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SIAT EMIIE (Engage Me In Interactive Experiences) Lab
I'm currently undertaking my PhD research within the SIAT EMIIE Lab under the supervision of Dr. Magy Seif El Nasr and Jim Bizzocchi
Download my current CV

Below are a number of research projects I am working on, or have been involved in.

The Reading Glove (2009 - Present)

The Reading Glove is a prototype tangible user interface for interactive storytelling. It uses the metaphor of psychometry to inspire a "hands on" interaction with narrative objects. Interactors using the Reading Glove explore and reveal the "memories" of physical artifacts by handling them. The glove's embedded RFID reader detects tags on the objects, and relays them to a server that responds with recorded narration. The reading glove is the first iteration of an ongoing series of explorations designed to create the knowledge and technology needed to create the Tangible Ubiquitous Narrative Environment (TUNE).
Learn more about the Reading Glove at our blog

Related Publications:

Futura (2009 - Present)
DSC_5898
Futura is a multi-player educational game, on a multi-touch tabletop, designed to teach children basic principles of sustainable development. Futura was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers including specialists in education, game development, and sustainable design. I was responsible for the game design portion of the system. The entire project was developed under the auspices of Alissa Antle. The rest of the team was comprised of Allen Bevins, Karen Tanenbaum, Sijiie Wang, and Katie Seaborn. An early prototype of Futura was displayed at the Sustainability Pavilion at the Surrey venue for the 2010 Winter Olympics. More information about the Olympic show can be found on the FCAT news site.
For more details about this project, visit the Futura Webpage

Related Publications:

Creativity Assistive Tools for Games (CAT Games) (2008 - 2009)
with Jim Bizzocchi, Steve Dipaola, and Ron Wakkary.
CATGames (Creativity Assistive Tools for Games) is a multi-university research network supported by the Canadian Heritage - New Media Research Networks Fund. CATGames research teams are creating innovative, leading-edge technology tools for game production that support Canada 's burgeoning interactive games industry by accelerating the creative process, and expanding and enriching content environments and platforms. CATGames is focused on creativity tools that enhance interactive games and entertainment for a wide variety of platforms, including the Internet, consoles, mobile devices, and high definition (HD) home video display. New authoring tools and new processes will better support the creative development of interactive games and digital entertainment. The network is developing tools to increase and diversify Canadian content and storytelling in a variety of game genres and interactive platforms.
My own research with this project is an investigation of the relationship between narrative, play, and embodiment in the new wave of nontraditional interfaces.
Related Publications:

  • Tanenbaum, J., & Bizzocchi, J. (2009) Rock Band: A Case Study in the Design of Embodied Interface Experience. Paper to be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2009, New Orleans, August 4-8.
  • Tanenbaum, J., & Bizzocchi, J. (2008). A Preliminary Framework for Narrative and Embodied Interaction in Games. Paper presented at the workshop: Expanding Our Horizons: Canadian Game Studies at Home and Abroad. September 19th-21st. Vancouver, Canada

Tangible Ubiquitous Narrative Environment (2008 - Present) (TUNE)
PhD Research Project with Karen Tanenbaum
TUNE is a story, a space, and a game. It investigates questions of interactive narrative, user modeling for informal learning, adaptivity, and tangible and embodied interaction. In TUNE, the participant is invited to assume a role in an interactive story through the exploration of a physical space that has been imbued with narrative possibilities through the use of ubiquitous and ambient computing. As the participant explores the environment, the environment becomes aware of the participant and adapts the experience in response to her interactions and decisions. TUNE uses a combination of tangible devices and tracking technologies to afford a diverse range of natural and transparent interaction possibilities, gathering data about the participant from explicit choices made within the space and from patterns of interaction that emerge over time.
TUNE’s primary valence of narrative adaptation is rooted in the notion of genre; a number of possible stories co-exist within the space, each in a distinct narrative style. The different stories told are tied together by the shared artifacts present in the space. While some artifacts may be strongly associated with one specific story, others have the possibility for a multitude of meanings spread throughout the different genres. As the participant explores the environment, the genre of the story she uncovers changes in response to her actions.

Believability, Adaptivity and Performativity: Three Lenses for the Analysis of Interactive Stories (2006-2008)
MA Thesis
In this thesis I present a methodology for performing analyses of Interactive Narrative experiences, and use this technique both to explicate a particular game—The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion—and to demonstrate the utility of approaching the game via three different analytical perspectives. This methodology is a form of close reading, a technique which was developed in literary theory for the explication of narrative experiences, with roots in earlier epistemological practices such as theological exegesis and hermeneutics. I have focused this thesis on examining and clarifying a technique for reading and explicating these experiences. Interactive Narratives are problematic due to their indeterminate nature and often unwieldy scope; in this thesis I propose a solution to these two problems. My solution takes the form of a series of constrained readings, which I argue allows me to productively explicate specific aspects of my play experiences. By using the notion of analytical lenses to filter my playings, I hope to simultaneously overcome issues of indeterminacy by narrowing the focus of my playing to observations of specific phenomena within the game, and also address issues of scope by reducing the undifferentiated experience of the game to a series of more readily assimilated sub-experiences. I believe that the method demonstrated within this thesis has utility for theorists of Interactive Narrative and Games, and I contend that the lenses presented herein provide three good examples of possible “constrained close readings”.

Scarlet Skellern and the Absent Urchins (2006-2007)


In the Spring semester of 2007 I took Maia Engeli's Computational Poetics class: a project based course exploring the intersection of computation and art. In collaboration with Angela Tomizu, a fellow SIAT graduate student, I created a prototype interactive story book called Scarlet Skellern and the Absent Urchins (SSAU). SSAU attempts to gauge the mood of the reader through several simple heuristics and alters the presentation of the story accordingly. Download the Prototype (26mb)


Related Publications:
Tanenbaum, J., & Tomizu, A. (2008). Narrative Meaning Creation in Interactive Storytelling. International Journal of Computational Science, 2(1), 3-20.
Tanenbaum, J., & Tomizu, A. (2007). Affective Interaction Design and Narrative Presentation. Paper presented at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technology. November 9-11, Arlington, USA