According to the Urban Dictionnary, a phantom ring is: Term used to describe when someone thinks they hear their cell-phone ringing or feel it vibrating in their pocket when it's actually not. "Excuse me a sec... aw sorry, it was a phantom ring." or "Yes! Finally she called me back *reaches in pock...
"Superimposed, intertwined and hybridised" layers
A good quote that I found in a paper by Karen Martin: Now they [architects] must contemplate electronically augmented, reconfigurable, virtual bodies that can sense and act at a distance but that also remain partially anchored in their immediate surroundings...Increasingly the architectures of phys...
Technologies for pervasive gaming
Among the last deliverable of the iPerg project, I found this very interesting presentation by Staffan Bjork entitled Using the limits of technology (5Mb, .ppt) that gives a very good overview of the technologies available to deploy pervasive games. He present SMS, bluetooth, GPS, RFID tags with in...
"Big games" and environmental space
Parsing tons of papers, articles, documents and pdf that I accumulated in the last few months, I ran across this article in Vodafone's Receiver: Big Games and the porous border between the real and the mediated by Frank Lantz. In this short piece, the author describes what he means by "big games"...
Affective computing for laptops?
I am not a huge follower of the affective computing trend, but once in a while I read stuff about it, just to keep me updated about progress in that area. There is a piece in the Christian Science monitor entitled What if your laptop knew how you felt?, which deals with this issue. Some parts I fou...
sorta look like Bitman
Spotted this morning on a french railway station in remote small town: Why do I blog this? 1) looks like Bitman 2) it's gorgeous, the cables are intriguing, going form the ground to this intriguing flashing character (meant to prevent you that a train is arriving) ...
IHT on location-awareness
A good read in the IHT today: Wireless: Can mobile phones give you 'presence?' by Thomas Crampton is an article about mobile presence and location awareness. Though this topic received a fair amount of work in HCI research (my PhD diss is about that very topic), it is now more and more common to se...
Map on street plate
Wandering around in the street of Paris last thursday, I ran across this terrific street plate: Why do I blog this? I found interesting the usage of the street plate as a way to create new affordances such as a direction map. Judging from the picture, there is already a street plate in the backgrou...
Living buildings
In The Economist this week, there is an article about “Responsive” buildings" capable of changing shape andresponding to their users' needs, namely how architecture can be thought as "living systems rather than static buildings". Some excerpts I found interesting: What woudl that look like? Houses,...
ITP projects worth to have a look at
Two interesting projects from the ITP (thanks regine!): On one hand, MoPres: Sense and contribute to the ghosty presences around you by Jane Oh, Alex Bisceglie (see also their website): MoPres brings out the risidual presence of the people who occupied your current location. It is a geotagging proj...