• Figure 2. Listening to a story in Rider Spoke (copyright Blast Theory).

In addition to this series of works by Blast Theory, our book also documents works by other creative practitioners, such as explorations of biosensing and thrill by Brendan Walker in his Thrill Laboratory, the Anywhere mobile city walk by Willi Dorner, and the Savannah mobile-learning game by Futurelab, in association with the BBC and HP.

 

May + June 2012

interactions

Rider Spoke (2007) further explored the nature of mobile engagement with the city, in this case by asking participants to draw on locations as inspiration for personal stories. In a deliberately isolating and contemplative experience, cyclists explored a city at night, recording a series of stories, leaving them at key locations, and then listening to the stories of others (Figure 2).

A text-messaging adventure game
for mobile phones, Day of the Figurines
(2006), took a quite different tack,
exploring complex temporal rela-
tionships between real and virtual
worlds. The experience was designed
to be slow, with 24 hours of a narra-
tive set in a fictional town unfolding
over 24 days in the lives of the play-
ers, who sent just a few text mes-
sages each day. In this case, our eth-
nographic studies revealed the chal-
lenges of managing highly episodic
engagement, especially how players
had to account for interruptions and
changing patterns of phone use with
family, friends, and colleagues.

Studying Mixed-Reality Performance as HCI Beyond being landmark examples of an emerging form of artistic practice, these various mixed-reality performances also provide vehicles for research. HCI researchers have been actively involved in their design and implementation, often touring with them through the first few performances as they visit different venues and helping refine them until they are stable enough to continue their touring