Inspiration

Reading Assignment: Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre by David Z. Saltz

In this article, David Saltz talks about using technology to aid a theater performance by giving the performers a way to interact with technology. First, he gives a definition of interactive media by outlining three key principles:

• Random access
• An arbitrary link between trigger and output
• Media manipulation

These serve to highlight the distinction between interactive media and simply using technology in a performance.

Shaw then turns to his own examples of using interactive media, through his lab at the University of Georgia. My favorite of these was his interpretation of the play Hair. He used interactive media to enhance the trippy drug induced hallucinations.

I thought this was such an effective example because it does a great job of enhancing the performance by augmenting what the viewer sees with what the actor is portraying.

Saltz then turns his focus to the relationship between the performer and the media. Although he cautions that it is not exhaustive, he gives us a great list of possible interactions:

• Virtual Scenery
• Interactive Costumes
• Alternate Perspective
• Subjective Perspective
• Illustration
• Commentary
• Diegetic Media
• Affective Media
• Synesthesia
• Instrumental Media
• Virtual Puppetry
• Dramatic Media

This list is something I will definitely turn to while working in this class because it presents some very insightful ways to use the techniques we will be developing.

Past Work

My passion is creating intuitive user interfaces. For that reason, what I want to show to represent my aesthetic and style are the projects I have been able to spend the time developing an easy to use and beautiful interface. Unfortunately, those projects are no longer my intellectual property because they were created while I was at internships, so I can not demo them or upload them for you to see.

I do, however, have a picture of a presentation I did for Valero about my program:

I hope that you can see that I prefer a clean, somewhat minimalist style that emphasizes making the object the user want to interact with salient. I do this because I think if a user has an easy time finding what they are looking for they will have a positive feeling towards my program.

Introduction

My name is Andy Hurley, and I am a junior computer science student. My main interest is in designing intuitive, easy to use user interfaces. Since user interfaces are starting to incorporate interactive technologies, I hope that what I learn in this class can be used to help my career.

I have not seen a lot of live dance, but I do occasionally go two stepping, so here is a video of our very own Texas A&M Aggie Wranglers, doing one of their routines: