The 2005 UbiApp Workshop: What Makes Good Application-Led Research? by Richard Sharp and Kasim Rehman, IEEE pervasive computing, Vol. 4, No. 3, July–Sept. 2005 The paper is a summary of a workshop that happened in 2005 at the Ubicomp conference. It deals with the concept of "application-led" resear...
Challenging the NBIC convergence?
Converging science and technology, firm knowledge base and innovation: The case of nanotechnologies in the early 2000's by Eric Avenel, Anne-Violaine Favier, Simon Ma, Vincent Mangematin and Carole Rieu is a very interesting paper that examines nanotechnologies and its convergence potential, i.e. d...
Methodology for public pervasive computing
Public Pervasive Computing: Making the Invisible Visible by Jesper Kjeldskov, Aalborg University and Jeni Paay, IEEE Computer, Vol. 39, No. 9. (2006), pp. 60-65. Through the presentation of a project called "Just-for-Us" (a mobile web service that aims at adapting content to the user's physical and...
The less than 5% of users who download games
Mobile gaming - the troubled teenage years by Stuart Dredge (Receiver #17, end of 2006) offers an interesting perspective on mobile gaming in Europe. First about figures, the authors describes the mobile gaming situations as a teenage troublesome period: "According to industry analyst M:Metrics, 4....
Rem Koolhas on "junkspace"
Some random excerpts of text by Rem Koolhas on "junkspace" that I liked: "Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is essence, the main thing... product of the encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuit...
Dandella and thoughts about awareness+robotics
(via) Dandella by Tan Yong Kai and Priscilla Lui Sik Peng (Singapore). The device is a hand-held GPS tracking system that lights up and physically blends towards the location it is looking for OR another Dandella (synchronized with). "Lost is a common global issue, especially for socially vulnerabl...
Nabaztag and Furby
Feeling that robots and ubiquitous computing are converging to a new type of artifact, filling the environment with instances of these systems is a very curious experience. This is why I bought a Nabaztag last year and a Furby recently. The former is often put in the ubicomp/commnicated objects cat...
Urban "sinkholes" and the habit to fill holes
According to the wikipedia: a sinkhole is: " a natural depression or hole in the surface topography caused by the removal of soil or bedrock, often both, by water. (...) Mechanisms of formation may include the gradual removal of slightly soluble bedrock (such as limestone) by percolating water, the...
Jane McGonigal's vision for a new generation of network games
From Information Week about her Etech talk: "The "ubiquitous games," or "alternate reality games," are part of an overall change in how technology is being evaluated. In the next five years, the criteria used for evaluating personal technology will shift from things like cost and features. Instead,...
HCI in science-fiction
(via Mr. Hand), this compelling paper about Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies by Michael Schmitz have made my day. It essentially surveys different kinds of interaction designs in sci-fi movies ("Neuro technology", Identification, Speech recognition, Intelligent assistants / Avat...