Living Game Worlds 2006: Dale Herigstad’s keynote

Dale Herigstad is a multi-Emmy winner, and Executive Creative Director at Schematic, a design firm that specializes in interfaces. You can read all about him here. His talk wasn’t about games per se, but rather about broader technical currents in the TV industry and how they are converging with games. Here’s my notes, only slightly cleaned up.

There is convergence between games and TV. He’s interested in Interactive Spaces: exploring what he calls “NewTV.” Schematic is a company doing work around interface, not content… the things that wrap around content, not content itself.

The new thing emerging in TV is portals, branded spaces. In his opinion, all the stuff that is out there on a screen, interactive or not (presumably games or not!), is TV.

The TV mindset is not one of high amounts of interaction. MTV with their interactive web TV thing found that people weren’t actually creating playlists, they were picking prepackaged playlists even though they have the ability to make their own.

Distance from the TV screen used to be a 10ft experience. But the PsP, iPod, cellphone are all at one foot. The computer is at 2 feet. The 10ft experience is a friends and family experience. They are also concerned about designing for 25ft and 200ft — large interactive screens in airports, public spaces… imagine screens in the airport where you can walk up, interact with the TV, grab feeds of what you want, etc.

[[Raph’s note: the TV industry wants to swallow games. If games want to be their own industry, they need to step up the ambition.]]

Time is an issue… with the smaller devices, they use the term “snacking” for media content. The TV mentality is an audience that doesn’t want to work at it.

His definition of NewTV:

• rich media content
• on a screen
• anywhere
• in a “space” (branded portal, interface, etc, on the screen)
• connected media

Rich media is dynamic and always moving, dimensional, layered (not flat), and looks like TV.

Interfaces for television: 4 basic types. The current means of navigation is the remote control. You move focal highlights on the screen. They are trying to move past basic page navigation, which is the old web model. The new model is moving graphical objects, such as icon bars, for example. They did work with Sony R&D in the Bay Area on Surf Space. Lots of cool interface stuff here…

Branded portal spaces… applied also to portals within the “desktop” of a hypothetical Xbox live media network. Emphasis on spaces here — watching TV is within a space. He uses GameTap as another example…

He then showed some awesome stuff done at Ball State University showing heatmaps of retinal attention as a 3d graph using the actual screen, mapped onto a plane. [[Raph note: Imagine seeing stuff like this only turned isometric, and distorted in to a heightfield so you can see precisely where the eyes are going).]]

Blended media: annotation of TV via an interactive site, like showing the deductions in CSI in real-time on the side. Another example is Battlestar Galactica Interactive. Commercials where you can “bookmark” the info, and then come back later to deeper info, from within the TV.

A more in-depth example: you can watch the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, and at the moment that a space dogfight erupts, play a shooter on rails that is synced to the video (which is still playing in the center top of the screen). The sequence is timed to exactly the length of the video, and has an unchageable ending. At the end it drops seamlessly back into the show. This site is also blending in the community stuff — send things to friends, discuss, etc

They’ve also embedded video and historical material within a WW2 shooter game…

Design processes:
For the new information architecture, they are doing UI work in wireframes, not in sitemaps; doing top views of the UI, not just front views. They are defining the meaning of directions, so that up always consistently means the same thing in the UI. They are considering motion as key component, planning it as a significant UI element from the beginning. And they are planning for all those view distances.

New design: centered on layering graphical design elements, sequencing the display of things, making everything scalable, ready for all distances & aspect ratios and sizes. It’s important to be able to sketch the motion quickly. As a result, they are moving towards hybrid designers — people understand type, graphic design, motion, and interactivity.

User testing: the challenge is getting past “the wall of the new” which is the automatic rejection that people feel for anything that is unfamiliar.

New techniques he sees coming in the future: gesture (they did some work on Minority Report.) Some of the stuff from games (EyeToy, Revolution, etc) is slipping into TV controls too.