The change of seasons in Animal Crossing (Nintendo DS) always struck me as an interesting example of digital/physical interconnection but there is a now a leap forward described in TR: "Electronic Arts's new sports game will have a novel level of realism: live weather that affects play. (...) With ...
Lewis Caroll, blank maps and geoware
"He had brought a large map representing the sea,Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. "What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and th...
Gestural interface for TV
The rush towards gesture-based interface seems to be a new trend, as shown by this gesture-control for regular TV designed by Australian engineers Dr Prashan Premaratne and Quang Nguye. What seems to change here is the fact that the concurrency problem is taken into account: "Crucially for anyone ...
Augmented tabletop with RFID
Browsing some pdf I have left on my desktop, I ran across this paper by Steve Hinske and Marc Langheinrich entitled An RFID-based Infrastructure for Automatically Determining the Position and Orientation of Game Objects in Tabletop Games (presented at Pergames 2007). It interestingly describes how ...
Street art complexity
The increasing complexity of street art... now representing organs and weird representations of objects: Seen in Geneva (Switzerland) and Torino (Italy) ...
Talk in Torino
Currently in Torino, where I gave a talk yesterday organized by Experientia and the Order of Architects of the Province of Turin. My talk "Designing a new ecology of mixed digital and physical environments" was a critical overview of ubiquitous computing (slides as a pdf) based on current research ...
Paul Saffo's tools and hints about forecast
The last issue of Harvard Business Review features an insightful article by Paul Saffo about efficient forecast. Although the title refers to "6 rules" for efficient forecast, the article actually provides the reader with two "thinking tools" and a set of highly relevant heuristics about how do for...
200 traditional games for 500 DS software titles
Some excerpts from the WSJ about the Nintendo DS (by Yukari Iwatani Kane): "Behind the fastest-selling portable videogame player in Japan is an unusual shift in the culture of gadgets: People are clamoring for it not just for games, but also to keep a household budget, play the guitar, and study th...
Judith Donath on "signals"
Signals, Truth, Design is the upcoming book of Judith Donath which deals with the social dynamics of the "mediated world" (i.e. email, forums and other communication supported by the Internet) and how to design it. To do so, the author use the "signaling theory" as a framework to describe how: "mos...
Digital/Physical fusing
Mark Baard in Boston.com wrote a short piece about how certain artifacts aim at fusing digital environments and physical activities. It basically gives an account of the "Virtual Worlds: Where Business, Society, Technology & Policy Converge" conference. "Second Lifers wearing the gadgets will be ab...