Tue 3:30-4:30 pm - Rose Ballroom B

Physics as Freedom

• Seung Chan Lim, Rhode Island School of Design, USA

We live in a world full of "things". Much of what we do everyday involves reenacting verbs on things. For example, trimming a piece of paper may be described as reenacting the verb "cut" on the piece of paper. Just as we reenact verbs on things, we often times reenact verbs on files. But for the average person, reenacting verbs on files tends to involve many more steps, and takes a much longer time to complete. Yes it's true that you get faster as you get better with the tools, but that's not all. Software tools are usually much more expensive than their physical counterparts. To be fair, software tools typically do a lot more than one thing to justify their cost. But the real difference is not in the speed or the cost. It is in having the freedom of choice. In the physical world, if we don't have a knife to cut with, we can choose to use our own bare hands. If our hands are tied up, we can even use our teeth. Nobody can deny us of this freedom of choice that physics affords us. Why should the digital world be any different?

Pinocchio: A Virtual Symphony Orchestra Game

• Ruth Demmel, Technische Universität München, Institut für Informatik, Germany

The movie shows the evolution of a computer-based game for conducting a virtual orchestra system that enables users of any skill level to conduct a virtual symphony orchestra in real-time. One of the main goals was to enable children to experience classical music in a playful manner by combining an immersive gaming experience with educational aspects. The movie focuses on the exploration of alternative input devices, emphasizing the end users point of view — the conductor's view —, and it illustrates several audio and video processing aspects during the recording sessions with the musicians.

Gource: Visualizing Software Version Control History

• Andrew Caudwell, Catalyst IT Ltd, New Zealand

Typically as software is developed, incremental changes to files are grouped together as ’commits’ and stored in a Version Control System, maintaining a history of the files changed, by who, and when. In this film we introduce Gource, a tool to visualize this history, playing it back as an interactive animation. Software development is displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.