Examples of interactive art experiences utilizing smartphones?
March 25, 2016 6:50 AM Subscribe
I'm helping out with an arts group that is thinking of doing a kind of experience that will mainly involve a user interacting with a smartphone. The experience will blend both what is provided via the phone as well as the environment the participants are in. They are still in a very early stage of conceptualization and would be keen to read more about similar things. Does anybody have pointers to such work?
They are dramatists, so what they've seen so far has been performances in that discipline However, on hearing what they're thinking of doing, it struck me that it isn't too different from stuff like alternate reality games (ARGs), and other things from the interactive/new media area. Certain kinds of games probably also fit the bill, especially if they involve the player roleplaying, and perhaps doing something that involves the real world. It could be an individual experience, or perhaps a group shared experience. As long as it involves something like a smartphone as an integral part of the experience.
They are dramatists, so what they've seen so far has been performances in that discipline However, on hearing what they're thinking of doing, it struck me that it isn't too different from stuff like alternate reality games (ARGs), and other things from the interactive/new media area. Certain kinds of games probably also fit the bill, especially if they involve the player roleplaying, and perhaps doing something that involves the real world. It could be an individual experience, or perhaps a group shared experience. As long as it involves something like a smartphone as an integral part of the experience.
Read up on the Museum of Feelings that was set up in New York last year. It used the movement of your smartphone to determine your mood and assign you an aura of sorts.
posted by greta simone at 7:07 AM on March 25, 2016
posted by greta simone at 7:07 AM on March 25, 2016
Best answer: Check out one step at a time like this they do interactive site based story telling. Their Since I Suppose was a deconstruction of Measure for Measure set in Chicago that involved a smart phone for each audience member.
posted by Uncle at 8:27 AM on March 25, 2016
posted by Uncle at 8:27 AM on March 25, 2016
Best answer: Infatuated by Situate and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was pretty great, though there's not a whole lot of documentation online. (I suspect the designers would be keen to chat about it, though.)
Though not strictly interactive - in that the media doesn't change in response to input - Improv Everywhere's mp3 experiments are worth a look, as are David Helbich’s Kortrijk Tracks.
There was a performance/game in San Fransisco around five years ago that involved following a recorded script while wearing headphones and carrying out directed actions for a good part of an hour, coordinated to line up with other participants. I'm pretty sure it included a meal in a cafe. But I'm failing utterly to find it now.
posted by eotvos at 9:21 AM on March 25, 2016
Though not strictly interactive - in that the media doesn't change in response to input - Improv Everywhere's mp3 experiments are worth a look, as are David Helbich’s Kortrijk Tracks.
There was a performance/game in San Fransisco around five years ago that involved following a recorded script while wearing headphones and carrying out directed actions for a good part of an hour, coordinated to line up with other participants. I'm pretty sure it included a meal in a cafe. But I'm failing utterly to find it now.
posted by eotvos at 9:21 AM on March 25, 2016
I don't have pointers to something that you can see as this was just a tiny exhibit in my local neighborhood art center. The piece was a physical object made of wood that you could walk around and get inside of. There were portals to look out of and surfaces to look at. On each there were QR codes that you could scan with your phone which would take you to a web page describing the place you were "at" or what you were "gazing out at".
posted by mmascolino at 9:32 AM on March 25, 2016
posted by mmascolino at 9:32 AM on March 25, 2016
Response by poster: Thanks for all the answers so far guys! I forgot to emphasize that I'm particularly interested in examples from the ARG / game industry, because such stuff are most likely things that my friends would have little exposure to.
posted by destrius at 9:56 AM on March 25, 2016
posted by destrius at 9:56 AM on March 25, 2016
Best answer: There's a lot of this about! Unfortunately the terminology is complicated - people have used phrases including "pervasive games", "real-world games" and "augmented reality games", but people have also used those terms to describe entirely different sorts of games, so it's hard to get a really good overview.
For older games, your friends could try Pervasive Games: Theory and Design, a book from 2010 or so that looks at work like this - obviously it doesn't include anything from the last five or six years, but it's still pretty interesting. There's also a decent quick overview here of five geocaching-style GPS-enabled games from 2010.
And speaking of old, here's a massive pdf from 2005(!!) about experience design guidelines for making a "mediascape" - mediascapes, or mscapes, was a term used by HP in particular with reference to a tool they provided allowing users to easily make location-based games. As I say, over ten years old, but a lot of clever people spent lots of time thinking about this and their huge guidelines document (although not always relevant now) still has a lot of worthwhile things to think about in it. Calvium, the company hosting the pdf I just linked to, continue to make this kind of work and to occasionally publish interesting research.
For more recent work, try searching for "augmented reality games" which will get you a lot of work that's about layering a (sometimes interesting, sometimes pretty vapid) game world on top of the real world. This is probably a better match for what you're after than most alternate reality games.
Or look at things like:
(NB this is kinda-sorta my job so I know most of these people; I started putting disclaimers in but in the end I was disclaiming pretty much everything so just imagine a general disclaimer cloud over this whole answer.)
posted by severalbees at 8:38 AM on March 26, 2016
For older games, your friends could try Pervasive Games: Theory and Design, a book from 2010 or so that looks at work like this - obviously it doesn't include anything from the last five or six years, but it's still pretty interesting. There's also a decent quick overview here of five geocaching-style GPS-enabled games from 2010.
And speaking of old, here's a massive pdf from 2005(!!) about experience design guidelines for making a "mediascape" - mediascapes, or mscapes, was a term used by HP in particular with reference to a tool they provided allowing users to easily make location-based games. As I say, over ten years old, but a lot of clever people spent lots of time thinking about this and their huge guidelines document (although not always relevant now) still has a lot of worthwhile things to think about in it. Calvium, the company hosting the pdf I just linked to, continue to make this kind of work and to occasionally publish interesting research.
For more recent work, try searching for "augmented reality games" which will get you a lot of work that's about layering a (sometimes interesting, sometimes pretty vapid) game world on top of the real world. This is probably a better match for what you're after than most alternate reality games.
Or look at things like:
- Ingress, a big "wander around the real world and claim locations for one side or another" game that reports that it has millions of players
- Zombies, Run!, a running game set after a zombie apocalypse where you, well, run around and listen to the story of what's going on in this world, occasionally get chased by zombies, etc
- Blast Theory are one of the "game-ier" experimental artist groups doing this kind of thing, and their work has been written about quite a lot so there's plenty of documentation and critical writing about their stuff, which is often not the case for games in this area
(NB this is kinda-sorta my job so I know most of these people; I started putting disclaimers in but in the end I was disclaiming pretty much everything so just imagine a general disclaimer cloud over this whole answer.)
posted by severalbees at 8:38 AM on March 26, 2016
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posted by mkb at 7:01 AM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]