Some interesting quotes from Ernest Adam's foresight about the future of gaming: "Games that depend on that depend on location or travel? Useful in theme parks, Laser Tag, etc. Not ever going to be a major segment. Compare # of video gamers to # of paintball players.Compare # of video gamers to # o...
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 ...
Striated space
Why do I blog this? I quite like wall textures like this one, as it reminds us how the space that we inhabit is not so smooth. There is a sense of roughness that is exemplified by this picture. At the micro-level, this image represents how a space is not always a repetition of the same small bits....
The tent as HCI
Camping in the digital wilderness: tents and flashlights as interfaces to virtual worlds by Jonathan Green, Holger Schnädelbach, Boriana Koleva, Steve Benford, Tony Pridmore, Karen Medina (CHI 2002). The paper describes a very curious project that propose the use of a projection screen in the shape...
Information Aesthetics Roadmap
Seen at the Visualization Summit last tuesday: It was the poster drawn by the group led by Andrew Vande Moere at the Visualization Summit. This group sketched a kind of roadmap that identifies information aesthetics as an emerging research direction in visualization. Why do I blog this? general cul...
Experience-design trappings
A good read for my daily commute today was this "On the ground running: Lessons from experience design by Adam Greenfield in which he describes the pitfalls and challenges of the "new ecosystem" that underly "experience design" and how to overcome them. Products, such as the iPod, are "no longer an...
Retrofrogging
Reading this interesting account of a session at Supernova07 (no joke please), I ran across this "retrofrogging" term used by Clay Shirky: "There’s also retrofrogging. We had such great copper that we now lag the world in broadband. That was our Minitel." I tried to google the term and nothing else...
'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 informatio...
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 to...
CACM about gaming
No time to parse it yet, but the latest issue of Communications of the ACM is about "creating a science of game". As Michael Zyda points out in the introduction: "Today's game industry will not build a game-based learning infrastructure on its own. It got killed in the early days of edutainment (20...