Talks by Martin Flintham and Steve Benford

Martin and Steve will present in the final digital lab meeting of the academic year.

Martin Flintham - Now Wash Your Hands! Understanding Food Legislation Compliance in a Virtual Reality Restaurant Kitchen

In this talk I'll present Corrupt Kitchen, a collaboration between MRL, Law and Politics, forthcoming at CHI PLAY. The Corrupt Kitchen is a room-scale virtual-reality game in which players act as a chef servicing a queue of customers. Tasked with making burgers, players must prepare the food while ensuring it is safe to eat, engaging explicitly and implicitly with challenges related to regulatory compliance and derived from UK legislation, but also efficient and ethical decision making; washing hands, placing rat traps, hiring appropriate help, time saving and money making. Interviewing nineteen players with professional involvement in food preparation reveals a diversity of perceived alignment with participants’ everyday real-world practice that ranges from rules to be gamed to serious concerns. We contribute an examination of how the game, combined with a study protocol that further prompted debriefing and reflection, demonstrates opportunities for training, reflection and engagement with the subject matter. We consider how fidelity and immersion allow comparisons between gameplay and real world compliance.

Steve Benford - How can we Sing Together?

Sorry, more folk music ;-)  I’ll reflect on my experience of two local folk clubs going online over lockdown and how amateur musicians working with a traditional (read non-technical) form have taken to digital technologies. I’ll discuss how digital platforms raise new opportunities and barriers to participation, with a particular focus on how musicians cope with the fundamental limitation of no longer being able to ‘sing in chorus together’. I’ll draw out some broader thoughts on nature of and relationship between liveness, participation and musical form. And I’ll try not to ramble on too much.