In the paper, People, Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World, researchers at HP described in 2008 how to support "web presence" for people, place and things. It actually refers to the Cooltown project, which has been conducted 5-6 years ago. Some elements from the paper: "We put web server...
Some differences between physical and digital spaces
In their paper called "Emplacing Experience", the authors compare aspects of space and place in physical and digital gameworlds. They describe different characteristics that show the specificity of digital places: "Players, through the agency of their avatar, may expend considerable time traveling ...
Adam Greenfield at PicNic 2007
Adam Greenfield's talk at Pic Nic was entitled "The City is Here for You to Use: Urban Form and Experience in the Age of Ambient Informatics. His presentation is basically about the implications of ubiquitous computing on the form and experience of the city. After "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubi...
Visualizing the geometry of relative distance
Wegzeit is a project by Dietmar Offenhuber that I found interesting: "Wegzeit is a project about Los Angeles and how it is transformed when brought to relative space. Asking someone in L.A. about the distance between two locations usually prompts a response in minutes. It seems paradoxical that peo...
Video games as research tools in psychology
(cross-posted at Terra Nova) Being a researcher interested in the user experience of interactive technologies, I have always been following how video games are employed as platform to explore certain topics and practices, especially in social sciences/psychology. The use of such kind of platform ha...
Chronotopic visualizations: representing traces of people in spatial environments
Reading the newsletter of the french consulting group Chronos, I ran across a term used by Bruno Marzloff that I found intriguing: the concept of "chronotope" defined in Wikipedia as: "The Russian philologist and literary philosopher M.M. Bakhtin used the term chronotope to designate the spatio-tem...
Spotting high buildings through GPS viz
Reading Stamen's work about cab spots with Eddie Elliott. They actually used the Cabspotting API to produce high-res long-term point maps of San Francisco with cab GPS lcoations. Part of the result description attracted my attention: "downtown buildings are so high and close together that GPS signa...
Virtual space evolution according to Korean developer Jake Song
(cross-posted at Terra Nova) Last month, I had the pleasure to co-organize a small event in Seoul about digital and physical space, and how technologies reshape them. One of the speaker, Jake Song gave an interesting talk about the evolution of "virtual space" in multi-player games. A South Korean ...
Pervasive gaming, laser-games and the "skatepark" model
Last week at PicNic, during the very interesting panel that I participated in, a question from the audience sparked some discussion among us. The attendee slightly complained about the fact that Fabien or myself were a bit too pessimistic about pervasive gaming. Our two presentations, although very...
Questioning the TomTom effect(s)
A quite interesting session at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference: Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect (transferred to me by Fabien). Organized by Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, the session deals aims at questioning the social effects, cultural meanings and poli...