Not that I am really interested by research&dev about spam filtering, but this American Scientist article by Brian Hayes is quite interesting from a cultural point of view. It basically describes spam as a social and economic phenomenon rather than a technological one and take an an immunological m...
The near future of gaming
Some rough issue about the near future of gaming, prepared for a workshop for a client: With regards to the notion of gaming, the video game market/industry is COMPLICATED - Because the notion of “games” is expanding from game console/computer games/portable games to serious gaming (e.g. simulation...
The recombinant infrastructural spaces that invisibly underpin cybercities
Graham, S. (2004): Excavating the Material Geographies of Cybercities, In Graham, S. (ed.) The Cybercities Reader, Chapter 18, Routledge, London. This chapter addresses the "material geographies of telecommunications hardware and equipment" built in the ICT boom of the late 90s showing how the so-c...
Finger-based puppets
Are those examples of the future of gaming? The juxtaposition of a visual code widgets for marker-based interaction and these finger puppets seen on the market in Geneva might appear absolutely odd and coming out of from the blue. Yet, there are some intriguing opportunities to use a combination ...
Granularity of location
Reading some material (.ppt!) about the Mogi game, I ran across this very interesting slide by Benjamin Joffe: The picture basically shows different digital maps, with diverse levels of granularity, from the cluttered to the simple. Why do I blog this? because I find it very relevant to the issue ...
Robot-Ubiquitous Computing convergence/boundary objects
Talking about the convergence between robots and ubiquitous computing artifacts, I started to list some of the projects that reflect this trend. I know some aspects of certain are not robots or ubicomp but still. Maybe they are sort of boundary objects that we don't name yet: Nabaztag by Violet, th...
TRACKING CAPABLE KIDS
A bit I ran across this morning: Tracking Capable Kids, a project on the Children’s Activities, Perception and Behaviour in the Local Environment from UCL’s Centre for Transport Studies (CTS), supported by CASA, the Bartlett School of Planning, and the Department of Psychology. "the project focused...
Is ubicomp already here?
Working on my talk for Frontiers in Interaction, I was wondering about a question I might address, which is "Is ubiquitous computing already here?" There are different options here to answer this question. At first glance, one might say "no" because as we do not see flying cars, super fancy fridges...
The dialectics between abstract invisibility and concrete visibility of IT
The Digital Invisibility of Broadband and its Representation in the Modern City by Peter Dobers, Paper presented at 97th AAG Annual Meeting, Session "The Invisible City", February 27 - March 3, 2001 in New York, USA. The paper addresses the issue of the concreteness of IT/digitality, especially in ...
"Interactive cities" excerpts
Finally got some time to read "Interactive cities" that was mentioned here a while ago. Some excerpts I found relevant to my work below: Editorial The editorial by Valérie Chatelet gives a good overview of the research questions at stake in urban planning/architecture with regards to ICTs. "What ar...