topical media & game development
[] readme course(s) preface I 1 2 II 3 4 III 5 6 7 IV 8 9 10 V 11 12 afterthought(s) appendix reference(s) example(s) resource(s) _

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multimedia casus

You can learn a great deal about technology, but there is no meaning to that unless the technology is applied to produce something worthwhile. In this final appendix, the outline of a multimedia casus will be presented, that is a course in which students face the challenge of creating a veritable (intelligent) multimedia information system.

In the studyguide, the course is described as follows.

multimedia casus

The assignment in the multimedia casus is to develop a virtual environment for some cultural or governemental institute or company.

The practicum takes the form a stage, in which external supervision plays an important role.

In the multimedia casus, techniques learned in previous courses (see the afterthoughts) will be applied to create the application.

At the start of the course the actual assignment will be determined.

Examples of possible assignments are: the development of a virtual exposition hall for the Dutch Royal Museum of the Arts, a virtual city square, which gives information about both the present and the past, a virtual shop, with online buying facilities, or an online broker, which offers facilities for inspecting houses.

In effect, the availability of a representative of a cultural institute, industry, or governmental department is crucial, otherwise the assignment might easily degrade to the type of toy assignments so common in academia. Now, what is the challenge in such an assignment?

augmented information

In the research directions of section 7-1 the notion of augmented virtuality was introduced to clarify the duality between information and presentation. More in particular, it was argued that the use of VR makes no sense unless there is some added value, that is by using the rich presentation and interaction facilities that come with this technology.

In an abstract fashion, we may rephrase the assignment as follows:

Given an information space, create a VR that resolves the duality between information and presentation, using intelligent multimedia technology. The VR must offer access to all relevant information entities, organized in a suitable spatial layout, and must allow for presentations from a variety of perspectives, making full use of graphical and rich media facilities.

Below, we will see how this may work out for a concrete assignment.

project assignment

Art is an interesting and complex phenomenon. No art, no culture! Hence, the preservation of collections of artworks is of crucial importance. The ICN (Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage) is a government-funded institute for the preservation of (dutch) cultural heritage. ICN gives advice, organises courses, does research, etcetera.

ICN is actively involved in the preservation of modern art, being project leader for INCCA (International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art), in the person of Tatja Scholte.

INCCA


In 1999, a group of eleven international modern art museums and related institutions applied to the European Commission (Raphael Programme) under the umbrella International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA). The INCCA project was accepted and work started in January 2000 led by the organiser, the ICN (Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage) and the co-organiser, Tate, London.

The objectives of INCCA are phrased as follows.

objectives


INCCA's most important set of objectives, which are closely interlinked, focuses on the building of a website with underlying databases that will facilitate the exchange of professional knowledge and information. Furthermore, INCCA partners are involved in a collective effort to gather information directly from artists.

The INCCA web site contains a wealth of information about contemporary artists, as well as links to virtual collections of the works of a variety of artists, as for example Mondriaan. The way the virtual Mondriaan collection is presented is interesting in itself. It is a running display with iconic representations of his paintings. The speed of the display varies with the user's mouse movement, and at any time the user may select a painting to obtain more information about it. This particular site suggests where our intelligent multimedia approach may fit in.

Returning to the INCCA project once more, as its mission statement we read:

mission


INCCA's guiding mission is to collect, share and preserve knowledge needed for the conservation of modern and contemporary art.

By now, the outlines of our assignment should become clear. Our information space is information about modern and contemporary artists, in the form of digital representations of there work, photographs, audio recordings from interviews and written text. The project assignment is to organize (part of) this material in a virtual environment and to include interaction facilities that highlight particular aspects of this information.

At this stage it would be too ambitious to cover all the material in the INCCA database, so we should restrict ourselves to one or more smaller case studies. The challenge, obviously, is to create presentations with a solid narrative structure and to augment the presented material in a suitable manner, using intelligent multimedia technology. What is suitable, is part of the challenge!

project management

Can the challenge, stated above, be met? Well, there are many ways the project may loose its focus, or fail alltogether. Students should be aware of the fact that the challenge is real and that failure would bring about shame.

Since there are no golden rules for project management, the students themselves are responsible for keeping the project on track. In other words, project management is part of the experience. Here is a checklist.

checklist


  • roles -- create a team
  • project goal -- develop a vision
  • production -- construct the assests
  • quality assesment -- test and control
  • delivery -- present and archive
  • manage -- all along
  • document -- track project's history
The rule of the supervisor should be minimal, as a critical third party. The students work as a group, and they should take responsibility as a group, including the management of the project, assigning roles, and keeping track of progress. In such an approach intervision (students supervise one another) is a necessary mechanism in judging the final result of the project.

judgement


  • group -- (2) effort, 5 (product), 3 (documentation)
  • individual -- (4) responsibility, (3) productivity, (3) quality
On a scale of 0-10, both the group result and the individual efforts may be assigned a mark with proper weights, as indicated above. In addition, target deliverables should be defined to assure that the project meets its deadlines and to inspect the nature and quality of the students' work.

deliverables


  • group -- project plan, design, project report, product
  • individual -- detailed weekly account of activities
Dependent on the time available a schedule should be defined indicating when the deliverables should be ... delivered.

schedule

  1. project organisation
  2. project definition
  3. planning and design
  4. construction and development
  5. integration and delivery
  6. presentation and archiving
Is this a realistic setup? It should be. Besides, it is not the supervisor's responsibility, is it? It is first of all the responsibility of the students themselves!
[] readme course(s) preface I 1 2 II 3 4 III 5 6 7 IV 8 9 10 V 11 12 afterthought(s) appendix reference(s) example(s) resource(s) _

(C) Æliens 18/6/2009

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