Production Tools for Electronic Arenas: Event Management and Content Production


Sabine Hirtes, Michael Hoch, Bernd Lintermann and Sally Jane Norman
John Bowers, Kai-Mikael J-Aro, Sten-Olof Hellstrm and Malin Carlzon


ABSTRACT                               

This document comprises a combined deliverable made up of Deliverables D4.3 and D4.4 to the eRENA project.
This document considers how the production of events in electronic arenas, might be supported. The concern is with
the behind-the-scenes activities which are necessary in staging an event and how those activities might be best
supported technically. Basing our research on the practical experience accumulating in eRENA, and on the field
studies of production work performed, we present novel technologies and orientations to the support of production
process, these principally focus on technologies for supporting events as they occur in real-time and include:
proposals and demonstrations of virtual cameras for capturing activity in electronic arenas, techniques for sonifying
the activity of participants in an electronic arena to give an audible sense of the status of events, a physical
environment containing tangible interfaces to production software to facilitate timely direction and production work,
and a system for mapping data from participants to enable its flexible interpretation in media-rich environments. It
also begins to consider how content for events might be developed both off-line as well as improvised in real-time.
The document contains reports of public artistic events which have driven the developments here as well as
stimulated novel cross-project collaborations. Throughout there is a concern to reflect critically on the status of the
technologies and concepts explored, where possible through formal analysis, and how they might influence and learn
from other developments in the eRENA project.


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