Showing posts with label china. Show all posts
Showing posts with label china. Show all posts

Saturday, 28 August 2010

Lab visit in Chengdu, University of Electronic and Science Technology of China


On the final day of the Sino-German Symposium on Wearable Computing in Chengdu Prof. Dongyi Chen invited us to see his lab. We drove to the new campus of the University of Electronic and Science Technology of China. Already the drive was impressive seeing the amount of building work happening in Chengdu, especially in the high tech area.

In the School of Computer Science and Engineering we visited a computer lab and got to see very interesting student projects in Prof. Dongyi Chen labs. The demos included a wireless controlled vehicle were the control is implemented on a mobile phone, industrial settings control applications using sensor nets, table top user interfaces and augmented reality applications on the table, different applications for wearable displays, and a wrist worn computer (developed from scratch).

The quality of the work by the students is impressive and so is the university campus (building and facilities). It shows a very clear determination to push science and education. We should probably talk to our government to consider investing more in research and higher education…
I hope this symposium will help us to start some more collaboration. As a next step we plan a summer school on Human Computer Interaction next year in Germany.

Friday, 27 August 2010

Live experience - media consumption is social

Before the dinner I decided to try a Chinese massage and it was astonishingly relaxing. It is one of those reminders that there are many things we need to experience and there is just no other way (at least so far) to gain a similar understanding…

The show after dinner showed to me how much a live presentation of artistic and musical performance transmits - it is so much richer than conserved/recorded media. Take as an example the shadow play - I really enjoyed it as live performance. In comparison to 3D animation movies it has little fidelity but it still works extremely well to engage people in the live presentation. But I could not imagine that I would watch it on TV - hence we probably miss something in creating the experience when playing/presenting conserved media. I would expect there is a lot potential in creating a social situation for digital media consumption that could improve the experience.