Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Cameras and Collaborative
Spaces (the Ideagora)
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
—Susan Sontag
9.1 OVERVIEW OF CAMERAS, NARRATIVE, AND SOCIAL SPACES FOR MEETINGS
Forty thousand years ago, in the Paleolithic caves of Spain [1], it is possible that early humans had their
irst business meetings. They gathered in one special space, signed in by painting outlines of their hands,
deined their goals with images of their hunting targets, and listened to what the leaders had to say about the
group. Survival in a dangerous, dynamic environment was the main business in those days, as it is today.
Our technology has replaced the stone cave with a CAVE (cave automatic virtual environment), our hand-
prints are log-ins, and we watch video images of our leaders speaking. The circle around a campire was
replaced by a conference call and replaced again by a circle of avatars around a virtual campire. You might
say that not much has changed, except that now, with a virtual presence, we can attend meetings in several
places simultaneously. Our modern world puts our brains under the constant pressure of assimilating many
layers of information simultaneously. Day to day, we are almost always surrounded by multiple screens and
immersed in a collective point of view that looks in multiple physical and temporal directions at once. Look
around you when you walk down a street or in an airline terminal or even examine what is on your desktop
computer. Odds are you are observing through many windows, many screens, and many cameras simultane-
ously, and your visual memory is illing with images that are a bricolage of daily observation, news media
images, websites, and digital content. This is not just an internal phenomenon, collected in your visuospatial
sketchpad. The Internet has become a social memory, creating the fabric of our collective experience and the
widest-ranging evidence of our existence. Babies are born with their Facebook pages set up by their socially
networked parents [2]. These children will grow with their life's memories recorded and shared socially;
their personal narratives will be lived collectively with their peers and then perhaps stored and downloaded
to the next generation after they are gone.
As a designer of social spaces for meetings, or the “Ideagora,” you will ind the these three factors are very
important aspects of your design methodology.
Factor 1. The relative importance of an idea or the importance of the person presenting that idea is
enhanced by the camera's point of view.
Factor 2. The observer's personal, subjective needs for involvement in the presentation will inluence
their choice of camera view and/or positional location during the presentation.
Factor 3. The ability of the attendees to see and hear the presentation can be inluenced by the design
of the meeting space.
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