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Effective Playtesting Rituals
Every community of creators should have a regular playtest series. This is true whether it’s an ad-hoc community of independent creators, an academic research group, or a large corporation. If there isn’t a playtest series, you should start one. This post is for you. I have been involved in several recurring playtest series. I first…
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Let Me X That For You
It happened. I asked a technical question in a forum. A day later, someone I don’t know responded “would this work?”, with a short link to them copying my query directly to a text-based AI. The AI’s response was completely irrelevant and unusable, despite giving the standard “verbose confident technical” aesthetic. 10-15 years ago, it…
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Millennial Superconductor
A superconductive material that operates at room temperature (LK-99) has been reported in the last couple weeks. This is not just exciting because of the potential applications, but also the bizarre drama around the release of the news, and the race to independently verify it. This is especially exciting for me personally, since my first-ever…
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Sabbatical Themes
Late 2022, I quit my job at Meta Reality Labs. I’m not looking for any commercial projects until at least 2024. In academia, a year outside your normal work environment is formalized as a “sabbatical”; this my DIY Sabbatical. Gestural Input, 2008-2023 At Meta, I was working on EMG Input for AR since the CTRL…
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Upcoming Topics in Computing (that I’m interested in)
I have spent a lot of time in academia, and the last four years at commercial startups, including running a few myself. This gives me a special vantage point on upcoming computing areas – I want to jump over what’s interesting now to what will be interesting in 5 years. My current job hunt has…
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Wonderful Projects I Did With Microsoft’s Kinect
RIP the Kinect. Literally changed the direction of my research/career/life/art. Gave it more DEPTH. — Dustin Freeman🚁LAX (@dustinfreeman) October 25, 2017 Microsoft has ceased manufacturing the Kinect. Here’s some projects, art and research, academic and industrial, that I could only have done with the Kinect. The Role of Physical Controllers in Motion Video Gaming, 2011:…
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An Illustrating Example of Improv
I’m finalizing my PhD Thesis on interaction design for improv. This is a slightly-embellished example of something that actually happened. Yes, a mouse ran across the stage in the middle of an improv set and the performers all reacted in different ways and my mind exploded in curiosity watching it unfold. Here is a example…
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Appears to Take on Meaning…
I’m in the midst of writing up my thesis, an unnaturally large document that I both want to just finish, but also have the urge to encapsulate every thought I’ve had in my life to this date. Some of my spare thoughts that don’t appear in that formal academic document will appear here. Humans are…
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Improv Remix Call For Performers: July 28th – August 3rd, 2014
Dustin Freeman and Montgomery Martin are looking for 3-5 performers of any age and demographic with a background in improv or comedy to collaboratively playtest a live video remix system. Performers will interact with an array of motion sensors and cameras to construct a series of original scenes from live video recordings to be presented…
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Coolest of CHI 2014
Every year around this time my research community has the CHI conference, both standing for Computer-Human Interaction and a pun on the greek χ, representing empirical data. Here are the projects I saw at the conference that were the coolest. I’ll update this as I read papers I didn’t get to see in person. Haptic…