Since 2020 I explore the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDN) and Interactive Discourse Environments (IDE) with a focus on authoring systems for IDN/IDEs that address complex topics.
For references please see my Publications page
Previous projects
Civic Media (2015 – 2020)
Fair BNB This projects investigated the effects services like AirBnB can have on city neighbourhoods. In collaboration with De Waag’s FairBnB project a coop environment was developed that is now used in Amsterdam as well as Bologna. See more information about this project here.
City Violence In this project we investigate how members of minoreties can explore their own but also unknown environments to get a feel what the intellectual as well as emotional resistance against the group is. The minorities we work for are the LGBTW and some religious communities.
UBUZZ (2015 – 2020)
The UBuzz vision is to make cultural content about cities accessible to citizens in public spaces, such as cafes, libraries, or community centres, through an original combination of information access and user interfaces. The originality of UBuzz is to insert this access into natural social interaction: it aims at making museum content available outside of the museum, and embedding the cultural experience into daily activities. UBuzz supports, enriches and encourages discussions on current affairs, on the level of city neighbourhoods, with material injected from the Amsterdam Museum’s repository that sets the continuing discussion in a historical context.
Accompany (2011 – 2014)
The proposed ACCOMPANY system consist of a robotic companion as part of an intelligent environment, providing services to elderly users in a motivating and socially acceptable manner to facilitate independent living at home. The ACCOMPANY system provides physical, cognitive and social assistance in everyday home tasks, and contributes to the re-ablement of the user, i.e. assist the user in being able to carry out certain tasks on his/her own. Services to the user are delivered through socially interactive, acceptable and empathic interaction, building on computational models of robot social cognition and interaction.
Smart Inside (2010 – 2012)
SmartINSIDE develops a GNSS-enabled standard smartphone. The proposed physical hardware infrastructure enables location-based services, namely by dealing with the specific unique source of information coming from the dedicated signals generated by the SmartINSIDE transmitters. The demonstrator to be developed will establish a potential service designed for the realm of large exhibition centers. The aim of the demonstrator is to facilitate visitor to navigate through the unknown indoor set-up usually especially designed for the event. The demonstration will be tested in a real world environment of a fare. This provides valuable data of a large set of users, in terms of age, culture, interest, etc. The demonstration will comprise studies with qualitative as well as quantitative data that facilitate to distil and hence better respond to end-user requirements with respect to ergonomics as well as usability goals as established for interaction design.
MOCATOUR (2009 – 2011) established computational methods to facilitate tourists with contextualised and experience-based access to information while they freely explore a city. The main goal of the project was to enable tourists to submit and share personal views in form of different media (photo, video, audio or text) to easily create complex experience representations, e.g. in form of virtual media graffiti as annotations on locations. We were in particular interested in the social aspects of such interactions, such as sharing personal opinions or impressions about particular locations and their related objects outdoors as well as indoors.
REDICT (2008 – 2009) brings together 6 regions and clusters (18 partners), which share a strong R&D presence in the field of ICT and New media and the sense that this position has to be exploited for maximal economic and social benefit.
ADVENE (2006 – 2007) facilitates the sharing of annotations about digital video documents (movies, courses, conferences…), as well as tools to edit and visualize hypervideos generated from both the annotations and the audiovisual documents.
CINELAB (2006 – 2007) a collaboration between Antenna Audio, Forum des Images, Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation (CentrePompidou). The Cinelab project aims at studying, developing and experimentally validating a software to annotate movies and produce new contents from these annotations. Annotations are organised along description schemes, and can be shared in a typical Web 2.0 fashion. The technology developed in this project supports the exhibition ‘Erice – Kiarostami‘, presented at the Centre Pompidou from September 19 2007 – January 7 2008.
Passepartout (2004 – 2007) Development of sensor-based user interfaces to control media content in an home entertainment environment .
CHIME (2002 – 2006) Cultural Heritage in an Interactive Multimedia Environments .
Vox Populi (2002 – 2006) Development of methods for the automatic generation of rhetoric-based video sequences.
Dynamo (2000 – 2004) Automatic Hypermedia Presentation Generation.
A4SM (1997 – 1999): Development of a framework for distributed digital video production.
YO (1999 – 2000) Design of an extended hypermedia environment for the exploration of Eisenstein’s Work.
TINKY (1998 – 1999) Development of an emotion editor for web-based VRML-faces.
VirtuOsi (1996 – 1997) Investigation towards the Application of Narrative Techniques in Virtual Reality and Business Processes Applications.
AUTEUR (1993 – 1996) The Application of Video Semantics and Theme Representation for Automated Film Editing.
Frank Nack 