Lab: The Media Computing Project

Course information:

• MCP SS 2009

Allocation:

Field of study:

• Informatik (D)/Hauptstudium/Praktische Informatik
• Media Informatics (M.Sc.)/Multimedia-Technologie/in Aachen
• Software Systems Engineering (M.Sc.)/Areas of Specialization/Media Computing and Interactive Systems

Number SWS: U4
The lab (Praktikum) will be held in english.

Content:

In this lab (Praktikum), students will work on group projects to explore post-desktop, multimodal user interfaces and interaction with multimedia contents. The goal is to design and implement an interactive system that shows how new interaction metaphors and technology can allow people to interact with various media, static or time-based, in new ways. The projects will have our Aachen Media Space available as testing environment (see our home page for a description). This environment features multiple touch-sensitive large displays and a variety of post-desktop interface devices (batons, wireless iStuff devices, cameras, etc.) Development will be taking place in our media laboratory with its Apple Power Mac G5 workstations and development environments such as MAX/MSP/Jitter/Cyclops, Xcode, and others. Projects will be judged based on the following criteria. These are a mix of design-oriented, engineering-oriented, and research-oriented goals:

• originality of the idea: do you have a novel concept, or does it already exist as a research prototype or even product elsewhere?
• depth of investigation and thinking: are there obvious flaws in the design of the user experience that you should have caught and resolved? does your design process exhibit multiple iterations of design, prototyping, and analysis?
• identification and understanding of target users: have you identified who your users should be, and have you studied their profiles?
• a compelling concept: does your system seem like one that your target audience just wouldn't want to miss because it is so indispensable, useful, or fun?
• technical elegance, depth, and robustness: does the implementation exhibit creativity in solving the problems you encountered, or did you take the path of least resistance? does it include more refined or only very simplistic features? does it work well consistently, or only occasionally?
• innovative use of available resources: did you put the technologies you had at hand to surprising new uses?
• media-spaciousness: is it possible to make the system a long-term demo in the Media Space?

The DIS I lecture is a requirement for this course, and DIS II is also highly recommended. Exceptional students may also be allowed to attend this lab in parallel with DIS II. If free space is available, we will offer seats to B-IT Media Computing Master's students.

Lecturers:

• Jan Borchers
• Max Möllers
• Jonathan Diehl

Times:

• Mi 14:00h - 17:00h, 2U13 (Media Computing Lab)

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Past Offerings

MCP SS 2008
MCP SS 2007
MCP SS 2006

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