Bill Tomlinson

Biography
Bill Tomlinson is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Drama at the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches in the ACE (Arts Computation Engineering) graduate program. He is a researcher and animator of autonomous computational characters, and a designer of interaction paradigms that enable people to engage with these characters. Previous interactive projects have been shown at SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, the Game Developers Conference, the ZKM Future Cinema exhibition and other venues, and have been reviewed by CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Sculpture Magazine, Scientific American Frontiers, the LA Times, Wired.com and the BBC. His animated film, Shaft of Light, screened at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by the Anti-Defamation League in its Anti-Bias/Diversity Catalog. He holds an A.B. in Biology from Harvard College, an M.F.A. in Experimental Animation from CalArts, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Synthetic Characters Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Position Paper
People use computer games and related forms of interactive entertainment as a medium for engaging in social relationships with each other. These social relationships take a number of different forms. People play games over networks, and chat via instant messaging (either in-game or out of game) while they play. People play the same games as their friends, and then talk about the games later. And people get together in groups to play games in the same physical space, at home with multi-player console games, at arcades or cyber cafes, and at LAN parties. Most games use standard interfaces such as mice, keyboards or gamepads that are not optimized to enhance social interactions. Games such as Dance Dance Revolution, however, have interfaces that help to provide a socially engaging experience.

Our research group has developed a multi-user installation called the Virtual Raft Project that creates a social interaction space by means of a novel mobile interaction paradigm. The installation includes several desktop computer screens that serve as “islands” of virtual space, and several mobile device-based “virtual rafts” that allow players to move real-time animated characters between the islands. When a player carries a raft up to an island, a character can jump off the island onto the raft. The player can then carry the character to another island. The following video gives a good sense for the interaction: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt/movies/VirtualRaftProject.mov

We have found that this installation, and its interface in particular, help to create several distinct kinds of social relationships among the people playing it. These relationships include:

• teacher/student relationships, where one partner helps the other figure out how to use the interface.
   
• advisor/advisee relationships, where one individual provides the other with information about the interaction (such as which island “needs” another character).
   
• collaborations, where two or more partners work together to accomplish some common goal.
   
• competitive relationships, where two individuals or groups seek to achieve opposing goals.

There are also individuals who appear to form closer relationships with the virtual characters than with the other players, choosing to shepherd a certain character or island. All of these different relationships combine to produce a rich and complex social setting that is made possible by the dynamics of the game play in the Virtual Raft installation.

This project builds on previous multi-user installations that we have developed. AlphaWolf (SIGGRAPH 2001) featured a pack of virtual wolves that people could direct by howling, growling, whining or barking into microphones. Voidstar (SIGGRAPH 99) featured a tangible interface modeled after Charlie Chaplin’s buns-and-forks dance in the movie The Gold Rush. Swamped! (SIGGRAPH 98) featured a sensored plush toy that people could use to interact with an interactive animated cartoon. All of these projects have served as social facilitators, letting people “break the ice” and engage with each other in various kinds of relationships. By considering the design of game interfaces, and in particular the mobile interface of the Virtual Raft Project, we attempt to build games that build social relationships.

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