Entertainment and Technology: Worlds in Collaboration

Brenda Laurel & Emmy Award Winners featured at Conference on Computers and Human Factors

(Palo Alto, CA) A twenty year veteran of the entertainment software industry and author of Computers as Theater, Brenda Laurel will address Human-Computer Interface experts at CHI 98 in Los Angeles, CA, USA, 18-23 April 1998. In addition, CHI 98 features participation by many entertainment figures, including a veteran Disney animator and several Emmy Award winners.

Laurel, Founder and Vice President at Purple Moon, will urge those in the business of determining how we interact with computers to get involved in more than just the surface of interaction design. It is no longer enough to merely apply intuitive front-ends onto existing functionality; designers must expand the scope of their influence beyond traditional boundaries. She feels it is necessary to express humanistic values in terms of the form, structure and purpose of software, especially in the entertainment business. Laurel's talk is entitled Technological Humanism and Values-Driven Design.

Emmy Award winner Dale Herigstad will present a tutorial at CHI 98 on Designing User Interfaces for Interactive Television. Herigstad, who has been designing motion graphics since 1978, plans to explain the differences between computer and television technologies, how to create visual designs optimized for television, and how to put these ideas together to make good user interactions with television displays and infrared remote controls.

Mark Swain, Technical Director and Designer at Disney Feature Animation, will discuss the impact of user interface design on the entertainment industry. With the explosion of digital production in film and video production, new tools have become available. Digital artists now have the ability to produce a wide variety of special effects; their effectiveness will largely be determined by how these new digital tools are presented to them. Swain's talk is entitled Alien Technology, Tools of Digital Production. His work has appeared in commercials, television, and feature films.

CHI is the premier worldwide forum for the exchange of information on all aspects of how people interact with computers. The annual conference features a full program of presentations, tutorials and vendor exhibits. Participants from academia, industry, health care and the arts come from around the world. CHI conferences are sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM)'s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The CHI conference is traditionally supported by industry organizations. The CHI 98 corporate sponsors include: Citibank, IBM, Microsoft Usability, Nokia, Sun Microsystems and Unisys.

The theme for 1998 is "Making the Impossible Possible." Approximately 2,500 participants will examine the future of human-computer interaction from 18-23 April in Los Angeles, CA at the Los Angeles Convention Center.