The Ubimedia competition seeks to broaden our understanding of where and how ubiquitous media will influence our future life. The competeition is looking for disruptive artistic visions as well as clever near-to-market solutions off the beaten tracks! This includes any range of innovative ubimedia, pervasive, or ambient products and services. The Ubimedia Award is a highly interdisciplinary competition and we invite Designers, Computer Scientists, Artists, Economists and Engineers to take a stand on the following questions with their entries:
What is the particular aesthetic experience opened up by the rise of ubiquitous and ambient media?
What constitutes the specific intelligence that drives future media environments?
How will location- and context-aware media services change our social life?
How will our future lives look like in the era of ubiquitous computation, and how can society benefit from these advanced technologies?
Valid competition entries include:
Pervasive and ubiquitous games
Ambient installations
Artistic works related to ubiquitous media and computation
Business models and management strategies
Ambient and ubiquitous media technology
Ubiquitous and ambient media services, devices, and environments
Context aware, sensing, and interfaces for ubiquitous computation
Ergonomics, human-computer interaction designs, and product prototypes
Software, hardware and middleware framework demonstrations
Ambient television
etc.
Prof. Wierzbicki is member of the Jury panel for the competition.
The EU has accepted the proposal EVA (European Virtual Academy) submitted for the Erasmus Programme under the Lifelong Learning Programme Call for Proposals Call EAC/41/09 (2009/C 247/09) and selected the project for the EU co-financing.
EVA is a collaboration project among the following learning institutions:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
University of Applied Sciences Tampere, Finland
University of Applied Sciences Mittweida, Germany
Sapientia Hungarian University of Transilvania, Cluj-Napoka, Romania
The Virtual Academy is a learning environment that will stimulate the skills of the current generation of students. Young people are increasingly rooted in the visual culture, based on video games, learning through the Internet, online tutorials, multimedia, etc. The new vision of teaching will be implemented in all the participating countries to start. The project is designed to provide a platform later to be transferred to all interested European higher education institutions.
The functionality of visual communication has been underestimated as photography and cartoons claimed artistic autonomy rather than being submissive to the explicit message to be conveyed. Commercials and pervasive messages in ideological campaigns are early adopters of visuals. Since 3D image spaces in Virtual Reality have been introduced it is a must to meet between scientific researchers, art directors, photographers and illustrators.
“Creative industries” is the epitome for critical applications like social software, gaming and cultural documentaries. This IADIS VC conference opens the landscape for those who bring overlooked messages from theory and practice and those who have the intuition that the visual languages prevail in attitudinal and affective communication. Multi cultural projects demand a high of sophistication in semiotic awareness. Especially this aspect is a fast-growing domain for communication specialists.
Prof. Wierzbicki will present a paper “Media Pedagogics in Converged Environments of the Future” at this year’s EuroITV in Tampere, Finland.
ABSTRACT:
Our life patterns and culture increasingly find their roots in visual media: film, video games, internet and multimedia. Visual media shape the image of our world and our society, thereby being, however, somewhat detached from reality, portraying the bold and the beautiful as role models. Entertainment has become a driving force in the creation of films, television programs and the design of computer games. Education and pedagogical aspects are often neglected. Values and norms in our society seem to be continually losing importance. Our society appears to be getting poorer, both financially and intellectually. In this article we demonstrate the potential that can be found in media forms of the future in repect of education and discuss a number of aspects of reader response and aesthetic response in connection with media and violence. Conference Programme
