"Mobile 3D" projects

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Currently working on a project about the user experience of 3D on mobile displays, I am fascinated by these two projects that came up in a discussion with Etienne yesterday:

Hasbro MY3D Viewer:

"Designed specifically for iPhone and iPod touch, the MY3D Viewer lets you experience 3D games and 360-degree entertainment in a brand new way. Simply insert your device into the viewer to enjoy a variety of 3D and 360-degree-enhanced apps, many of which are free from the App Store. The MY3D Viewer includes four adapter trays sized to fit iPhone and iPod touch devices. Your device quickly snaps in and out--no wires or batteries are required."

Sensor Girl, an old stereoscope customized for iPhones by Dominique Cunin. This project has been shown at Mode:Demo (Lift Experience 2010):

"SensorGirl is an artistic experimental application that aims to question the new interactive relationship a user can have with represented objects on nowadays mobile screens. Embedded sensors like accelerometers and gyroscope are opening new modalities of interaction with images : the user’s hand changes the screen physical orientation which can be used to interact with the represented object without any third party device. The screen itself and its relative state can then be directly connected to an object image, linking both in a new way that common controllers like mouse or joysticks don’t permit on usual, non-mobile screens."

Why do I blog this? I'm accumulating examples of curious experiments like this for a project and wonder about people's reactions, the design possibilities and the value of 3D in mobile context.

Taxonomy, ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies

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"These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that from a long way off look like flies."

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” Why do I blog this? Simply because it's a fascinating quote for a Sunday afternoon. Working on a course about qualitative analysis, it's intriguing to have such example of taxonomy.

ENDCOMMERCIAL® / Reading the City

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ENDCOMMERCIAL® / Reading the City is a book that Chris Woebken recommended few weeks ago via a quick exchange of 140-character messages. It's a fascinating object that is perhaps 102% in line with my interests (urban artifacts, classification, aesthetics).

This book is basically a compilation of pictures photographed by Florian Böhm, Luca Pizzaroni, Wolfgang Scheppe and published by Hatje Cantz Publishers. It is based on a exhibit located in Berlin back in 2002 and features an extensive exploration of New York City. The authors took this environment as a sort of generic city from which they could highlight certain aspects. Which was definitely the purpose of the authors, as they say, "it is about the represented not the representation" and their inspiration lies both in "scientific and ethnological photography and Claude Levi-Strauss" and "the device itself: the product line of electronic consumer goods. Digital cameras by japanese makers. Nikon, Canon, Sony".

Why do I blog this? What I found interesting in this work is that it's definitely more than a simple visual encyclopedia:

" I hope it can change your sensibility for your surrounding, a change in perception of the ordinary, a shifted view on something that has become invisible by its omnipresence. The images are arranges in a way that they have an effect on you, wake you up, make you see things for example reveal social and economic patterns that shape the modern urban enviroment, understand things in their context."

The way they sorted the picture is also interesting. Based on an inductive approach, they sorted the different themes and they created various "periodic tables" to define similarities and categories:

"WS: The quality of the diagrams is that of a taxonomy. A taxonomical order systemizes phenomenons due to analogies and similarities judging elements of their appearance. while analyzing and researching our archive we found similarities, types of figures, strange coincidences. after identifying these they were transformed in themes and subjects for new shootings and field researches. new material was collected to verify or falsify categories of the taxonomy.

FB: The Diagram was extracted from the material after screening and structuring the image archives into themes, not the other way around. In this way it is rather an empiric investigation with a result that could have not been anticipated fully in the beginning. The material reveals many aspects, sociological, political, economic, urbanistic etc... But we didn't plan for it to be anything."

As a final word, one of the best quote from the author about this work is certainly: "it is impossible to walk down the street without seeing social qualities in objects". This is clearly what this book depicts.

Funfaircomp: game interfaces

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Some examples of game interfaces encountered at a fun fair in Nantes last week:

Why do I blog this? Fun fair and amusement park offer peculiar kinds of constraints for interaction design: noisy environment, presence of a crowd, cash-oriented money, balancing success and failure with regards to the reward at stake (toys, etc.) The crafting of sound user experience in this context is intriguing and lead to solutions as shown above.

It would be good to spend some time and observe more people's reactions when using these huge buttons and joysticks. That being said, fun fair interfaces and amusement parks experiences seems to be a forgotten realm in human-computer interaction. Apart from research about amusement rides, I haven't seen may occurrences of such endeavor. That can be an interesting lead for future projects.

Yuichi Yokoyama about the future

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A strikingly interesting author, japanese manga author Yuichi Yokoyama has an interesting perspective on the near future:

"Matiere: Are you interested in Science Fiction?

Yuichi Yokoyama: I was impressed by Tarkovski’s films, Solaris and Stalker and also by Kubrick’s 2001, a Space Odyssey. I also like TV shows about aliens and prehistoric times… If one sees Sci-Fi in my stories, that doesn’t bother me, but it’s not specifically my intention. I’m not trying to write stories that are set in the future, but rather to write stories which are delivered from references to any given epoch or time. If the history of the world had turned out differently from what we know today, men would live according to different sets of values and different aesthetics. The culture of that world would probably demand that people not wear shoes or always cover their heads and never show their true faces. It would be a civilization completely alien to ours. Tomorrow’s world takes root in our present time, and is always connected to it. That’s why it doesn’t interest me to depict the world of the future. Two of my stories, entitled “Dress-Up” and “Travel” show characters with no hair on their heads. And yet these characters are not old men with bald heads. They are young people who shave their hair off. In the civilization portrayed in those two comic strips, that’s the way things go: it’s maybe part of the fashion to pretend to be old. I draw characters whose aesthetics are different from ours."

From Back to the Future 2 to a WIPO patent

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It took 20 years to (finally) see a patent for self-lacing shoes. The Nike prop from Back to the Future 2 has indeed been shown in 1989 (with a non-automatic lacing version released as a collector in 2008).

People interested in rather low-tech solution can also have a look at this arduino-based version with utterly swell strapped micro-controllers and motors to a pair of Jordans.

Why do I blog this? Of course this is old news for the interwebs, but I find it interesting to collect examples of product featured in speculative movies that find their way to real artifact or intermediary artifacts such as patent. It's a good way to trace the evolution of product ideas from a Los Angeles studio to a huge server farm at the World Intellectual Property Organization near my apartment in Geneva. The fact that it took 20 years to see this move is intriguing too.

More game controllers evolution charts

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Working on the game controller project book, we're building various charts of joypad evolution. What's interesting is that we're definitely not the sole persons doing this. Over the recent months, there's been several other relevant visualizations, that I compiled in this blogpost. Obviously, the first that caught my eyes several years ago is the following one by Sock Master:

Then, more recently by incontrol and Steve Cable:

Or these two, focused on game controllers, beyond joypads by Pop chart lab:

I also found this others one, slightly less visual:

Why do I blog this? We try to differentiate our representations, so it's good to see how others are proposing relevant visualizations. In our case, we're creating a family tree for each of the joypad characteristics (d-pad, shape, action buttons). Which, hopefully, will highlight the complexity of the gamepad evolution.

Pixels Per Person: making WiFi networks tangible

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Pixels Per Person by Carina Ow is an inspiring design project that looked at how to give a tangible existence to the public WiFi network in the city of Geneva:

"In images, WiFi connections are usually represented as a series of fluctuating waves derived from signal strength indicators that fall and rise according to the strength of the WiFi connection. This inspired the creation of a system that would not stay static, but would instead be in a state of constant motion. To represent this idea, each installation takes the form of a dynamic OLED surface modelled differently each time depending on the characteristics found on site. Organic LEDs (OLEDs) were specified for surface of the installations because they work both in the light and dark, and can therefore contribute to the spatial quality of the installation site at night. (...) The graphical system is designed as different configurations of these pixels forming pixel images derived from classic Wi-Fi signal motifs. Depending on the total number of users connected to the network, the image will change to reflect the network traffic, i.e. the more users, the more pixels used in the composition of the image. The pixel images morph between themselves in a pre-defined transitional animation."

Why do I blog this? Because of my long-time interest in representation the digital envelope of urban environments. This project is intriguing as it represents WiFi usage and aims to induce a sense of participation and ownership in the users.

Back to school days, course are being prepared

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It's back to school days here, pencils are being sharpened, wireless notebooks being bought... and new courses are being prepared. This year will have a decent share of teaching in various institutions. I am currently preparing some fresh material for the following courses

  • HEAD-Geneva for masters students:
    • "Introduction to interaction design": a year-long 2-hours a week course about the main notion of interaction design (affordance, mental models, design process, direct interaction, usability, interaction styles), the history of the field and the main subdomains (web, mobile, locative media, 3D virtual worlds, networked objects, etc.). It's going to be a mix of lectures, discussions and practical exercises.
    • "Usage-Oriented Design": a semester-based course about how to apply field investigation in design. The emphasis will be made on data collecting techniques and how to turn the results into sound design. This one will be a mix of short lectures and studio-based activities.
  • ENSCI, for undergraduate students:
    • "Introduction to design research: from usage to design" with Raphael Grignani (Method, SF): a week-long workshop about how to apply field investigation in design, in November.
    • "Usage-Oriented Design: from usage to prototyping" with Yves Rinato (Intactile design) in March 2012, which will also be a week-long workshop about the articulation between field investigation and design prototpying.
  • Ecole Gobelins Annecy, for masters students:
    • Bottom-up innovation and foresight: a three-days workshop about diffusion of innovation theories and foresight methodologies. This course is based on both lectures and workshop-based activities.
  • EPFL, Lausanne, for masters students (yes I'm back teaching at my Alma Mater):
    • "A creative toolbox for innovation" with Daniel Sciboz. The year-long weekly 3 hours course will be an overview of design processes, approaches and tactics. From prototyping to sketching, design ethnography and storyboarding. This course is based on both lectures, studio-based activities and a personal project by the students.

And of course there will be more punctual interventions in other places about similar topics.

Cyberpunk and creolization

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Read in No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration by Patrick Novotny: Why do I blog this? Collecting material about cyberpunk for an upcoming interview about the connections between science-fiction and interaction design. The creolization meme seems important but, for some reasons, I don't know (yet!) how to articulate its role. More material needed to understand the implications.

Feeling interactivity in a video-game

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An excerpt from Pilgrim in a microworld found in Rules of play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman:

"I'd catch myself turning my chair into a more en face position vis-à-vis the TV. An obvious delusion. Maybe I could rest one elbow on the set to help feel the angle of my look and deepen a sense of the scale of things. See it from this side and that; see the invisible backside of things through an imaginary bodily tour of the object. Nonsense!  If only I could feel the impact of the ball on the paddle, that would certainly help, would give me a tactile marker, stamping the gesture's places into a palpable little signature, so I'd feel each destination being achieved and not just witness the consequences of a connect shot. Nonsense!

Nonsense, just your eyes way up top, to be somehow fixed on things in ways that can't feel them fixing, then this silent smooth little plastic knob down there, neither near nor far away, but in an untouchable world without dimension. And in between all three nodes of the interface, there is nothing but a theory of electricity. So fluid, to have to write your signature with precise consistency in size within the strict bounds of a two and three sevenths of an inch of space, say, while the pen somehow never makes contact with the paper. There's nothing much to hold on to, not enough heft in this  knob so your hands can feel the extent of very minor movements, no depth to things you can use to anchor a sense of your own solidity."

Why do I blog this? This is an enlightening account of playing a video-game from the user's point of view.

Urban theories embedded in cyberpunk stories

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For people interested in the relationship between Science-Fiction and the urban environment, Cyberpunk Cities Science Fiction Meets Urban Theory by Carl Abott is certainly a good resource. (A picture of a Shadowrun sourcebook that I ran across in Denmark this week)

The paper argues that cyberpunk culture embedded certain notions ("global cities", cities as communication system, the importance of Los Angeles school of urban studies). It also highlights how urban planners can "understand the influence of a range of social theories on public understanding of planning issues".

The whole paper is of interest but I was struck by this excerpt:

"Reading and discussing science fiction, whether cyberpunk novels or work from other thematic streams, will not help a planning student learn how to model transportation demand or a practitioner to write up findings on a conditional use application. Science fiction does, however, have the capacity to engage our imagination in thinking about present problems and future challenges, a heuristic function that derives from its willingness to take economic, social, and cultural patterns a step beyond their common sense extensions.

Because the cyberpunk subgenre draws on ideas that ascribe power to technological change and global capitalism as all-encompassing forces, it offers relatively little direct guidance for planners. However, it does suggest the need for flexibility, for seeing plans as reflexive processes intended as frameworks for responding to inherent instability. It also suggests the value of creating opportunities for spontaneous and informal social institutions by loosening building codes, preserving low-rent commercial spaces, and making information infrastructures as ubiquitous and cheap as possible."

Why do I blog this? Because of recent work about design fiction and urban futures. Moreover, it's important to think about the excerpt above beyond urban contexts (by replacing "planning" by other forms of social interventions).

The graphing calculator plateau

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This piece in The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal deals with an interesting case in technological evolution: the stabilization of a technical objects, which in this case in the so-called graphing calculator.

The column wonders about the reasons why graphing calculators such as TI-83 did not change that much, unlike teenager gadgets. Some explanations the article surface:

"First, for high school level math classes, the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus are essentially perfect. After all, the *material* hasn't changed (much), so if the calculators were good enough for us 10 or 15 years ago, they are still good enough to solve the math problems.

Second, standardized test companies only allow a certain range of calculators to be used. If they got too powerful or complex looking (seriously, the aesthetic is part of it), they could be banned, hurting their sales. Horizontally oriented calculators have been banned by the SAT, even if they have near identical functionality to vertically oriented models. 

Third, and this is probably most important, teachers tend to recommend a particular calculator or set of calculators, and the more of their students using the same tool, the easier it is to teach them. That puts a drag on the change in tools because the technological system in which they are deployed militates against rapid change"

Which leads the author to the following conclusion:

" Some technologies don't change all that quickly because we don't need them to. Much as we like to tell the story of The World Changing So Fast, most of it doesn't. Look at cars or power plants or watches or power strips or paper clips. The changes are in the details, and they come slowly. But that's ok. More change isn't necessarily better."

Why do I blog this? An interesting example of a technical object that seemed to reach a certain plateau. An example to keep up my sleeve for my course about interaction design and technological evolution.

User study about check-in usage in Foursquare

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Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-Sharing Using Foursquare by Cramer, Rost and Holmquist is an interesting paper presented at Mobile HCI2011. It's basically a user studies of Foursquare usage, based on in-depth interviews and 47 survey responses, about emerging social practices surrounding location-sharing. Some excerpts I found relevant to my own research in location-based services:

"Users appear to share with both smaller and much larger audiences than imagined. Sharing is sometimes only a byproduct, with ‘check-ins for me’, checking in for rewards, gaming and becoming the mayor, points and badges, life-logging, diversion and voyeuristic uses unimagined in most of the previous location-sharing systems research. A check-in is not always motivated through the desire to ‘perform’ or enhance ones self- presentation. However, performative aspects as in do appear to play a large role in shaping interactions. The roles of spectators and performers are reflected in our participants’ attitudes toward check-ins; and awareness of these roles affects their behavior.

We saw users adapt their check-ins to norms of what they perceive as worthwhile check-ins - and that they to a certain extent expect others to do the same. Many participants checked in at what they perceived as more interesting places and in some cases tried to minimize annoyance to others that may result from check-ins that they thought would appear uninteresting. Both the co-present audience observing the physical act of checking-in and the distant audience that (may) see the resulting check-in is considered. We also see the service, and its ’super users’, sometimes serve as an (disapproving) audience and not only a system to be operated. "

Why do I blog this? These results echo with a similar study we conducted internally last year. What I find relevant in understanding the usage of check-in is simply that I became an important alternative to automatic detection of users' location. On this very topic, the paper conclusion is worthwhile as it describe the the intrinsically rich value of check-ins and their implications for contextual data collected by sensors:

"our results represent a major shift in the use and perception of location-sharing services. While it may seem that the check-in’s introduction mainly addresses technical issues (including limited battery life and localization limitations), it actually gives the user new ways to express themselves, while at the same time mitigating problematic issues such as privacy. More speculatively looking to the future, our results perhaps may turn out to hold not just for location sharing, but for all kinds of mobile systems that sense and report a user’s context. While many previous user-adaptive mobile systems have relied on automatic and continuous detection and presentation of the user’s state, future users will be used to the social and performative model that foursquare and other check-in based systems represent. Rather than be constantly tracked, users will selectively share their sensor data, be it physiological readings, locations, activity sensors, orsomething else. "

The promise of locative media seems to remain just that: a promise

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Read in the "Rise and Fall of New Media" by Lauren Cornell and Kazys Varnelis:
Locative media remained the stuff of demos and art-technology festivals until 2008 when Apple released the GPS-enabled iPhone 3G. Paradoxically, the mass realization of locative media seems to have taken the wind out of its sails as an art form. Although courses on writing apps proliferate in art and architecture programmes, the promise of locative media seems to remain just that: a promise, its transformational ambitions forever enshrined in William Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), a novel which, tellingly, was set not in the future but in the recent past.

Why do I blog this? The quote echoes with my feeling and it's the second time this week that I encounter such comment about locative media. I actually don't know what it means about the use of this technology but I guess we'll see pretty soon how users repurpose such devices and services to their own context and interests.

Filming, from the object point of view

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This fellow, encountered at Monument Valley, AZ two week ago, took plenty of time to install this little camera on his huge SUV, a somewhat robotic eye... (or, more likely, a proxy to capture souvenirs).

A brief chat with him allowed me to understand that he wanted to get an exhaustive view in the park. This led me to think about objects' viewpoint: the increasing use of this kind of camera (on bike and snowboard more generally) indeed enable to capture visual elements from a very specific angle. The results can be both dramatic or crappy but it's clearly curious to see the sort of traces produced.

Why do I blog this? This feature actually makes me think about robot perception, or how digitally-enabled artifact can perceive their environment. Of course, in this case, this is only a car with a camera... but I can't help thinking that this big robotic eye has a curious effect on observers. Perhaps it leads to this "human-robot intersubjectivities", the ‘signs of life’ that are exhibited by robots and that people perceive and respond to.