Finnish company Sulake (well known for their Habbo Hotel platform) recently released Mini Friday, a Habbo-like virtual world that runs on mobile phones. What is interesting is that it's rather a research platform, an attempt that gears towards the following direction: Mini Friday is a small researc...
A whole semiotics of heard events
As a follow-up on my earlier post about how human beings experience space by listening, Paul Dourish sent me a very interesting paper that goes even further. It suggests that the aural component goes beyond just the localized issues of timbre and echos from surface materials, but into a whole semio...
Duct tape, embodiment and pervasive gaming
Artificial has a fantastic interview of Susigames about their Edgebomber project. If you're not familar with their work, this interative art/game platform is a system that allows player to use tape, stickers and scissors to create a playground on a wall. It's one of the very relevant project I have...
Mash-up machine
I ran across the Mash Up Machine by Jankenpopp. This apparel seems to be a perfect looking artifact (I like duct tape and buttons). It's actually made of a box with 4 buttons and musical samples. Pressing a button make the box glowing and play one of the musical sample. Check the video here. Why d...
An interview with Adam Greenfield
Regine and I interviewed Adam Greenfield on WMMNA. The interview was about Mr. Greenfield's book "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing", how it has been received, why such a name, what were the implications and how designers should have a voice in the discourse about everyware/ub...
Keeping up with the zeitgeist
On the State of the World 2007 discussion on the WELL, there is a very interesting discussion that started with a question from Jamais Cascio to Bruce Sterling about "what you regularly read to keep up with the zeitgeist". I used to have "sources." I can't say I do that much any more. These days it...
Up in the swiss mountains
I am currently at the CSCL Alpine Rendezvous in the swiss mountains where our labs organized a serie of workshops about computer supported collaboration. Mirweis and I put together a workshop about Mutual Modeling in Collabortiave Tasks, in which we gathered a good crowd of social psychologists, or...
Gaming on digital cameras
Looking for some ideas about gaming on unusual platforms (like projects about ATM), I ran across a post by Ian Bogost about casual game son digital cameras: The Fujifilm Finepix V10 Digital Camera, which is apparently the only digital camera to come with games you can play on its rather large LCD s...
What a news: Neural 'extension cord' developed for brain implants: A "data cable" made from stretched nerve cells could someday help connect computers to the human nervous system. The modified cells should form better connections with human tissue than the metal electrodes currently used for purpos...
"come as you are" VR
Today in a meeting in Grenoble, I was reminded this concept of "come-as-you-are Virtual Reality" described here: In the late 1960s, Myron Krueger, often called "the father of virtual reality," began creating interactive environments in which the user moves without encumbering gear. Krueger's is com...