Enhancing MMORPG experience through mobile features

Enhancing player experience in MMORPGs with mobile features by Elina M.I. Koivisto and Christian Wenninger is a paper presented at DIGRA 2005 that addresses how the massive multiplayer game experience could be augmented through mobile services. Although written in 2005, not much has really change concerning the cross-platform issues described in this paper, so it's still very pertinent. The paper interestingly provides the reader with a categorization based on "how the player can interact with or influence the virtual game world and other players by using his mobile phone. It's actually obtained through focus groups conducted both in Helsinki and in a virtual chat-room. The results they describe concerns:

• Communication access: through IM or voice communication.
• Event notifications: to be aware of specific events, some level of control is needed here, given that it could be intrusive.
• Asynchronous gameplay: to manage specific game feature asynchronously, like crafting, mobile auction.
• Synchronous player-to-player interaction, which may allow the mix of players using different platforms, through articial intelligence, especially in turn or tick-based game.
• Passive participation: observe the game world or influence the game by voting or rating with the mobile device.
• Parallel reality: "Real-life events can have an effect on the events in the virtual game world and vice versa", like location-based games.

It's also relevant that the authors describe how these feature would change (or not) the game mechanics. The factors that limit the mobile-enhancement are also mentioned and revolves around the problems of latency and I/O issue (text) as well as pricing for data transfer. This last point might eventually be fixed soon through flat fees. Why do I blog this? this classification emerged from focus groups is great material to be included in the literature review for a research project about this topic. Also, it allows to set some baseline about the current ideas concerning cross-platform gaming. There is a "physical" axis here which ranges from basic observation (gamer as spectator) to using real-life events in the game mechanic. I am convinced that other axes should be found to map more design opportunities.

Architectural analysis of WoW and BFME II

McGregor, G.L. (2006). Architecture, Space and Gameplay in World of Warcraft and Battle for Middle Earth 2 , Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Game research and development, pp.69-76. This paper, which is very relevant to my work at the lab, is an architectural analysis of the spatial qualities of two video games: World of Warcraft and Battle for Middle Earth 2. The author starts by pointing out how game architecture is different from architecture in reality because the underlying rationale has a different purpose. In games, the architecture is created to produce challenges and gameplay.

The whole paper offers an analysis of two video games, let's jump to the conclusion to see the main issues of interest to me, i.e. the meaning of space:

"Both games build on established fantasy traditions, using architectural and ecological diversity to differentiate races and spaces. Both games use architecture to clarify and simplify gameplay in two very different ways. World of Warcraft uses architecture and landscape as an organisational system that contains activity and builds on usage patterns from real life. In contrast BFME II creates architecture as a symbolic object that stands for complex systems within a flattened and simplified contested spacemap. (...) The dichotomy between architecture in videogames as a spatial entity or as an object suggests a primary division of games into those that are concerned with movement through space as a visceral experience and those that are not. (...) they operate with significantly different approaches to spatiality. On one hand we have a game that represents architecture and landscape as accessible and spatial, that is characterised by an embodiment in and a personal view of space, that focuses on an individual’s movement through that space and that simulates a physical (though primarily visual) experience of space. On the other we have a game that produces architecture as an object and the landscape as a map, that uses architecture to represent intangible concepts, that simplifies the landscape and favours an external viewpoint, a game that simulates a conceptual view of space in which codified relationships are more important than physical characteristics, favouring metaphor over corporeal experience. "

(Pictures taken from the paper: WoW and BFME II)

I was also interested in the part about affordances:

"It is interesting to briefly consider the architecture of both games in relation to notions of affordance, taking William Gaver’s separation of affordances and perceptual information. The architecture of BFME II exhibits a false affordance of conventional architectural/spatial use in the way it mimics the visual properties of real buildings. Other uses of architecture in gameplay, for example creating soldiers, exist as hidden affordances. BFME II relies on the gameplay manual and knowledge of established traditions in real-time strategy games to indicate to the player the buildings utility. Conversely World of Warcraft primarily exhibits perceptible affordances of customary architectural and spatial use to its architecture, creating a congruity between what between what the player perceives they can do and the activities they can perform. "

Why do I blog this? it's been a long time that I am interested in finding this sort of paper, that would use architectural analysis of video game. This type of work is both interested for architecture (new objects to analyze, new behavior to observe, etc.) and for game design as it allows to understand more level design and how space could be articulated with game mechanics.

I am also wondering about how to go further, how to enrich game/level design through that sort of research analysis. Currently, I am gathering material like this paper and hopefully try to integrate this more deeply, maybe I'll try to write a paper about architecture and gaming to formalize more the interconnections.

Weather influence on spatial behavior of catchbob players

Writing a paper about the affordances of space, I tried to get back to Catchbob data and create some heat maps that would represent players's exploration of the environment with two different weather conditions: with (first) or without snow (right)... a sort of commonsensical demonstration of how weather conditions influenced participants' behavior:

Why do I blog this? achievement of few hours toying with this idea to illustrate a paper.

Architecture and gaming

Alla Varney in The Escapist has an interesting piece about gaming and architecture. Some excerpts that I found relevant (some parts are quotes from an interview of Andrew Hudson-Smith):

"Slowly, architects - not software architects, the brick-and-mortar kind - are starting to notice. They're gradually repurposing 3-D computer game engines to visualize real-world building designs. (...) Remember how machinima inspired the game community's budding filmmakers? Now, in the same way, the architectural use of photorealistic 3-D game engines heralds an imminent and exciting new pursuit. (...) Of course, architects already use advanced modeling software (...) In comparison to game engines, architectural packages need heavy hardware, aren't optimized for real-time walkthroughs, and cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. (...) That's the view from the architect's side. Should gamers care? Will ordinary gamers really want to use their favorite games to design, not deathmatch and capture-the-flag, but mundane buildings? (...) Early adopters may include the vocal minority of players in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) who enjoy player-created housing. They'll tinker obsessively with their dream houses, like your sister playing The Sims. After that, the next city's worth of game buildings may arise in - wait for it - machinima nonfiction documentaries."

Why do I blog this? some good points here but the author did not deal with the notion of simulation, how some architect study people flow in space/buildings (supermarket). It would be curious to study more what architects can do with regards to gaming practices, spatial behavior in games and stuff like that; not only the tools but behavior.

For example, looking at "consumption of space" in a building (the equivalent to what I described yesterday as examples of playtest), the intensity of places usage, interactions, with what objects, etc.

Infrastructures as indicators

Leigh Star, S. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure, American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), pp.377-391. This article interestingly propose to take an ethnographical approach of infrastructures, and study these so-called "boring things" as indicators of practices and culture. Phone books, international classification of disease or power plugs are described as important indicators by the author. The point is not only to "study the unstudied" for the sake of it bur rather to take them as a relational concept ("for a railroad engineer, the rails are not infrastructure but topic").

She then defines infrastructures with 9 properties:

"Embeddedness. Infrastructure is sunk into and inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies. (...) Transparency. Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks. (...) Reach or scope. This may be either spatial or temporal—infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice. (...) Learned as part of membership. The taken-for-grantedness of artifacts and organizational arrangements is a sine qua non of membership in a community of practice (...) Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice (...) Embodiment of standards. Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion. (...) Built on an installed base. Infrastructure does not grow de novo; it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strengths and limitations from that base (...) Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks (...) Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally. Because infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above."

Why do I blog this? "Reading" infrastructures can be done by identifying the "master narratives" and "others" (i.e. the single voice who does not problematize diversity), find the invisible work (i.e. the traces left behind by coders, engineers, builders) and understand why people "persist in using less functional but more routine actions when cheaper alternatives are nearby". This obviously utterly echoes with the near future laboratory concerns and methodologies.

What would this infrastructure - currently being fixed - reveal from the society? (Picture taken in Oaxaca, Mexico, last week)

Location awareness affordances

Brown, B., Taylor, A.S. Izadi, S. Sellen, A. Kaye, J.J and Eardley, R. (2007). Locating Family Values: A Field Trial of the Whereabouts Clock, Going to be presented at Ubicomp 2007, Innsbruck. The paper reports the study of long-term trails of a location-awareness system I a have already mentionned here: the Whereabouts Clock. This basic device, situated in the home allows family members to see where other members of the family are by looking at a Clock (showing categories such as "home”, “work”, “school” and “elsewhere”).

The results showed how, for these families, "location awareness was less about coordination and more about family members’ emotional connection to one another". It was less about communicating the people's whereabouts but rather to support family in what they already know about each other (some form oa reassurance) and that one expects. The part that struck me as the most relevant, resonates with my PhD research; I was actually very interested in their discussion of "location" versus "location in interaction":

"the WAC let us explore location not as a technical feature of a system, but as something interleaved with a family’s interactions with each other. We would argue that the value of location technologies are seldom simply in their ability to track objects and people, but rather in how that tracking is, in the end, used. For location awareness, whether it is of family members or delivery trucks, this means in interaction. It is seldom the autonomous tracking of position that is important but what that tracking means to others involved – such as when a truck driver needs to explain to management the extra long route they took, or just a family member explaining why it took them so long to come home. (...) location-in-interaction: how it is that location is used, read, viewed, and manipulated by groups, and what this can support. These activities are directly connected to the accuracy, resolution, or whatever, of a positioning system, but these technical aspects can only ever be a partial account of location’s role. Our point is not that inaccuracy is unimportant – as we have mentioned, the inaccuracies of the WAC (or more specifically: its flutter) caused unnecessary distress. It is rather that it remains to be seen what accuracy is in a specific interactional situation, and we should not simply assume accuracy is a uniform concept. (...) Location was understood, even at a glance, in the context of what that person ordinarily did, and their ordinary patterns and routines. (...) Location for our study’s families was not only meaningful in terms of their intimate knowledge of one another, it also had moral connotations. By this we mean that there were “right” places to be and “wrong” ones. "

Why do I blog this? as I said, this is very tight to the work I've done in my PhD research, in which I explored how location is interpreted and used in both virtual environments and ubiquitous computing. In my research, I've shown how location-awareness can be an impediment to collaborative processes (people remembered less their partners' paths when having an automatic location-awareness tool). The conclusion in this paper is very similar in the sense that the implications that it shows how location awareness is not simply about optimizing "the underlying technology, but rather to optimize the fit between the technology and users’ values and practices. For instance, as they described:

" there has been a considerable body of work on optimizing tracking within buildings, as an extension to traditional GPS which on the whole only works well outside. Yet from a consideration of what location means in interaction, it may be that whether we are indoors or outdoors and what address we are at can be of more importance than our spatial location within a building. We might only want to know if one is inside a commercial establishment, waiting outside, or at a house next door. "

Two others ideas that I found extremely pertinent here: - the idea of deliberatively lowing the accuracy resolution (the importance is less the accuracy of information but rather to provide a mean for reassurance). - providing a mean to tweak the system, by allocating the term "work" to other places (a person used the category "work" for gardening). This is very relevant to allow people expressing what they want (even to lie).

Using movements from real sharks in a digital game

Sharkrunners is a new game designed by Area/code that seems to be compelling.

Based on what is said on the website, the gameplay is very straight-forward: players, involved in an oceanic mission:

"take on the role of marine biologists who seek to learn as much as possible about sharks through advanced observation techniques. In the game, players control their ships, but the sharks are controlled by real-world white sharks with GPS units attached to their fins. Real-world telemetry data provides the position and movement of actual great white sharks in the game, so every shark that players encounter corresponds to a real shark in the real world.

Ships in the game move in real-time, so players receive email and/or SMS alerts during the day when their boat is within range of an encounter. Players login, choose crewmembers and an approach technique, and then collect various data from the nearby sharks. "

Why do I blog this? yet another pertinent game in which traces from the physical world (real white shark movements through telemetry) are fed back in the digital environment. I also like the SMS/email interaction, very basic but efficient (especially when I am not online).

A return to the earlier mechanical era, with improvements

Following on his earlier column about command line as the future of User Interface, Donald Norman now describes physicality in the latest issue of ACM interactions as another important direction ("the return to physical controls and devices"). As he says "Physical devices, what a breakthrough! But wait a minute, isn't this where the machine age started, with mechanical devices and controls?" this is some sort of throwback to earlier times "with improvement" though.

"Physical devices have immediate design virtues, but they require new rules of engagement (...) Designers have to learn how to translate the mechanical actions and directness into control of the task. (...) As we switch to tangible objects and physical controls, new principles of interaction have to be learned, old ones discarded. With the Wii, developers discovered that former methods didn't always apply. Thus, in traditional game hardware, when one wants an action to take place, the player pushes a button. With the Wii, the action depends upon the situation. To release a bowling ball, for example, one releases the button push. It makes sense when I write it, but I suspect the bowling-game designers discovered this through trial and error, plus a flash of insight. Not all of the games for Wii have yet incorporated the new principles. This will provide fertile ground for researchers in HCI."

He also points out intriguing issues such as the movement towards physical interface would lead HCI to "move from computer science back to mechanical engineering (which is really where it started many years ago)". So he advocates for HCI that would take advantage of both mechatronics and UX: "If the future is a return to mechanical systems, mechatronics is one of the key technological underpinnings of their operation. Mechatronics taught with an understanding of how people will interact with the resulting devices"... wondering where this would happen.

Why do I blog this? it's now well established that "new rules" should be written. New games are being design, new guidelines being described, new approach are required (like gestural language annotation for example) but the final part (about need to have more mechatronic + a user-centered approach) is less common in papers about tangible interfaces. It's curious to see how things will unfold towards that direction (yes I assume that it's a correct direction).

'Nomadic work' workshop

Bits and pieces, quotes and notes about a workshop about "nomadic work" I helped organizing (along with Jef Huang, Mark Meagher, Silke Lang, Isabelle Bentz and Alvise Simondetti) on tuesday. Why a workshop about nomadic work in an infoviz conference? because the point was to envision how information visualization could be a way to overcome some of the problems/limits/pain points experienced by mobile workers.

The workshop lasted one day and was based on two parts: 1) a discussion of the current nomadic work situation of the participants through discussion of pictures and maps. This helped us to set research topics, limits and opportunities that can lead to design opportunities. 2) a quick and dirty brainstorm about how to design for such topics.

The 'nomadic work' themes we explored concerned (btw yes they overlap): - selective connectivity: how can we manage our time: being offline on vacation, offline but working on a project, online and available to discuss with others. - supporting collective grounding: how to build trust and mutual understanding over distance - awareness of various kinds: which information about one's state to share - the office in a pocket: access to resources - temporary appropriation of space: how to appropriate certain places to work during short amount of time

Francesco Cara interestingly described how work process became 24/7, more a matter of an engagement. To him, the office cleaning used to mark the end of the day, with a fresh start the morning after finding a clean office. Now in certain companies who have office cleaning at 2pm, this ritual is lost. What happens, as he pointed out, is that work will more and more be project-based, about multitasking and with a increasing mix of personal and professional tasks. Jef then remarked that maybe the problem is not make work like home but instead to to make home look like work, how to liberate from domesticity.

Yasmine explained how things unfold in the company she's recently joined: they're a pool of consultants so the office is often too small for when they're all present (back from the field) and too big when they're on the field doing ethnographic research.

Another relevant point raised by Francesco was the "myth of the overload": when looking at the data, what is stressful for people is not that receive too many phone calls or message (in mobile situations) but rather the potentiality to receive them.

As pointed by Roberto: "I don't care about where my colleagues are, they can be in the toilets, as soon as the work is done" "Second Life is a place populated by journalists who have virtual sex with each other to write articles about people having sex in virtual reality" "Most people look bad on picture (me included), I would rather see their heartbeats"

Alvise also described that: "I like cubicles because I can create my own patch of people with videoconferencing applications, I see my colleagues... So when my colleagues are picking their nose I see them but in the end you would skip noticing, besides the sound is too intrusive, I muted it"

Why do I blog this? as the seminar I attended yesterday, it's not directly connected to my research about gaming/space but it's tightly linked to some of my research concerns about computer-supported collaborative work, mobile work and the user experience of such technosocial situations. These messy notes are elements I found intriguing from the day and that we might use to do the write-up.

Digitality and space seminar

Some notes gathered from the annual seminar of the sociology/geography department at EPFL. This year, the seminar was about "digitality and space", focusing how relationships between the individual, the social and machines are reshuffled and what could we envision "new architectures" for "living together". Boris Beaude about the spatiality of the Internet

Boris, a french geographer, started by showing how the vocabulary about the Internet is spatial: website, navigate/surf, internet explorer, information superhighways, site architecture, "on internet" (in french as well as in english). Is it because the Internet is a space?

He then pointed out that information on the Internet have a speed but not mass... which leads to sensorial issues given that 3 of our senses require mass (proprioception, taste and smell). Therefore, Internet better ease certain type of contacts based on the visual and auditory senses.

Very interestingly, the rest of the talk was about questioning the spatiality of the Internet. Is it because of its infrastructure that the Internet is spatial? Obviously no because it relies on previously existing infrastructure as Boris argued: the existing telecom networks. However, what is curious is that it specificity might be the node of the network, i.e. the content... which would lead us in a situation where the specificity of this network is not the network itself but what is connected.

The last part of the talk briefly concerned the relationships between the Internet and the City. One of them favor connexity and the others is bound to contiguity through two techniques (telecommunication versus copresence) or two different logic (reticularité versus territoriality). BUT the Internet is unique ("un géotype et son unique géon"). This said, Boris describes the 3 sorts of relationships between the Internet and the city: - complementary logic (e.g. an activity on the Internet can motivate physical mobility like having a chat with a friend on the other part of town). - alternative logic (e.g. buying a book on Amazon instead of going in a book shop) - exclusive logic (e.g. wikipedia, open source development: activities that would have a huge cost without the Internet)

Patrick Keller and Christophe Guignard (fabric.ch).

Patrick and Christophe interestingly presented several projects of fabric.ch, their architecture/research studio starting from the idea of the availability of data collected through sensors: what do we do with these data? what's their status? should they be private? public? what technologies deal with them?

Instead of relying on the flawed differentiation between the digital and the physical, they rather presented how they see the hybridization caused by ubiquitous computing to be similar to a spectrum, made of different wavelength. Some are visible, some aren't, and tools/artifacts allow to access to certain wavelength: technologies can then be seen as mediators. They showed how the mediators enable us to access to different fringes of space that would be invisible without them. Another aspect here, also drawn from the spectrum metaphor, is that these different levels coexist: at certain moments, it is possible to access to other wavelengths (interferences). This leads a continuity between the spaces and they describe their work as the creation of interferences.

Their architectural practice aims at understanding the world around them and to propose projects that question it or to describe potential solutions. They then took examples of their work such as Knowscape mobile (a browser that allows to navigate the Internet both as an hypertext and a 3D representation), electroscape 004 (a Playstation dialoguing to an Xbox about their relationships to space), Perpetual Tropical Sunshine (a set of IR lamps that recreate a perpetual tropical client, nurtured by data drawn from a weather database), realroom[s].

Why do I blog this? although these two talks are different from my research, there are very intriguing convergence here and some of the elements discussed are utterly relevant to me in terms of concepts, metaphors, examples deployed. For example, I really like the spectrum metaphor to go beyond the opposition of digital/physical; the description of the relationships between the Internet and the city is also of interest to a project about playing virtual worlds on a mobile phone in a city context.

On my side, it was a way to present my research, about mutual location-awareness as well as the new analysis I am doing with the CatchBob data about the affordances of space.

Notes from Frontiers in Interaction

My notes from Frontiers in Interaction in Milano, an italian event about user experience/interaction design that focused on the Internet of Things as well as Virtual Environments. Thanks Leandro Agro and Matteo Penzo for the invitation! Fabio Sergio: "designing for the segment of one"

Fabio described the cell phone as the "personal remote control for life", which is contradictory with the fact that cell phones have the same shell (hardware, physical appearance) and the same ghost (software). Obviously, this does not reflect the specific needs people have. At the same time, function fatigue is the number one complain of cell phone users (Source: forum to advance the mobile experience). As Don Norman said, "we want simplicity but we don't want to give up any of the cool futures", hence the myth of simplicity.

Fabio then described how the area should rather aim at simplicity, not simplification. To do so, he got back to the shell/ghost metaphor by proposing the following:

Shell: hardware is hard but it's getting softer, as attested by some examples: Schulze&Webb' metal phone, rapid manufacturing by Patrick Jouin, "3D software for the masses" (see this announcement for that matter). According to him, a near future path would be the 3D printing of your own shell ("to match the color of your shoes" as Fabio put on the slide). A last example he showed is Panoko, an emergent marketplace for 3D printing.

Ghost: there are some steps towards the direction of software personalization with Jaiku or MySocial Fabric or the advent of a widget-based model. Another important domain would also correspond to the "one field that rule them all" model: the google field search is indeed presented by Fabio as a relevant style of interaction (which claims is supported by a recent paper by Don Norman). There are already examples of this trend but ,as Fabio pointed out, it's still lacking "Magic".

Rafi Haladjian

This talk was a worthwhile and compelling account of the Nabaztag creation. As a minitel and internet pioneer, he was convinced by the idea of ubiquitous computing, he and his team wondered about "how to get there from here" (a recurring question for people interested in the future ;) ). His point was that "there is life beyond CES". Deploying what he called a "teddy bear theory", they aimed at improving devices following the basic process: mechanical/functional (classic teddy bear or scale) to digital (singing teddy bear or enhanced scale) to connected.

The next question for them was then "where to start"? This is where he explained why they chose the rabbit as a prototype of an ubiquitous computing artifact. Some reasons: - there was a rabbit on his desk at that moment, when they were brainstorming. - it's a message to show people that it's possible: if you can connect a rabbit on the internet, then you can connect anything. - it's not utilitarian, and people won't have high expectations. - a rabbit can be the "Pong" of ubicomp - it's cute

They had 3 ambitions with this project: - popularizing the idea that there is a life after the PC: the world is not reduced to a screen. - experimenting screenless ways to provide information (sound, light, movements but not in a "new age" way) - bringing virtual worlds to the real life: a physical avatar.

The challenges were not so simple, the point was to start facing the real life challenges of ambient devices: how do you live with a screenless one button-device? how to face the complexity of un-interactiveness? how to manage serendipity? There were also important technical design challenges (local/networked). Moreover it was also challenging to see how existing information could be used.

Rafi Haladjian highlighted the importance of bottom-up innovation in their project: as he said "we don't want to invent the life of people", therefore their approach was to to sell this connected rabbit and see what emerges: how would people invent the "Internet of Things"? (And people said "Wow" as he expressed). Violet's strategy is to empower people by making things they can play with.

The next big thing after the release of the Nabaztag/tag will be in september: Nabaztamps, RFID stamps that one can put on objects to track certain activities (or to let people imagine new applications):

Jeffrey Schnapp I took less notes here but I was impressed by how he described successful innovation as a "tradition of productive failure, failed interaction and failed immersion", which he exemplified by virtual reality examples that aimed at replacing the physical. Another hint from him that I liked (and that resonated with my talk) was the aim of "replacing total immersion, total interaction and reality replacement paradigms with partial, distracted play-based paradigms that exploit and interconnect the specificities and experiential potentialities of physical and digital things".

I was also interested in talks by Alexandro Valli (io agency), Teresa Colombi (LudoTIC, she presented an insightful study of eye-tracking device employed to analyse the UX of WoW) and Francesco Cara although they were in italian. Valli described three interesting ideas: - how "digital does not exist" but is only a form of representation, the digital being an enabler of possibilities. - the importance of being "cold" - simplicity as the ultimate sophistication (Leonardo da Vinci).

Frontiers in interaction talk

Currently at Frontiers in Interaction in Milano where I gave a talk entitled "PeopleSpaceThings: hybridization over the internets" (Slide can be found here).

The talk was basically a critique of assumptions in ubiquitous computing, relying on current literature (Bell and Dourish, Graham, etc.) and show how some alternatives could be possible, mostly projects that I am doing with Julian and things I like (Jaiku, Isolatr).

Cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in HCI

Bartneck, C. & Rauterberg, M. (2007). HCI reality—an ‘Unreal Tournament’?, Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 65 (2007) 737–743. This article addresses the cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in the HCI community. It reports the results from an empirical study about the barriers between these professions. The authors describe these barries using the term "Unreal Tournament" because of the "shouting match between academics and practitioners" between researchers in some conferences.

The description of the barriers is quite insightful:

"Barrier 1: Engineers {E} and scientists {S} make their results explicit by publishing in journals, books and conference proceedings, or by acquiring patents. Their body of knowledge is externalized and described outside of the individual engineer or scientist. These two communities revise their published results through discussion and control tests among peers. On the other hand, designers’{D} results are mainly represented by their concrete designs. (...) Barrier 2: Engineers {E} and designers {D} transform the world into preferred situations, while scientists {S} mainly attempt to understand the world through the pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws. (...) Barrier 3: Scientists {S} and designers {D} are predominantly interested in humans in their role as possible users. Designers are interested in human values, which they transform into requirements and eventually solutions. Scientists in the HCI community are typically associated with the social or cognitive sciences. (...) Engineers {E} are mainly interested in technology, which includes software for interactive systems."

Then the study also offers some pertinent results (summarized in two words below but I encourage reader to look more closely at the paper):

"Scientists, with their logical positivistic paradigm on the one side, and engineers and designers with their constructivistic paradigm on the other side, appear to have different attitudes toward REALITY. Our study attempted to find empirical proof of this difference. (...) Interestingly, among the three professions, engineers appear to be the cohesive element, since they often have dual backgrounds, whereas very few participants had dual science/design backgrounds. Engineers could, therefore, build a bridge between designers and scientists, and through their integrative role, could guide the HCI community to realizing its full potential."

Why do I blog this? articles about how a field such as HCI is organized are always interesting to understand the underlying dynamic in research communities. Although what is described there (and that I have put the emphasis on) is a bit stereotypical, lots of things are true and can be relevant to get what is at stake.

Pet computing review

Working on a paper about new interaction partners, I tried to categorize the work done in what can be called "pet computing", i.e. the idea that "traditional human-machine interfaces and their advantages can be extended to other living beings. In order to provide them comfort and also to enhance human-animal communication interaction " as described in Savage, J., Sanchez-Guzmán Walterio Mayol, R.A., Arce, L., Hernandez, A., Brier, L., Martinez, F., Velazquez, A. & Lopez, G. (2000). Animal-Machine Interfaces, Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 191. So, based on a review of the existing literature and concrete projects, I came up with 4 categories:

Pet-machine interaction This category is a pure "design for pet" topic: lots of products are explicitly designed for a pet target group: toys, DVDs but it also corresponds to animals playing video games or art projects such as "Augmented Animals" by Auger-Loizeau. The Wonderful Shot Dog Camera by Takara Tomy is also a device that allows pets to take photos themselves. Cricket robots are also part of this augmented animal domain.

(Pictures: left is a pif playing a video game with its snout, right is the dog camera)

Pets and their humans Here it's much rather about technologies for the owner: generally those products or services aim at tracking the pet (location-tracking) or allowing meetings between pets or owners (social software for animals... which are generally targeted to the owners). Generally, these systems are direct translations of the values and concerns humans shared about them to pets: tracking loved ones and improving sociability/encounters/meetings. Examples: there is a huge number of patents and papers about pet trackers (my favorite is Float-a-pet), some social software like Dogster (for dog owners) are also trendy.

Although, this is less about pet-to-pet interaction, a system such as pet palio (basically a matchmaking website for pets) falls in this category given the need to have a human to interact with the website.

Control pet Military menagerie is a also a lively domain in which people aim at bending animals to their will so that they could move them around, spy or attack. No comment about the ethic of such purposes.

Renewed interactions between pets and humans What I put in that category is all the projects that aim at creating new relationships between pets and their owners. This is where the innovation should and will happen, and where Julian and I are doing our investigations. Unfortunately, there are only few projects here: - feline fun park, a phidget cat toy which interacts with a cat for hours of feline fun. It detects cat interaction and reacts accordingly to keep the cat playing. - SNIF: a system that allows pet owners to interact through their pets' social networks. - Poultry Internet, that allows people to touch/hug their pets remotely and have a feeling of presence. - animal-controlled video-game: pacman game in which a human play against real crickets.

What is important here is that these projects often differs depending on the level of awareness the pet might have about its involvement in an interaction, which is often the problem here.

(Pictures: left is the feline fun park, right is poultry internet)

Virtual pets That one is more a side-note because it's not strictly speaking related to pet computing, given that Webkinz, V-Migo or Nintendogs are more tamagotchi-like projects.

Granularity of location

Reading some material (.ppt!) about the Mogi game, I ran across this very interesting slide by Benjamin Joffe:

The picture basically shows different digital maps, with diverse levels of granularity, from the cluttered to the simple.

Why do I blog this? because I find it very relevant to the issue of location-based interfaces, for single-user or multi-user systems. In the single-user system, it's important to convey the location information with the most relevant granularity for the user. In a multi-user application (such as a buddy-finder), things are more intricate given that there is a need to match the granularity between users: is the same granularity pertinent for the 2 persons? what about applications for 50 persons? what about cultural issues if you have an emergency team of french gents in a remote country and people need to collaborate?

TRACKING CAPABLE KIDS

A bit I ran across this morning: Tracking Capable Kids, a project on the Children’s Activities, Perception and Behaviour in the Local Environment from UCL’s Centre for Transport Studies (CTS), supported by CASA, the Bartlett School of Planning, and the Department of Psychology.

"the project focused on monitoring the energy expended and the patterns of travel of children between home and school focuses on understanding how and why children walk and play in an activity context. (...) We sampled some 180 children aged between 8 and 10 in three Hertfordshire primary schools over a four day period using a variety of equipment and questionnairiaes to establish their activity patterns. GPS monitors on the kid’s wrists and RTS energy monitors around their waists record movements. The kids filled in diaries and produced mental maps of their environment during the four day period in question (...) A fascinating array of data has been generated and the project team is working on analysing this information at many scales and relating this to the social economic order characteristic of the households of which the children are a part."

Why do I blog this? some interesting bits here, need to read the papers about it. Besides, the question "How children play in their local environment?" is very relevant to my own research about mobile gaming and spatial practices.

Is ubicomp already here?

Working on my talk for Frontiers in Interaction, I was wondering about a question I might address, which is "Is ubiquitous computing already here?" There are different options here to answer this question. At first glance, one might say "no" because as we do not see flying cars, super fancy fridges and context-aware cell phones are not used by 97% of the earth population. And when looking at the 3% (my approximation) well versed into high-tech practices, things are not that simple.

Another answer would be that yes ubicomp is here but not as envisioned by researchers, this is the claim by Bell and Dourish: "ubiquitous computing is already here, in the form of densely available computational and communication resources, is sometimes met with an objection that these technologies remain less than ubiquitous in the sense that Weiser suggested" that I share. This resonates with news press like this article in The Economist (It was hailed as a breakthrough that would revolutionise logistics. What ever happened to RFID?). The point here is to say that ubicomp is maybe less a matter of the gadgety future propelled by some researchers and maybe existing practices in countries well into broadband and mobile. Lots of reasons can be called to explain why we're not using location-based annotation systems or intelligent fridges, some are related to flawed assumptions about infrastructures, others to the problem of automation, regulation issues, etc.

Another way to think about it is that yes ubicomp is here, latent but not implemented like a sort of normative future waiting to be realized. The ideas and design of ubicomp so pervaded naive or pop culture about technologies (through cultural artifacts like Minority Report) that the future is thought to be like this. I can feel this when running workshop about the near near future (ubicomp, location-based app...). The symptom is simple: the ideas o buddy-finder, place-based annotations, intelligent agents are so present in people's mind that it's VERY difficult to reach innovative conclusions. What is even more remarkable (but maybe expected) is that it's not only the applications people want that are similar but also the underlying trend of hybridization: the improvement/facilitation ofconnection between people and people, things and people, place and things... all these *values* now pervade our culture...

Treating technological innovations in an experimental fashion

Crabtree, A. (2004) Design in the Absence of Practice: Breaching Experiments, In Proc. Of DIS 2004, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, pp. 59-68. While IT research and development is now generally informed by studies of practices, this article raises the problem of innovation and design in the absence of these very practices in the context of ubiquitous computing. The author interestingly proposes to deploy new technologies "in the wild" and treat them as "breaching experiments". Some excerpts that summarizes the main meat:

"How, then, are disciplines that take practice as their object of inquiry and study to proceed in the absence of practice and, furthermore, to support innovation in design? (...) a solution we have developed over the course of our own research to address how we might incorporate ethnography into an innovative process of research and development (...) treating technological innovations in an experimental fashion (...) our approach is based on conducting experiments ‘in the wild’ (...) The ethnomethodological notion of breaching experiments: (...) a research procedure that necessarily disrupts ordinary action in order that the sociological analyst might “detect some expectancies that lend commonplace scenes their familiar, life-as-usual character, and to relate these to the stable social structures of everyday activities. (...) in the absence of practice with which to inform design, novel technological innovations might be deployed in the wild in order to confront them with novel situations and ad hoc practices devised on the fly to make the technology work ‘here and now’ (...) they provoke (in the etymological sense of ‘call forth’) practice and make it visible and available design reasoning. (...) Breaching experiments do not make existing practice available to analysis however – as none exists – but make visible the contingent ways in which the technology is made to work and the interactional practices providing for and organizing that work. "

Why do I blog this? some important elements here about how to set proper research methodologies in the context of ubicomp R&D. It certainly connects with the talk that I did recently in Marseille. I found important the clarification about researching practices... that do not exist yet. Besides, the "experiments in the wild" approach is appealing to me, although I may not limit myself to ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography (given that I like to use mixed-methods).

Folded paper+LEDs

Results from the folding workshop that happened last week at our lab (organized by Mark Meagher). The point for students was to use the laser cutter to create crease lines prior to folding. The folded paper was then used as a diffuser for an LED wall display. I was not part of it. Some picture I took from that:

Why do I blog this? My role at the lab is not about this topic but it's very intriguing to be surrounded by outcomes from such workshops! Besides, from my POV (as a user experience researcher/psychologist), observing designers/architects work process is appealing and important for me.

Reboot9.0 doggy bag

Some notes about the first day at Reboot9.0.

Highlights were: Kars Alfrink (Mobile Social Play) The talk introduced very relevant design guidelines to design for "mobile social play" 1. Design for different level of player engagement (casual, hardcore...). Keep people there, engaged gradually to provoke flow. 2. Provide players with roles, role creates dynamic, assigning roles to players so that social interaction emerges [I do think this is why games like WoW works better than social platforms like SL] 3. Encourage "meta-gaming" (like kids painting their miniature to play a tabletop game). It augments their engagement and keep them involved. 4. Support implicit rule creation. You should have hard rules encoded in the game BUT also unwritten rules that players agree on. Example: soccer on the street = soccer rules + rules negotiated by players about street constraints 5. Play with the game's existence

Aram Bartholl (Online Symbols in the offline world) He presented some intriguing art projects about how network data world manifest itself in our everyday life: - de_dust: The de_dust installation consists of a large number of various sized stacked crates arranged in a cluster. All the crates are printed with the same imitation wood texture from the computer game Counter-Strike. - WoW: people's name and identity is floating above people's head, visible to every body else in the street as in WoW. - Plazemark: real life representations of digital places generated by users of the Location Based Web2.0 platform Plazes.com. I also liked when he described how virtual places such as Countersike maps becomes part of people's memory, showing a CS map drawn in the sand.

Tom Armitage (The Uncanny Valet) A great talk about re-examining "the notion of manners on the web, and how we teach our software to be appropriate - but never too-polite. Tom's claim was that applications and tools that we are building define the manners of the web today, whether we like it or not. His point was illustrated by diverse examples. - modern web brings potential surprises (ajax, rich interface that zoom out, drag and drop that is only for nerds, click on RSS feeds that open up weird codes...). This is RUDE. - have a look at the Jack Principles, there are important lessons there - anthropomorphic representations (a la MS Bob, clippy...) destroy the sense of accomplishment for the users (“agents make people diminish themselves” and “redefine themselves into lesser beings.” Jaron Lanier) - a good example of a correct behavior is the email sent by the Little Moo robot:

" I'm Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I'll let you know when it's done and on its way to you. (...) Remember, I'm just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions regarding your order please contact customer services (who are real people) at: http://www.moo.com/service Thanks, Little MOO, Print Robot"

Why is it correct? because it's endearing, it reinforces the status as a computer, it better builds the user's relation with the company AND it naturally dissuades people from hitting "reply" to this email. SOme other stuff he mentionned, slightly less related to these notes: - kids use blank SMS to express their will to party - telescopes in the UK that tells on Twitter what they're looking at: a nice background machine. Tube lines in London that have twitter streams: it's polite and appropriate.

Matt Jones (Travel and serendipity) Matt described Dopplr, a social software that allows you to share when and where you will travel. His talk had a very interesting subtitle: "How personal informatics are engineering coencidence, lowering environmental impacts and forging a new golden age of travel". This reminded me a research paper by Christian Licoppe. This researcher (see "ICTs and the engineering of encounters: a case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminals" looked at how Mogi designers created a system that "engineer" encounters and specific forms of social play. Mr. Jones showed how "Dopplr is about the future, which you can't automate. You have to declare it". The Dopplr interface is meant to lower the energy to declare it. This point is very important and directly relates to the conclusion of my PhD research: there is always a cost related to location-awareness. Generally the capture of the location information is either automatic (by a computing system) or self-declared. My dissertation examined this difference and showed the importance of self-declaration: the cost is higher than the automatic version for the sender BUT for the others, the BENEFIT is high: it's more than an information, it's an information AND an intention. Another good point here is that Dopplr focuses on a single benefit, instead of having tons of "features". Dopplr is part of a larger service called the "Internet", as Dave Winer described it for Twitter, it's a "coral reef" on which one can plug lots of other services. For example, when Julian asked Matt about the past locations, Matt said another services could provide that but Dopplr only focuses on the future. The point of Dopplr is to create a model of what's going on (for instance sparklines of people's location as one can see below or timelines between you and a friend) and the service allows you to change one's mind about our model of the future.

(Sparkline designed by Matt Biddulph)

I also enjoyed a lot Jyri Engeström (Microblogging: tiny social objects ad the future of participatory media) and Jed Berk's work but I was so tired after my talk that I could not take more notes.