Software engineering issues in interactive installation art

Abstract

Software engineering has been in contact with new media art for years, although the connections between the two fields have rarely been explicit. In this article we discuss the important software engineering issues that appear in one of the new media art subfields, namely interactive installation art. Our deductions and suggestions are based mainly on reports available in the literature (i.e. published papers). Interactive installation art is often heavily dependent on software and thus software engineering issues are important to consider. Software requirements, which are vague and frequently changeable, appear to be one of the major and most difficult issues to be considered in the development of interactive installation. Timely evaluation, validation and testing with potential users are helpful for successful completion of the artwork Special attention should be paid to the choice of process model and software architecture to allow flexibility. The final goal is to provide a road map for artists who need software engineering skills to communicate with software engineers and/or to act themselves as programmers or software engineers of their artworks. Additionally, software engineers who start working with interactive installation art will profit from this summary of relevant reports.

Game-Based Interactive Campaign Using Motion-Sensing Technology

“…However, despite some usability issues, gesture controls such as the Kinect in social games work very well as users quickly become immersed in the game [4]. Examples of using gesture and movement for various purposes are the Nautilus game where users can play in an interactive virtual space [5], and interactive art installations [6][7][8]. The immersion that motion-sensing technology can create along with the opportunity of public interactivity, makes this technology promising for running advertisement campaigns.…”

Audio Fingerprint Extraction Using an Adapted Computational Geometry Algorithm

“…Moreover, the fingerprint produced for each sampled audio clip represents a significant parameter that may affect the realisation complexity, mainly in terms of computational load and memory requirements. Both the above requirements are met by the reduction of the spectral resolution of the original Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) magnitudes using the Onion Algorithm (OA), according to our latest studies (Gillespie, 2004;Kosch, 2004;Trifonova et al, 2008). In more detail, the basis of the method depicts the centre of the multi-layers of a set of arithmetic points on the Cartesian plane that represent the values of the application used (Dalal, 2004).…”

“…New-media arts (Trifonova, Jaccheri, & Bergaust, 2008), interactive and experimental multimedia (Deliyannis, 2012) are characteristic areas of application featuring dynamic user-content interaction (Deliyannis & Karydis, 2011) and a culture of continuing content use changes (Gillespie, 2004). These global transformations introduce new services and markets (Simpson, 2004), a fact that is supported by the evolution of standards such as MPEG-7, which links content to context offering multimedia accessibility, while MPEG-21 is designed to support full user-content interaction.…”

Sonic Onyx: Case Study of an Interactive Artwork

“…Like Oates [4] who looks at computer artworks as Information Systems and proposes to extend Information System research agenda to include computer art, we suggest to extend software engineering research to include software dependent art projects. Our experience from projects involving both artists and software engineers such as Flyndre [5], and Open Wall [6] shows that software engineering can play important role in such interdisciplinary projects [7]. The struggle of software engineers to make technology more accessible to artists is recognized by researchers [8].…”