Future Media Research / 2.2 Automated Synaesthesia

Ideally the intermedia tools would encompass multiple platforms, and be scalable from a text only interface to an immersive Virtual Environment. The media should be scaled or transformed by the environment in which they are experienced. The final media output should be the result of negotiations between internal rules associated with each element (or group of elements) and the external conditions/obstacles created by the environment.

An extreme example could be a meditative augmented reality installation in an office building, whose media should be displayed as ambient sound and light, while its transformation parameters are accumulated from an automatic text generator (logfiles), a film archive and a skin conductivity sensor. A more practical example could be a training program for facility monitoring which incorporates real time data input (such as surveillance cameras, electric fences and temperature metres), together with a context sensitive library system. This program should scale from a SMS message for transmission on a mobile phone, to a video presentation and web pages. Another aspect of scalability required is the customisation of the UI to the particular needs/skills of the user.

At the present moment, developers of media worlds (such as games) are confronted with the challenge of learning (or creating) several interface paradigms for authoring different aspects of this creation. Another approach to this process is that a range of different media could be transformed through the same interface. For example, a developer comfortable with video editing systems, could edit sound, graphics, text and scripts through a video-editing interface; or a sculptor could have a tool that allows him/her to model digital media as if it were a physical matter.

—Nicholas Gaffney and Maja Kuzmanovic, FOAM (the whole text of the media future conference).

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