Staging and Evaluating Public Performance as an Approach to CVE Research

The Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham conducts research with the approach of staging public performances involves taking emerging technology out of the laboratory and working with professionals to create an event that can be placed before the public.

In Staging and Evaluating Public Performance as an Approach to CVE Research, they describe how they evaluate public performances:
- Andience feedback and discussion
- Ethnography: natural observational method that seeks to provide rich description of human activity
- System instrumentation and analysis of logs: log as much data as possible at participants’ machines and as it passes across the network (avatar movements, interactions with virtual objects, audio packets and text messages. These logs can then be analysed statistically in order to uncover significant patterns of user activity. The results can support or contradict other observations.

They present 4 examples of public performance in CVEs (Out of This World, Avatar Farm, Desert Rain) and most interestingly “Can You See Me Now?” after which a number of issues were raised:
- With the experience, the runners exploited areas of good GPS coverage
- The players would have benefited from better knowledge of the local environment on the streets
- Streamed walkie-talkie communication was an important part of generating excitement of the players, especially when their names were mentioned by the runners.
- The monitoring interfaces were too fragmented, detailed and expert specific. A shared higher level interface that provided an overview of the state of the game with possible drilling down into greater detailed would have been an improvement.

In the Reflexion and improvments part they mention that the analysis of system logs is also more problematic than it needs to be. At present, there is no agreed format for log data and no readily available suites of analysis tools.

Other quick notes:

Making good art and good computer science – in our experience, it is difficult to make something that is both artistically and technically groundbreaking. Indeed, interdisciplinary researchers often suffer from the expectation that they will be excellent at two or more disciplines.

Work to make it work: activities required by participants to establish and maintain their interactions

Nicolas’ post: Location based Games as a testbed for Research