Misty winter morning steps to work.

Arrival of the massive box for my new PC.

Because there was a video on YouTube of the PC game Witcher’s strange monkey creature, or Mamune which has subsequently been removed I decided to record my own and upload it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQlT8WVhVs

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Mamune

A T-Shirt for sale with everyone’s names printed on it!

So I took this opportunity to start up my old computer, which is running a pretty much clean install of Windows 98 updated as far as it was supported, all on a Pentium 4 with 512mb of RAM and the high-end Geforce 2 GPU: astronomical power compared to what 95 and 98 were intended to work with normally. And then there is Internet Explorer 6!

I was a little bit astonished to discover that despite my fears that the new CSS would collapse in a heap, everything was generally rendering exactly where it was meant to be. The only issues were superficial ones, such as transparent PNGs rendering as grey which were easily fixed. In the end I did make an effort to ensure that users browsing with IE6 do have a reasonable experience.

For the Scripting for Digital Media coursework I created an interactive flash header for my website of the time. I created gallery and media object classes that loaded images from the server and displayed them in an attractive, fully scripted animation with a realistic reflection from a shiny surface.

Click the arrow orb, and then select which gallery to view. To change the speed of the gallery animation use the circular controller to the top left or use your keyboard’s Left and Right arrow keys. Where multiple galleries are present Up and Down may be used to flip between them.

Documentation

Related Journal posts:

Scripting for Digital Media

A Note on Actionscript Classes

Flash Actionscript Image Reflections

Finishing Scripting and Update

Scripting Finished

Social interaction within virtual environments is on the increase, in accordance with both the rising prevalence of personal computer technology and the numerous forms of traditional communication being converted to formats suitable for the digital era. This is evidenced firstly by the growing popularity of various virtual social communication activities such as online social networking, and secondly the increasing sophistication and depth of interaction these services provide.

Consequently, there is a continual demand for the improvement of the interface through which these interactions can take place. Current interfaces are highly limited as to the depth and type of information they can respond to from their user. The field of biofeedback contributes aspects that could be crucial to the development of improved interfaces. Although its original purpose was to be a form of medical treatment, the field readily overlaps with the fields in human-computer interface design. The acquisition of physiological data that was originally only intended for use as a feedback loop for patients can actually be used for a much wider variety of purposes as an interface to virtual reality.

With the introduction of biofeedback technology as an interface, there will be a profound change in the means and methodology with which humans can interact with their virtual environments, and subsequently socially within them. Its gradual adoption is enabling the production of interfaces that are both more intuitive to their users and capable of garnering a wider variety of input relevant to particular activities, for instance prospective virtual social environments of the future.

This dissertation examines how the adoption of biofeedback technology into the interfaces for virtual environments will affect social interaction within them by exploring the way that the technology can be adapted to meet the already recognisable requirements for this interaction.

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The Development of Biofeedback Interfaces and their Effect on Social Interaction in Virtual Environments