A colleague sent me this wallpong project (by Adrian Wong and Bhavin Rokad from Cornell University) this morning. It's a pong game played with a lase-tracking system: "The Wall of Pong brings the arcade PONG game to the real world by projecting an image of the pong ball on any flat surface and allo...
Thoughts after the lab retreat
Today was the lab retreat day, a sort-of get-together moment in which we discussed the lab strategy, on-going research projects + pending projects. Given that I work here for one month, it was a good introduction for me to the lab mission as well as what people are doing there. The Media and Design...
Augmented sensory room
Adam Montando just sent me a project he is working on: Visual Voice Pro is an intriguing new product: "Visual Voice Pro will create an immersive, reactive digital playspace. The Visual Voice Pro installation comprises of a sensitive microphone, a computer with a data projector, and custom software ...
Describing a framework, but why?
Currently writing a paper about a framework for "mutual location-awareness" (i.e. the representation of significant others' whereabouts through specific interfaces), I felt the need to reading back some papers about needs of having a "framework". Reading some HCI literature is a good way to find so...
Vanica toilet radio
One of the mysterious encounter of this week in Amsterdam was this truly nice radio mounted on a toilet paper-roll, designed by Vanica. Why toilet+radio? According to Zyra: "Advantages: You are entertained when using the toilet. You learn a lot of snippets of knowledge at random. Learning is autom...
Defensive space in Amsterdam
If you scratch the surface of Amsterdam, you can feel the contrast between the open-ness of transparent window and these signs of defensive space as shown by these pictures. This is not a critique, but there is certainly a relationship between certain people's behavior and the presence of almost i...
Quick and dirty typologies of pet's reactions to video-games
One of the near future laboratory interest concerns what I called "new interaction partners", e.g. the inclusion and participation of pets in the social web. This is why I was very interested in this Joytiq blogpost about pets confused by video games. The author of the blogpost ask people to write ...
Difficulty in 3D perception
A Survey of Design Issues in Spatial Input by Ken Hickley, Randy Pausch, John C. Goble, and Neal Kassell (1994), Proc. ACM UIST'94 Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology, pp. 213-222. Even though the paper is a bit old, it gives a comprehensive summary of the design issues regarding spat...
Left pair of shoes
Left shoes (as well as other kind of clothes) are usual suspects in cities, it's very often that you can encounter them. Gloves are perfect condidates too but it's less intriguing to understand what happen after a person lost his/her gloves than the shoes. What is even more curious is when you hav...
Distributed cognition assumptions
In Distributed Cognition: A Methdological Note, cognitive scientist David Kirsh describes six assumptions that "guides his own research": "1. We act locally and are closely coupled to our local environment (two entities that reciprocally interact) 2. We externalize thought and intention to harness ...