CigameniC 3.0 Youtube video game

This work, baptized CigameniC, is the fruit of the final degree project of two young UC3M graduates in Journalism and Audiovisual Communication, Pablo Arana and Daniel Bernáez, under the tutelage of Professor Javier López Izquierdo, Assistant Dean of Audiovisual Communication. The term CigameniC  is a combination of the words cinema, magic and game, which the creators have attempted to transmit to their production. “It is a story with  high quality audiovisuals (cinema), which goes beyond the player’s screen making the spectator participate (magic),  and  it is interactive, with different developments and endings (games)”, they explained.

In their web they define it as the first 3.0 video game for YouTube, which takes advantage of the interactive possibilities that this audiovisual platform offers. This form of narrative immersion allows the user to decide the course of the story and integrate it into real life, thanks to the use of alternative online platforms which enrich the story, such as Facebook, or email, which are indispensable for enjoying the adventure to the fullest.  At a given moment, for example, the user has to find out an email address to send an email, so that after doing so a reply comes with the instructions they must follow.  “In fact”, they point out, “one of our objectives is to demonstrate that at present the boundaries between the different multimedia and online tools are quite blurred and totally complementary.”  In a nutshell, it attempts to use the real world as a support for interactive narrative, known in the English speaking world as ARG (Alternate Reality Game) which has Lost Experience on the North-American channel ABC as its main exponent.

This work combines the everyday reality of the UC3M Getafe campus, where the project has been filmed in its entirety, with a science fiction story backed by special effects that allows it to recreate the fall of a meteorite right in the University’s main yard.  In essence, it is a cocktail blend of ordinary life and the extraordinary, offered in the most popular online video community in the world, YouTube, which as of more than a year ago takes advantage of a system of interactive annotations in its audiovisual pieces. “Today people want to actively participate in the plot, be in charge of what happens to the protagonist and influence events, and that is what we are trying to obtain through hypertext narrative”, Pablo Arana remarked.  In this way, the user gets the chance to experiment in various ways and take part in the adventure which leads to another totally new one, with a different ending with different scenes and dialogues.  “In our case, this narrative interaction is based on intuition, the resolution of puzzling events and the possibility for the active spectator to make decisions in real time”, Daniel Bernáez clarified.

This adventure blurs the boundaries between cinemagraphic language and that of video games. “In my opinion, the whole story secretly proposes a game between the narrator and the reader or spectator”, Professor Javier López Izquierdo comments, who directs the ALMA-UC3M Master’s in Screenwriting for Television and Film. “At the beginning of the story, some rules are presented and we are invited to play.  During the game”, he continued, “we are given instructions, clues, sometimes false, which are just as important as the true ones because it is only in fiction and in death when we wish to see our expectations not fulfilled.  What David and Pablo do is strip this procedure down to its bare bones”, he concluded.

Among the most obvious points of reference for these young creators are graphic adventure videogames; cinema and action series in the style of “24; ARGs such as in Lost; hypertext stories, and the genre of the book series ‘Elige tu propia aventura’ (Choose your own adventure); and viral marketing, as Paramount Pictures did to promote the film Cloverfield (Monstruoso), for example. All of that is combined with the possibilities offered by new technologies which allow “dealing with certain subjects  with a degree of believability required by the contemporary spectator”, López Izquierdo pointed out, stressing that the ingredients of good audiovisual story have not changed much since the time of Aristotle: “An enigmatic beginning, where the characters set out to obtain some sort of restitution; the continuation where they lose their confidence and are then in collision with other impediments in the pursuit of their objectives; and finally, an unexpected yet logical ending…”.  In this case, however, various endings can be found.  However, they are provisional because CigameniC is a modular story, created with future extensions in mind in which the story branches out, thus making it  “complex beyond unimaginable limits”,  its creators assert.

Source: http://www.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/actualidad_cientifica/noticias/YouTube_game

Chinese tunnel

Many people feel insecure when they drive in tunnels. However, their anxiety can be reduced.

”Driving in tunnels is actually twice as safe as driving in the open air, when all factors are taken into account,” says SINTEF scientist Gunnar Jensen.

However, a rough estimate suggests that as many as 10 – 20 percent of the population feel uncomfortable or very uncomfortable driving in tunnels. Older people in particular tend to feel insecure.

In a previous study carried out by SINTEF, as many as 40 percent of the older age-group said that they felt extremely insecure driving in tunnels. They spoke of walls and road lanes that seemed to shrink, and of a feeling of being completely exhausted when they eventually reached the end of the tunnel.

Gunnar Jenssen believes that this may be due to the fact that elderly people tend to have poorer vision than younger people. This means that lighting conditions in tunnels play a decisive role in determining how people experience tunnels, he believes.

Design can reduce discomfort

On this background, SINTEF transport researchers have been studying the use of various ranges of colour, lighting and patterns, as well as the use of cavern spaces in tunnels. The group’s driving simulator has been and still is a very aid in testing out lighting designs.

”The cavern in the tunnel is one measure that is high on our list. The trumpet-like widenings of the caverns’ entrances and exits are a way of breaking up the impact of long tunnels. The 24.5 km-long Lærdal Tunnel has three well-lit caverns designed according to proposals submitted by the Kadabra Produktdesign company, researchers and the artists Arild Juul and Brit Dyrnes.

Norwegian breathing spaces in Chinese tunnel

In 2007, the lighting design from Trondheim was exported to China, and Gunnar Jenssen was project manager for ”Safety and Lighting Design” when that country inaugurated the world’s longest twin-tube tunnel, the Qinling Zhongnan Mountain Tunnel, in which the monotony is broken by huge caverns excavated at intervals of three to seven kilometres.

”The tunnel is 18×2 kilometres long, and to begin with it was a dry, monotonous tunnel, which was then developed in collaboration with Norwegian artists and designers into an oasis with palm-trees and clouds on the roof ,” says Jenssen.

Lighting for safety

The main point is to obtain a good distribution of light, in conjunction with the use of artistic lighting, which turns out to give drivers a feeling of space and of greater security. Modern lighting systems, with two rows of lamps, light sources that illuminate the opposite direction and driving lane, are beginning to be quite common in new Chinese tunnels, and they have also been installed in the tunnel that forms part of the Øresund Link between Denmark and Sweden.

Source: http://www.sintef.no/Home/Technology-and-Society/TransportResearch/