Presentations

I have lots of thoughts about presentations, but most of my experience comes from industry. I was lucky enough to be able to give a couple of presentations at games conferences in Australia, an experience I greatly enjoyed despite having little idea what I was doing :-)

Coming to the ATC course was an opportunity to be a bit more reflective and analytic about presentation skills. Previously I'd typically have just thrown together a few slides in Powerpoint at the last minute, not practice, just wing it when I get up on stage. During my MA I had the pleasure to use Keynote on OSX rather than having to struggle with Powerpoint on Windows.

The first thing I learnt from this course was not to use Powerpoint, although as I said I'd already moved over to Keynote anyway. We had a little fun with this when we were asked to create a 5-10 minute presentation just to try out some of the features of the software. While trying to do this simple piece of work I was struck with how awkward I felt the new version of PP to be, and how lost I felt while trying to use it. This struck a chord with my prior topic for the presentation, the trouble we have getting around campus, finding rooms etc. I decided to combine the two and make a mixture of these sensations of being lost, and use some of the more gratuitous PP features by way of illustration.

Looking back at some of my slides from projects I worked on back then, in hindsight I made excessive use of text on the screen, although I did try to incorporate graphics where appropriate. In fact this worked quite well on one occasion where I wanted to talk about three concepts:

Progress:


Imagination:




Self:



In case you don't get it, that's Will Self.
I couldn't find anything to represent the concept very well, but fortunately one of the audience members recognised Mr Self and laughed.

I also found another presentation I did where I used the same background colour and texture for the first and last slides, but a different one for all of the other slides. Recently I saw a presentation by Rob Clowes where the background colour was related to a theme explicated earlier in his presentation, thus providing some kind of continuity with later slides and also being a visual change to indicate a change in topic for the audience. I used this technique in my presentation for ATC, though I'll have to wait for feedback from my peer reviewers before I find out if they noticed and whether they appreciated it or not.

Other reference points for self-reflection on my learning come from watching other people give presentations. In one session when Geraldine was away, Maria and I offered to coordinate access to video recording equipment for the rest of the group in case they wanted to record themselves presenting. David Hurrion was the only person who took up the option. Even Maria and I were too shy or too lazy to prepare an mock presentation. Watching Dave was interesting, because even with an audience of just two people (and one video camera) he appeared nervous, at least at the start of his talk. After we'd filmed him we watched it back on the television screen. This was an interesting experience, but presumably much more so for Dave. It's clearly an opportunity that I missed out on. Obviously I could have tried filming myself before giving my actual presentation, but I didn't do this either. It would be easy for me to say that I'd do it before any other presentation I give in the future .... but that would just be good intentions. I do think the presentations were recorded on the day I gave mine and I'll try to get hold of that tape to evaluate how well I think I did. Right now I think it was ok, there were some interesting questions at the end so presumably people managed to stay awake through it.

Once I gave a presentation at a games conference in Melbourne. The talk was about writing the software to animate characters on Sony's PlayStation 2 console. There was a representative from Sony in the audience, but he fell asleep during my talk. It was pretty dry, basic for someone like himself, and apparently he'd just got off the plane from France and was hung over.

For the first presentation of my MA I referred to that experience,

"Computer games that I've worked on have been played by literally millions of people, some of whom claim they have been driven to violence as a result. The last presentation I gave was to hundreds of people on a great big stage, but someone fell asleep half way through. Today as there we're in a more intimate environment and there are only three people in the audience I hope my presentation will provoke neither reaction."

haha.

The final point I'd like to make today is to mention how impressed I was with Geoff's presentation delivery. Personally I found the slides less impressive, but in terms of vocal delivery and pacing I thought it was a stand-out presentation. One thing I particularly noticed was his way of projecting towards the back of the room, something he'd mentioned before in a previous seminar. As I sat on the front row for all of the presentations I noticed that some speakers would only make eye contact with those of us immediately in front of them. Geoff pointed out that if you look to the back of the room your head will naturally lift, your chest open, and your voice will carry further. It's a simple technique but one that seemed to work well, even in a presentation where there were only two rows in the audience. It'll be interesting to review the presentations on film as the video camera was behind the audience and I'd expect this technique pays off in terms of audio recording quality.
Definitely something I'll try to use in future presentations.

Technical Writing

The piece of work I'm going to review today is A Wii Remote, A Game Engine, Five Sensor Bars and a Virtual Reality Theatre.

@inproceedings{1324941,
author = {Torben Schou and Henry J. Gardner},
title = {A Wii remote, a game engine, five sensor bars and a virtual reality theatre},
booktitle = {OZCHI '07: 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},
year = {2007},
isbn = {978-1-59593-872-5},
pages = {231--234},
location = {Adelaide, Australia},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1324892.1324941},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

Let's start with the title: I really like it! Although it says nothing about methodology, problem, results, etc, I think it fits well with the content of the paper. This is really just a description of a technology project in progress without much of a theoretical basis, but that's fine. It's exciting from an HCI / engineering perspective even without being able to discuss the implications of their study as it hasn't completed yet. As such the disjoint, technology-focussed title seems to me to be appropriate: it's like all they have at this stage is a bunch of technologies, but that alone is enough to draw my interest and provide enough suggestion that I can infer that this is an interesting paper. Looking at the title a bit further, what appeals to me is the combination of several "sexy" terms all used together. The Wii remote is a device that I've paid particular attention to recently with a project of my own, but is also something that's generating much interest throughout the game studies community as well as the commercial industry. Including the term "game engine" in the title also helps me as it positions this paper as being very relevant to my area of interest, whereas most writing on the Wii is from a largely non-technical perspective, and in many ways does not deal directly with the material reality (i.e., the technology) of video games. If they had been more specific and had said, "The Steam Game Engine" I would have been even more excited, though admittedly most readers of the OzCHI proceedings would be forgiven for not having heard of "Steam" before. Next, "five sensor bars" - this marks the project out as being something quite exceptional. Normally only a single bar is used for Wii games. Indeed, the only other project that I've heard of which uses custom sensor bar configurations are those by Johnny Lee Chung, the pioneering PhD student at the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Using five sensor bars suggests to me that this paper is in that rare and extremely interesting league of hardware modifications. Finally the "virtual reality theatre" is for me the least interesting term. This suggests that the project is unfortunately out of the scope of normal users and most other research teams.

The abstract to the piece is short and doesn't give a lot of information. Fortunately the whole paper is short so there's not too much lost. If I were to rewrite it I'd include a mention that various technical characteristics of the Wiimote will be discussed including sensitivity cones, aiming techniques, it's usability affordances, as well as some modifications made to the Source game engine. Finally as this project is a work in progress, I would make that clear in the abstract, that no specific results will be reported in this current paper.

The introduction set the context for the paper by explaining the authors motivation.

"The exciting prospect of incorporating a Wii remote controller into this theatre and determining whether it could be used effectively with games and other virtual reality software has led to the study described in this paper."

It sounds like they really just want to see whether they can use the Wiimote with their VR theatre. This isn't a terribly rigorous reason for conducting a piece of research, and perhaps they'd be better off to frame it as a particular research question. I'd go for something around an investigation into the capabilities / limitations / affordances of the Wii remote as a virtual reality interface device. The emphasis then would be on examining the device itself and trying to work out what applications it could have in different contexts, whereas the authors begin with the environment - their virtual reality theatre - and are then working back in the opposite direction to see if they can make it work. Even though I might approach the work in a different way I still think their project is exciting and my approach might not have led me to even consider its usability in such a unique and compelling environment.

Alternatively I noticed that they include the word "Immersion" in their keyword search, but nowhere in the title or abstract.

"The motion-tracking abilities of the Wii can provide a strong immersive experience..."

This is taken from their introduction, and again suggests another way of framing the paper - as an analysis of the potential for immersion that the Wii remote can offer in a CAVE-like immersive environment. This shift in emphasis would move the project more into psychological or theoretical territory and away from the technical. Frankly this is all extremely interesting to me and I look forward to their future publications to see where they take this project.

Towards the end of the introduction they point to what sounds like some form of results.

"... the main limitation to the deployment of the Wiimote in the interaction space of the theatre is the narrow code of sensitivity for detection of infrared signals from a Sensor Bar (by the Wiimote) and the narrow cone of transmission of infrared signals by a Sensor Bar."

After which the authors take a common approach of briefly describing the structure of the paper to follow.

Section 2 is a taxonomy and usability analysis of the Wii remote, followed by a description of different aiming techniques used by current Wii games.

... the Wiimote for a 3D user interface has clear usability advantages over the sometimes unfamiliar devices employed in virtual reality theatres ... speed, accuracy, ease of learning, fatigue and coordination would all seem to be well served."

This section is concise, with clear language and concrete examples of actual games. After a short description of the aiming techniques the authors make a conclusion that is also a hint for what will appear later in the paper,

"it is, therefore, necessary to either convert fixed-reticule game engines to have a bounding-box approach or to adopt a form of head tracking which is independent of the Wiimote."

Section 3 is a technical description of the viewing cone angles, and their implications for use in the large space of the VR theatre. I found this section extremely interesting as it dealt with an important aspect of the Wiimote that I hadn't seen covered elsewhere. Unfortunately the presentation of their data was not well executed. In essence this section describes the angles (left, right, up, down) at which light is either emitted from a diode, or detected by the sensor. It occurs to me that this is essentially graphical data but the authors only present it textually.

"the viewing cone for the Wiimote to have average half-angles in the horizontal plane of 18.7 degrees for the right half angle and 22.1 degrees for the left half-angle. The vertical cone was measured to have a hfalf-angle of 14 degrees in the up direction and 17.3 degrees in the down direction."

"At separations of 1m, half angles in the horizontal direction were measured to be 66 degrees (left) and 72 degrees (right).

"... at 3m separation half-angles of 39 degrees (left) 33 degrees (right), 41 degrees (up) and 31 degrees (down) ..."

A tabluar format would have helped to emphasise the differences between these measurements, but even better would have been a graphical rendering of the angles and distances. A colour-coded 3D volumetric rendering could have shown all the volumes simultaneously, or a simple first-angle orthographic line drawing projection with the horizontal and vertical planes overlain together. The did provide one drawing which tried to show where a participant could stand in the theatre and still be able to see at least one infrared dot, but I found this hard to reconcile with the data presented, and indeed it did not include any representation of the angles described.

However, the most important conclusion from this section was how the viewing angles vary with distance, and that they are asymmetric. The authors then suggest that due to these limitations they would need to use multiple sensor bars for their VR theatre, but this in turn necessitates further work on the driver.

"Anecdotally, the immersive feel of this environment is compelling, even though it is not be projected in stereo" [sic]

Just an aside - there are a couple of typos in this document, which surprised me for an ACM publication. The one above was just a proof-read problem, but perhaps more seriously the reference footnotes used in the body of the text are incomplete:

"Many games and other applications have been written for the Wiimote and we have drawn up detailed interaction taxonomies for a number of these (The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess [?] and WiiSports [?]"

References are properly numbered in the References section at the end of the document but not through the body so there was clearly some kind of technical problem when the authors or editors produced this file.

Returning to the previous quotation about the immersiveness of the project, I think that again this is an area that they could investigate further as it seems like a solid research question. We know that immersive experiences are hightened in game environments, and also in wide-perspective VR theatres, but it would be interesting to evaluate how the use of the Wiimote changes this experience compared to other interaction devices such as the traditional data glove.

In this last major section to the paper the authors give a high level overview of their software modifications. This is just enough information to suggest how one would reproduce their results without becoming too specific with implementation details.

Section 6 is Project Status, effectively the conclusion for this paper and is just a two sentence summary. More could have been said about the future direction this work will take, about why this work is or will be significant for the field, as well as some concluding remarks about the Wiimote and / or theatre as devices for immersive interaction.

Community

There are a couple of related communities that I'm interested in targeting, academics from game studies and HCI.

In terms of conferences my background in video games suggests DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association, which is the premier academic game studies event but it's only bi-annual with the next conference coming in 2009.

Given my new-found involvement in Human-Computer Interaction, HCI 2008 would have been a good option but it's now too late to submit a Full Paper. The subtitle for this year's event is "Culture, Creativity, Interaction" so I'd like to attend anyway as it sounds very interesting. They do accept Short Papers on the topic of "Users with unusual requirements", but these are only 4 pages long which is probably too small for my project.

Fun and Games 2008 is my target conference, and I intend to submit a 6 or 12 page Technical Paper to reach them by their deadline of April the 18th. Second Life is not a game per se, but could fit into their interest ins "Serious Games", " Games and Rehabilitation technologies" and "Multimodality interaction and games".

There are several journals which have expressed an interest in my work,

Convergence
which describes it's interests in the "creative, social, political and pedagogical issues raised by the advent of new media technologies", and lists relevant topics to include "Video games", "Internet studies", "Digital/new media art", "VR", "New media in cross-cultural/international contexts" , "New media products".
Relevant papers include Lee, Alistair, Morrow, Guy. "Disabling Web Designers: Issues Surrounding Disabled People's Use of Web Related Technology". Convergence 2005 11: 19-24.

New Media and Society also includes papers on video games and is interested in the cultural implications of technology, though they don't explicitly reference these things in the way Convergence does.

Games and Culture
"theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within interactive media". Their emphasis tends to be more focussed on games per se and the issues around ludology, narratology, violence, gender, aesthetics, critique and design.

Another Sage publication, The British Journal of Visual Impairment is clearly relevant, and they even include "technology" as one of their interests, though there is as yet no discussion of computer games or Second Life.

The ACM also have a couple of interesting journals,

Computers in Entertainment
Volume 5, 2007 featured a "Special Issue: Interactive Entertainment" and issue 4 October / December promises to have "Full-length interviews and papers on accessibility, technology, history, and branding of computer games", but this issue is still unavailable.

Interactions also appears to be somehow interesting from an HCI perspective. Their subtitle is "Experiences, people, technology". They even had an issue on "Funology" which considered computer games, though it was more from a design perspective and I couldn't find any work around visual impairment.

I feel that I have a very good appreciation for my community, especially thanks to the year of research I conducted on my MA in New Media prior to coming to Sussex. I'm very comfortable with the language of game studies, though am aware of plenty that I still need to read up on in the HCI field. Interestingly both disciplines seem to refer to similar issues but by way of different authors. For instance the Interact lab recently held a presentation by Rob Clowes on embodiment, which was a subject I dealt with during my MA thesis, "Embodied Evil: The Aesthetics of Embodiment in Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition". It was interesting to note that a lot of the audience who came from an HCI background referenced many similar authors that I'd never heard of before, and similarly that many authors I would consider to be fundamental were excluded from their discussions. For example while talking about cyborgs it seems to me that Donna Haraway's 1985 Cyborg Manifesto would be fundamental. However Haraway's work is largely associated with feminist theory and so would not necessarily be something HCI people were necessarily interested in.

To conclude I'm looking forward to consolidating my current knowledge with some new perspectives on familiar themes, and hope that by so doing I can bring something new to the mix that others might not have access to.