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Plenary
Lecture
Applications of Playware: Intelligent Technology that
Creates Playful Experiences
Professor Henrik Hautop Lund
Center for Playware
Technical University of Denmark
DENMARK
E-mail:
henrik.hautop.lund@gmail.com
Abstract: This talk will
present playware for creating
playful technological
applications, and how playware
technology can be generalised for
a vast variety of people, e.g. for
play, education, cardiac patients,
stroke patients, hospitalised
children, home care, autistic
children, dementia patients, and
handicapped. The approach builds
upon the development of modular
robotics to create a kind of
playware, which is flexible in
both set-up and activity building
for anybody and anywhere. Key
features of this design approach
are modularity, flexibility, and
construction, immediate feedback
to stimulate engagement, activity
design by end-users, and creative
exploration of play activities. I
will illustrate the design
approach by a system composed of
different modular playware devices
that by its modularity is used for
creating playful experiences in a
vast variety of application areas,
e.g. music, sport, play and
rehabilitation, e.g. most recently
for the FIFA World Cup 2010 in
South Africa. The system composed
of the modular devices engages the
user in physical activities, and I
will show how it motivates to
perform physical activities by
providing immediate feedback based
upon playful physical interaction
with the system. The modularity,
ease of use and the functionality
of the devices such as modular
robotic tiles and cubic I-BLOCKS
suit well into these kinds of
scenarios, because they can
provide feedback in a generic way.
It is therefore possible to create
applications with different
stimuli and to dynamically change
parameters to provide immediate
feedback to the users. The
modularity allows to investigate
adaptivity both as changes in the
physical structure and in the
processing of the modules (e.g. by
neural networks).
This gives ample room for the
development of playware, i.e.
intelligent hardware and software
that creates play and playful
experiences amongst users of all
ages. Indeed, design principles
from modular robotics, embodied
AI, interaction design and
cultural studies allow us to
create playware for diverse
application fields such as welfare
robotics (e.g. home care,
physiotherapy, autism therapy,
dementia therapy), sport, music,
playground play and fitness
training. In the presentation, I
will show numerous examples from
DJ remix music, rock music,
physical rehabilitation,
playgrounds, soccer, and use in
Africa.
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Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Professor Henrik Hautop Lund,
Center for Playware at Technical
University of Denmark, is known
internationally for his work in
bringing robotics to use in novel
ways. His approach is to combine
modular robotics and modern
artificial intelligence to create
novel solutions to problems that
occupy the citizens of the World,
e.g. obesity, rehabilitation, and
3rd World development. He has
recently founded the Center for
Playware to focus even further on
how playful aspects of robotics
may provide motivation for any
citizen to perform different kinds
of interaction with the robots of
our future daily life. He chaired
the Robots at Play festivals in
the open city areas where
researchers, artists,
entertainers, and citizens meet
through playful hands-on
experience with robotics in the
daily life of the citizens. In all
cases, Lund has shown how the
combination of a modern artificial
intelligence, modular robotics and
entertainment may provide novel
opportunities in play,
rehabilitation, sport, music,
teaching, third World development,
etc., because the approach
provides non-expert users easy
access to the technology in a
playful and motivating way.
Professor Henrik Hautop Lund has
published more than 140 scientific
articles in the field of robotics,
he has been a member of the Danish
Research Council, and he has been
invited to present his robotic
work in numerous occasions, for
instance for the Emperor of Japan
at Akasaka Palace in Tokyo. He has
been keynote speaker at the major
conferences in the field, such as
IROS and Ro-Man. He founded and
headed the LEGO Lab in 1997-2000.
He founded the RoboCluster
industrial promotion organization.
He invented the RoboCup Junior
robot football game for children,
and his Adaptronics group won the
RoboCup Humanoids Free Style World
Championship 2002 in front of
120.000 spectators. Also, he
developed the Laudrup, Hogh & Lund
RoboSoccer, which was used at the
FIFA World Cup 2010 in South
Africa. Further, he developed the
RoboMusic in collaboration with
World Music Award winner, remix
musician Funkstar De Luxe.
Professor Lund’s work has received
world-wide interest from news
media, e.g. CNN, BBC and WIRED to
name a few, and he was nominated
for the award for the best
entertainment robots and systems
research over the last 20 years at
the IEEE International Conference
on Intelligent Robots and Systems
(IROS).
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