of the six Monty Python group members are incorporated on fish that engage in various conversations during the movie. This particular theme of incorporating human faces on fish or other animals has been used in numerous creative works. A recent example is an interaction design project, the Gilliam Café by the third author. The interactive installation used motion tracking and adapted the so-called „Gilliam style‟ [3] for incorporating human faces on fish using surreal, mixed-style cut-out animations, named after Monty Python‟s animator Terry Gilliam. In contrast to this, the Virtual Fish Community focuses on a strong participatory approach in which the community members have direct influence on the fish‟s appearance and behaviour. A realistic visual style has also been chosen to sup- On a practical level, incorporating historical elements within the work helps to further embed the project within the community. When combined with the map functionality, the central installation serves as a hub for visitors to the area wanting to know more about the KGUV community. However, the usefulness of the work can not only be seen in its potential to act as a map and serve as a reservoir of historical information but also to stimulate thought and provoke positive emotional responses: Given the demographic of the KGUV, an interactive installation that invites exploration and promotes playfulness may be beneficial in an area where people are mentally and physically rushing between classes, work and business. Some community members are likely to lack computer literacy skills, such as many of the senior residents. In order to make the 221 project accessible for all, a dedicated computer will be set up in the KGUV community hub where people without computer access or skills will be guided through the process of joining the Virtual Fish Community. The same method may also be used to allow visitors to the community temporary involvement with the virtual world. The intuitive nature of touch-screen interfaces should prove to be accessible to all. attracted to “experiences that allow them to create instead of merely participate” [13, p285]. In this respect, the ability to incrementally accessorise one‟s fish and alter options such as colour, size, shape and mood encourage a heightened and sustained engagement with the work over time. 6. CONCLUSION We have aimed at contributing to the OZCHI design community by stimulating discussion and creative thoughts about placebased artworks and locative media – specifically a current design competition as well as the concept of one of its winning entries. We have reviewed relevant examples in the interaction design field, and we have discussed potential and challenges for projects like these. Furthermore, we hope that the outlined competition concept may serve as a model to engage the interaction design community – students as well as professionals – in creating enjoyable and useful urban community installations. 5.4 Feasibility and design considerations Technical feasibility of the Virtual Fish Community is grounded in an understanding of other projects that have successfully achieved similar features. The ability to transfer a photo of a face onto a digital model via a web interface has been successful in projects such as the Verizon Action Hero website [14]. Infrared and „optical touch‟ technology, as produced by NextWindow [11] for example, will be employed in the touch screens, which both feature one time calibration, input from multiple sources and high reliability. The central installation‟s electronics are secure behind toughened glass (see Figure 3), and the satellite displays will be mounted in vandal resistant stainless steel. 7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank for their support of the competition, the Virtual Fish Community project, and this paper: Angela Button, Marcos Caceres, Jaz Choi, Greg Hooper, Tim Joyce, Ian Kaye, Neal Krautz, Peter Lavery, Tim Malone, Stephen Pincus, Gavin Sade, Penny Somerville, Madonna Thomas, Glen Wetherall. 8. REFERENCES [1] Bolter, J.D., Gromala, D. Windows and mirrors: interaction design, digital art, and the myth of transparency. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2003. [2] Cameron, A. The art of experimental interaction design. Systems Design Limited Shop, Hong Kong, 2004. [3] Evans, N.W. Packed Full of Goodness: The Animations of Terry Gilliam. Retrieved Aug 15, 2007, from http://www.digitalmediafx.com/Features/terrygilliam.html. 2001. [4] gizmag. World's first MMS Mobile Phone Game. Retrieved Aug 30, 2007, from http://www.gizmag.com/go/3714/. 2005. [5] Gomes, P. Park Bench TV. Retrieved Sep 1, 2007, from http://www.mutantfilm.com/parkbenchtv. 2002. [6] HIT Lab NZ. Touchscreen. Retrieved Sep 2, 2007, from http://www.hitlabnz.org/. 2004. [7] Jones, T., Gilliam, T. The Meaning of Life. Universal Pictures. 1983. [8] KGUV. Kelvin Grove Urban Village Master Plan. Retrieved 10 Nov, 2006, from http://kgurbanvillage.com.au/ vision/masterplan.shtm. 2004. [9] Laurel, B. Computers as Theatre. Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., Reading, Mass., 1993. [10] Nakajima, T., Kimura, H. Activity Mirror: Ambient Feedback System to Change Human‟s Behavior. In UbiComp 2007 Adjunct Proceedings (Innsbruck, Austria, Sep 16-19, 2007). Springer, 2007, 240-243. [11] NextWindow. Optical Touch Screen Technology. Retrieved Sep 2, 2007, from http://www.nextwindow.com/ benefits/touchscreen_technology.html. 2006. [12] Queensland Department of Local Government; Planning; Sport and Recreation. Queensland Population Update (No 10). 2007 [13] Shedroff, N. Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design. In: Jacobson, R.E. (ed.): Information design. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, 267-292. [14] Verizon. Action Hero. Retrieved 2 May, 2007, from http://actionhero.verizon.com/. 2007. Figure 3. Breakdown of physical installation. In order to be financially feasible, the Virtual Fish Community was designed with scalability in mind. The greatest costs of the project lay within the programming work required and the acquisition of a large touch enabled display screen for the central installation. The indicated budget of AUD 40,000 will cover these essentials, and additional modules such as the satellite displays and community hub computer can be added as time and money allow. Figure 4. Mockup of the installation at the shopping centre. Social sustainability is always a deciding factor in the success of an installation such as this, and functionality has been integrated to meet this need. Allowing residents to personalise their experience with the work is a method of encouraging involvement, and this is achieved by semi-regular emails to participants granting them the temporary ability to customise their fish. This utility has been included to support a positive and creative user experience based on Shedroff‟s notion that people tend to be 222