Have a demo to do this morning for my supervisors visiting HCI students. Anyway here's hoping that they don't judge the affective gaming installation I'm going to be using - a live display of your physiological reactions as you play (see December, School Taster Day) as (A) a means of me stealing your soul or (B) a medical diagnositic. It's a difficult tossup as to which is move funny to see.

Edit [19:46]:

Sadly the students were more willing to wear the biofeedback sensors then I gave them credit for, I tend to get alot of "but people may see bad things about how I react [biofeedback data is displayed alongside the game, for the audience to see]" - to which I reply "dude, your playing Streetfighter, and I'm using skin response, at worst your mates will see you become more aroused when Chun-Li or [insert male equivalent of female focus] appears, it's not like were going to find out your a psychotic killer". Though I'd have to analyse one in order to be sure.

It's a shame really that the version of the installation I use for demoing purposes doesn't have any record features (for a 20 minute demo, I'd rather not spend half of that having them sign release forms), as the physiological reactions of the demo participants were interesting to say the least, well maybe if I hadn't already seen these patterns before in my research, but I do have poor long term memory so once and a while I get to reexperience my eureka moment's.

However I'm going to leave describing that to tomorrow - I need sleep as I didn't get any trying to set the installation up.

Edit [a month later]:

Arghh! I completely forgot to finish this post off. I spent most of the following month preparing / conducting tests on user performance with cruel designs (I love my job). If I manage to find where I placed the notes that go along with this post I'll add them ASAP, till then, bugger.

Mood [08:44] | Ring: Purple | ECG: N/A

Last weeks lecture would of gone so much easier if in my sleep deprived state, I didn't leave the freaking notes I spent several hours writing about what I was supposed to cover, on my book case.

If I had a time machine I'd be kicking my one week younger self in the face.

Mood [20:33] | Ring: N/A | ECG: N/A

Ever get that feeling that your life left the rollercoaster and is now heading for the ACME dynamite shed? Well that's how I feel today - I've still only half a lecture written (it's harder than it looks), have a paper due for Tuesday, an experiment to run tomorrow and a smeg load of other stuff to do in the meantime.

If I make it, it's Miller time. If I don't, well - fuck it, it's Miller time.

Edit (15,38, the next day):

Oh yeah it's Miller time, lecture done, experiment done, thesis brainstorming done, Kiel knackered.

Mood [21:48] | Ring: Black | ECG: N/A

Nicolas demoed how Pin & Play could be used to control a series of off-the-shelf PC games (i.e. World of Warcraft and MechWarrior 4), yesterday. What amazes me is how easy it was to augment the physical space in which the game was played (i.e. the chair) with Pin & Play.

The Pin & Play environment we used for Mechwarrior 4 took approximately 15 minutes to setup - and most of that was taken up by the installation of the game, finding the manual and cutting a Pin & Play board to fit the chair turned Mech cockpit.

More later.. when I have some free time, for now you can download and enjoy the video we made.

• VoodooIO - Mechwarrior 4 Demo Video

Mood [10:40] | Ring: N/A | ECG: N/A