Biography
As an animator, architect, author, entrepreneur and teacher, Jean-Marc's work spans interactive design and storytelling to virtual spaces and visual display of information. He was the founding Chair of Singapore’s Animation and Digital Arts MFA program at New York University Tisch School of the Arts Asia. His interactive media artwork has been presented at venues internationally. Jean-Marc's projects have ranged from 3D interactive set design for the theater to “NightHawks”, an urban installation interacting with a large audience inside a public park. He has collaborated on numerous scientific visualization projects, including the "Dynamic Virtual Patient’, a 3D interactive animation of the human body, the “Brain Project”, a 3D interactive animation of the brain and an interactive visual display for exploring the genetic diversity of the world’s 10,000 recognized bird species. He recently completed a project funded by the National Eye Institute (USA) and the University of Alabama (USA) involving the design of an immersive display and dynamic visualization of car traffic, pedestrian crossings and street intersections for the visually impaired. Jean-Marc has written several books on the production of real-time 3D games and the creation of animations, including Creating Interactive 3D Actors and their Worlds (Morgan Kaufman Publisher), and Virtual Sets and Pre-Visualization for Games, Movies and the Web (Focal Press, Elsevier Science). He also contributed to Game Art Complete (Focal Press, Elsevier).

Abstract
From Sensing Cities to New Driving Experiences

The growth of global cities puts more pressure on efficient transportation systems and on the regulation of car traffic. People are also more demanding about the cars that will enable them to travel through the increased density. As a result, the design of cars is becoming influenced by the demands and constraints of an increasingly urban population. Cars need to be more environmentally friendly, smarter and be able to accomplish more complex tasks. Until recently, humans drove cars and made forecasts about their paths through the city. Some drivers are traffic experts from experience, others are listening to news about the traffic on the radio. A key element while designing for the future is to recognize the central place of the driver and his or her acceptance to collaborate with an automated driving system; starting with some level of automated assistance for the driver. There are some moments where an automated system could temporary replace the driver; such as in a traffic jam. The self-driven car which is fully automated will require complete acceptance of the system by the driver. As communities and governments start to raise concerns about sensing and self driving cars, the success of this technological revolution and drivers' willingness to buy into it will require breakthroughs in interaction design. Drivers of smart cars already share some of their driving decision-making with automated systems that learn over time. These systems can display a representation of car traffic; unfortunately not very useful when you are already caught inside a traffic jam. The new meshing of sensors around and inside the car creates a new driving experience. Sensing provides the driver with real time information about the context and the spatial and social environment of the car. Sensing can include local sensors (computer vision, stereo vision, infrared vision, radar, Lidar, and differential GPS) and participatory sensing which involves sharing data from several cars. Since there is an abundance of data available from sensors how can we provide the data available to drivers so they can make educated decisions about their own traffic choices. An important factor of the new driving experiences is usability and visualization. How to provide valuable information to the driver that can be used in real time? Answering this question requires a complete redesign of the traditional dashboard, a new kind of user interface using apps with the following functions: (1) to gather data, (2) to access data, to extract data, and to mesh data from sensors or to use “sensor-fusion” to provide a high volume of data that can be processed together, (3) to provide data analysis and visualization functionality for the driver. This talk also addresses examples of interactive maps used for car traffic, bikes and pedestrians and the new possibilities offered by interactive 3D maps generated in real time. Several prototypes of interactive designs using web components, overlays and templates that can display different kind of data according to the driving tasks will be presented. We will review the use of some of these systems based on criteria of reliability, human-machine collaboration, efficiency, cost, sustainability and privacy.