Pervasive gaming IMO or how a game can pervade the environment: two basic sudoku boards in your plane mealbox: ...
Roles of ethnography in design
Ethnography and Design? by Andy Crabtree and Tom Rodden is an insightful paper written in 2002 about the practical relationship between ethnography and design. The main problem they describe is how to link details accounts of situated activities (provided by ethnography) to the actual design of com...
Ball-Shaped camera and tangible interactions
Fabien, who is at Ubicomp 2007, just sent me this crazy project: TosPom: a ball-shaped camera that takes pictures while playing catch by Izumi Yagi, Mitsuyoshi Kimura, Makiko Nagao and Naohito Okude: "TosPom is a ball-shaped camera that takes pictures while playing catch. When the photographer thro...
Seamful design: showing the accuracy of location predictions
Dearman, D., Varshavsky, A., de Lara, E., Truong, K.N. An Exploration of Location Error Estimation. To appear in the Proceedings of UBICOMP 2007: The 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (September 16-19, Innsbruck, Austria), 2007. The paper deals with location-aware computing and h...
One Wilshire building: when digital is material
Reading this summer "Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies by Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis was a good experience, as the whole book itself is insightful and written exactly in the sort of style I like. It's basically a compendium of stories that may seem odd but whi...
Game settings and privacy
Different type of game require different levels of privacy. On these pictures taken in Seoul: compare the lonely gamer in arcade-game row to the comfy-door-augmented karaoke arcade game. The possibility to close a door surely allow more privacy for shy karaoke players At the same time, read about...
About "virtual recycling"
Ecotron is new feature/device in Habbo Hotel: "The Ecotron is the latest in Furni recycling systems. No longer will you have to delete your room, turn off the computer or dump your unwanted Furni on a friend. Now you can throw it all into the Ecotron and get some brand new Furni back! Open the cata...
MMO communication tools
Game Career Guide reports on Nick Andrew Quagliara's masters thesis about communication in MMOs. The research conducted here basically addressed the following issues: "Do these chat communication interfaces support the types of interactions that users desire?" and "do the current interfaces, which ...
Weather forecasts maps and otherness
Today's column by Tyler Brulé in IHT tackles an intriguing issue: the one of map used in weather forecasts: " In the early '90s, it struck me as odd that British broadcasters never bothered to inform viewers about the weather across the Channel. (...) The pinballing around Europe later revealed tha...
Ubiquitous computing normative future and sci-fi
Stone, A.R. (1991). Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? In Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 81-118. An excerpt I like from this paper: "Neuromancer reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas's powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and ...