Packaged Stories (Moving Images)

What we have done

We have focused on our final presentation this week and how we want to present our project. We decided that it would be fun to do the whole presentation in the form of a movie. We talked to Malin to make sure this would be okay and after we got it confirmed we started to plan the script. We had some different ideas but decided on one everyone were satisfied with.

We have also tried to find a good camera to use for recording our video. And after some research and e-mailing some contacts we found a very good camera that we can use during next week. We have also started to look for locations to shoot the movie at. We have contacted KTH Media Production about filming in their studio and we will meet them next week and record some of our scenes in the studio.

What we will do

Next week we will start recording our video for the final presentation. On Monday we are going to pick up the camera from Canon who have agreed to lend us one for the rest of the week. Then we will use the whole week to record material for the video. After that we need to do some editing and create the effects that we want to get the final movie.

Now that we have the instructions for the book we will also finish our chapter and make sure that we say all that we want to say with the text. Our goal is to have the book chapter done at least one week before the deadline in order to get as much time as possible to work on our film/final presentation.

Challenges encountered

We have not yet received answers from the scientists and industry RnD-personnel that we contacted last week. Since their inputs would be of good value before finishing the book chapter we will try and contact them again and hope to get some inputs on our idea.

Another challenge is finding locations where we can record our film. As written above we have contacted KTH media production to help us with this but we need to find some other locations as well. We plan on filming some scenes outside which is not optimal this time of the year (since it is very dark a big part of the day) and it will be a challenge to film everything before it gets dark.

Changes in the project

We have not made any changes to our project this week.

Future of Cross-Cultural Storytelling

• What we have done. Since the previous report, we did a lot of literature and web research to find out about cultural differences in user interfaces and the different meanings of symbols/icons/colours/images in the various cultures. Our main results are that there are a lot of differences in the UI and in the meaning of the symbols. We have not discussed it further yet, but there is the possibility now to design the user interface in a globalized, internationalized or in a local way. Furthermore, we looked up, how news will be consumed in the future and how stories are told in different ways, which guided us to the result that wearable are the future of news consumption. Therefore, we decided that our system will be used in combination with a wearable, where the user receives the headlines and depending on the screen size of the wearable a short abstract of the article as well. Whereas, the main use should take place on a medium or large screen. Additionally, in our use case, there should be the possibility of sending the service from the wearable to the larger screen via a wireless connection. 
  During the week, we had one meeting, where we summarized our findings of the literature and web research and discussed, what exactly our system should be, the main functions and features of the system and the business plan and started to talk about our corporate identity.

• What we will do. What you will do next (next step(s) in your project. After an extensive discussion about our service’s definition and features the next step would be to discuss our concept from a realistic point of view. Some of us have taken the course Media Management and have therefore the “business model”-thinking in mind. That is something that we started to discuss of the end of this week, and already encountered several challenges, therefore that will be one of the priorities for next week. One of the challenges is how and why different newspapers would agree to be featured on our website. What will be our value proposition to them? As a lot of their revenue comes from advertising, when we argue that the value of our service for our readers will be that they find all news in one place, it must mean that the brands lose customers and revenue as they lose the ability to show display ads on their original platforms. If we would pay news magazines to be featured on our platform, what will our revenue come from? Also, we believe that unbiased and accessible news should be available to everyone, and therefore we don’t see it legitimate to charge users for the service. Those are the questions we are discussing at this point.
• Challenges encountered. The communication within the group is one of the hardest matters for the moment. Even if we have meetings and do great progress we have troubles to share the same point of view and agree on the importance of certain activities that we should focus on. You could say that we are in the “storming phase” again, so now we look forward into entering the performing phase next week!Some of the group members think it’s more important to focus on different features and exact technical functions while other think it’s of higher importance to talk about the value proposition of the service and how it will work and be used before we set every technical detail. We all are agreeing on the importance of working through both aspects but we have hard to communicate. This leads to large challenges in the working process and it slow down the process a bit because of the reason that it’s harder to divide tasks among the group members since everyone is not aligned in their perception of the concept. 
  It’s also a challenge to actually put ourselves into the ears or eyes of the future audience and try to figure out if our idea make sense or not and if it’s understandable. All through the project the importance of including the main topic; the cross-cultural storytelling aspect should be considered and also taken into account in the changes and development that have been done. Last we find it difficult to know where the gaps are within the concept and which part we should focus on to achieve the requirements of the course as well.

• Changes in the project. As mentioned earlier, we have specified that we are to offer a service and not a product per se. This because we don’t want our users to buy an artifact in order to use our news gathering platform, as well as we believe a service as a seamless solution that you can use on different connected devices will bring value to the user. We added e.g. social sharing and commenting to the service in order for the users to communicate since we have seen an increase in interest for user generated content and co-creation. Although while still being a multi-subjective service, a commenting and sharing function can make for the user to feel involved and increase their interest in the service. We also changed some of the functions, as well as came up with new ones (also as mentioned in What we have done). So this might not be a “change”, but more a progress in the service development. We are also in the middle of the name-changing process (from CCN - Cross Cultural News, a twist of CNN “ha-ha”) to something we all like, since CCN was something we just invented as a last minute solution before the 50-words-hand-in. However, we haven’t decided on it quite yet, so it will be a “to-be-continued” for next weeks blog post. *drum roll*
• Resources. Because of the large amount of literature and web research done, we have found many useful resources, e.g. from the databases ACM and SpringerLink. The scientific papers, we have found on this databases, are all about cultural differences in user interfaces and about cross-cultural communication. A very recommendable and useful source was for example this book (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-39143-9), which contains of several articles. Furthermore, we have found a useful article (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfmid=1502658&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=562248448&CFTOKEN=53891227), which describes a similar idea to ours. Therefore, we have seen that gathering articles from different news sources, presenting them in a timeline and extracting the main information is already possible. We have also looked into different media and news predictions so to say regarding how news will be consumed in the future. (http://www.medieutredningen.se/om-oss/ ) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/brand-connect/wp/enterprise/are-wearables-the-future-of-news/ )(https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Reuters%20Institute%20Digital%20News%20Report%202014.pdf)

Computer Games

What we have done this week:

This week we have worked together to complete some of the "what we will do" tasks from previous weeks report. We have made a collection of about 200 pictures of Chernobyl. The pictures are both post and pre the event and we have some really great photos of both the surroundings where people lived as well as photos from inside and outside the reactor.

Cornelia talked to Björn and we got some really great feedback. With the help of the feedback we came up with one idea that we call "real time evacuation" where you have to complete the goal within 48 hours (we have sources stating that it did not end well for those who failed to evacuate within 48 hours). We also investigated the Stalker game and took some screenshots. However, we need more time to investigate what material we can use from the game in our concept. We have been thinking about getting video recordings from the game to illustrate our own concept. 

We have been working more on the plot of the game but it is not yet finished.

Finally, we have been looking at tools that we can use to illustrate our concept with comic book drawings.

What we will do next:

Right now we are focusing on the draft of the text for the book, we have to complete this draft for next week. We feel like we have to put in a little more effort in doing research about the industry as it is today and future trends in the industry. We also want to find material about the historical development of storytelling in games. Since we got this new idea of a time based game we need to investigate whether there are games out there that uses ideas like this. We know there are many "time based" games but not many games that uses real time as a constraint. 

We still feel a bit confused on how to visualize our concept and present it in an understandable and exciting way. We need more thoughts and discussion on this matter.

We feel like we have done progress this week and are not yet stuck on any matter.

Update: Attention Span

This week we mainly went more into detail about the functionalities of our service app.

First of all, we are going to call our service Goldfish - Read it now or it’s gone forever. The look and feel will be inspired by the presentation we made for the midcrit. The goldfish is a symbol for a short attention span and we also tried to incorporate this in our first logo drafts.

We specified the functionalities and interface of our app in detail, for example how the welcome screen should look like, what the steps after this are, what kind of information the user needs to receive in order to enjoy using the app. We made decisions about whether one should be able to take an incoming call (we decided that this should be enabled, after which you return to the content). The main focus for next week for Leonie and Anton will be to make a sketch of the interfaces and different screens. The result should be a mock-up of the application and also some visual support (a video demonstrating the user experience for instance). In order to create the interface, we need Teresa’s content, which we will hopefully be able to see next week on our meeting with her.

Furthermore, we defined our aim/ mission, market launch strategy and a long term strategy for possible expansions of our business model in the future.

Finally, Ulrika and Desiree started to work on the book chapter. We had some ideas about a title, introduction and quotes to support and back up the chapter (mainly from our research for the midcrit). Our aim is to continue and finish the chapter next week. We will also have to think about a great way of how to tell a story in our presentation, which will be one big task for the next weeks where we still have to devote some time.

We feel that we are having a very good flow of ideas and we are happy that we talked more about the specifications and functionalities of our app. Probably there will be more questions about that next week, once we will dig deeper into the design process.

Interactive storytelling group

Hi there!

What we have done/Challenges encountered

What we have done this week, until now, is to continue our research of how to develop our Be Detective idea and try to find a solid concept of how we think it will work. But our research has not been to a lot of help though we feel uninspired and don’t really know how to move forward with our concept. We were too focused on integrating the feedback we got from the mid-crit session which made us more confused. That is why we now have chosen to kill our darling and are focusing on a whole new concept idea which we all feel much more comfortable and stoked to work with.

Here is the motivation of why we chose to kill our first idea:

• Our idea will not work in the long term. There is theory and research that states gamification only works in a limited period of time and after that the user doesn't care anymore, we want to create something that has a longer life span.
• The idea was to old and already out there. We want to come up with something new, innovative and futuristic that does not exist today or has existed for the last couple of 15 years..
• We want to create something with a reality approach. Our idea has until now only had fictional aspects and the only reality approach was the surroundings.  
• The storytelling is not modern and innovative enough.
• We had a hard time understanding and developing the interaction aspect. How would the user interact with witnesses, clues etc.
• The concept was not solid enough.

Changes in the project

To start with, what we actually plans to keep from our detective idea is the technique. We still wanna use, augmented reality lenses or glasses other than that the concept is completely changed. Our new concept underlines creativity, interaction, entertainment and visualization in a whole new way by taking the “going out for dinner” experience to a whole new food sensational level. This concept focuses on creating a restaurant business experience you’ve never seen or heard of before. By interacting with your food, a story associated to the food  appears in front of you (like a movie) using augmented reality. By eating different things from the plates, will add happenings to the storyline. You can also manipulate the story happening on the dinner table. For example if an unexpected guest in the form of a fly appears, just wave it away with your hands or cut the flower that is growing to high, with a simple scissor motion with your fingers! A custom made database of events/happenings, characters and emotions will be created in association to the specific menu.  When you for example eat a tomato a visualization develops on your restaurant table where you can see the whole time lapse from when the tomato started to grow until it’s mature and ready to be eaten. If you eat several ingredients at the same time, for example meat, potatoes and salad, a integration of all your ingredients will appear on the table in an artistic manner. By chewing your food slow, the development of the visualization process will move slower and if you chew fast, the visions you see will appear faster. You decide the story. The whole visualization experience depends on your food and how fast you eat it. Going out for dinner is a social activity, and we want it to stay that way, an integration of all your companions visions will blur together into one. When your plate is empty, you have a fullsize story in front of you that you’ve made yourself depending on what food you have eaten. It’s like going to the movies except that you are the one creating and deciding how the story will look like, depending on what food you are eating and how you’ll eat it. Because the food is organic and locally produced, there will only be positive images creating.

What we will do

We now have a solid concept we want to develop further. We will continue to research more in the area linked between food experience and augmented reality. So far, we have not encountered any concepts similar to ours. But with e.g. augmented reality glasses we think this can be possible to execute in the future. We are focusing on the final presentation and how to make our concept as clear as possible. Though we have our solid concept already developed, we need to discuss which approach we want to have. We still have some ideas of how we can integrate food with a visual experience. Do we want to visualize our food with pictures, abstract colors, feelings, cooperation between the dinner guests,cultural aspects or a mix of them? We also need to state how the exact integration will be like.

Resources

Here's an images of how we visualize the experience:

Personalized Storytelling

Status report

Personalized storytelling

This week we have met to discuss the feedback we received at the mid-crit session. Although we received lots of positive feedback there were also some things we had to work on, specifically being very clear about our idea, as well as using strong use cases. In keeping with what one of the judges said, we watched our animated video again and wrote down what exactly we thought the idea was that was being presented. This really made everything more clear for us. We also had a brainstorming session on more use cases for our technology, things that would really improve everyday news consumption for different types of individuals.

How we intend to move forward is to meet 2-3 times in the coming weeks and really start to shape our idea and what will present at the final presentation. One challenge we have encountered is that because everyone in the group is taking different courses on top of this one, it is sometimes hard to coordinate. However, we have solved this by sometimes splitting up the work and keeping in contact through our Facebook group page.

We like the idea of moving forward with the animation so we plan to really make that work. We have also discussed that it might be interesting to focus on one news outlet like BBC News, so for our final presentation we are planning to present the idea by using the example of BBC News and how are technology would work with their news stories.

In terms of resources, we have been able to set up a meeting with Ian Vänmann, who is the founder of OMNI, so it will be really interesting to hear his take on personalized storytelling. The meeting is this week so amongst us we have come up with some key questions to ask him. Next week we plan to discuss what he has said and consider if we can develop our idea with his input. Furthemore, we will continue to work on the video with our improved use cases.

Future of audio

Group name: Future of audio

What we have done: Our group met twice in order to discuss the project. And we came up with a completely wrong idea, which was later discussed with Daniel Pargman and Bjorn Thuresson on Friday, 13^th. The main problem was that we did not have a strong idea for the project and we tried to combine different things not quite understanding why we need them.

Also during the week we started developing a web-site for the project which eventually was not necessary at all. Besides, I conducted several interviews with the historians and also found many sources on the topic (including the exclusive ones from the Kungliga Biblioteket – for example, an article “Sweden, the Soviet Union and the Baltic Question 1940-1964 – a Survey” by Karlis Kangeris). But the problem now is that we probably do not need the story in-depth, we rather need a concept for the future of audio, and the story may be told in a more superficial way.

So, a lot of work was done during the week but now we are at the same point where we started many weeks ago.

What we will do: We will meet on Monday and discuss the concept again. Now we need to be very clear what is special about the project and what is the main idea. It should be a heavy brainstorming again.

Challenges: The main challenge was about our forth group member, who in the beginning of the project disappeared for 10 days and we could not reach him. Then he appeared and we made a presentation together on the 6^th of November, but now he does not participate in the group meetings again even though we are informing him. After he didn’t show up to all the meetings during the last week and never replied emails, we decided to exclude him because we cannot rely on him and he can disappear again any time. We cannot trust him any part of the project work... So from now on we are threesome making the project. But to be honest this was very stressful – to lose two members of the group (first was from the school of Journalism and another one I just described). But we will cope with this all:)

Resources: Well, I (Olena) worked on the story part and can add plenty of resources I encountered during research on the topic of our project (the Baltic soldiers extradition). I also made three interviews on the topic. Though I do no know if we will use them. I think we need to dig deeper into the possible future side than into the story itself from now on. But anyway this is good we developed the story because at least we could help the JMK student with his project:)

http://www.diena.lv/kd/teatris/gertrudes-ielas-teatri-atgriezas-legionari-13932434

http://dvcv.lv/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/LATVIE%C5%A0U-LE%C4%A2IONS-Jan-2010.pdf

http://www.occupation.lv/#!/en/eksponats/05630

http://svjt.se/svjt/1992/449

http://lpra.vip.lv/karashausmas.htm

http://www.historia.lv/biblioteka/skirklis/baltiesu-karaviru-izdosana-no-zviedrijas-psrs-1946gjanvari

http://www.hawaiilibrary.net/articles/swedish_extradition_of_baltic_soldiers

http://www.lettia.lv/en_a_legionari-zviedrija.html

P.S. We are sorry to report late this week (Sunday instead of Friday). We won't break the deadlines anymore.