Déplacements is an interactive art project by Manuel Braun: “Déplacements” consists of 24 computer case fans forming a rectangle. Each fans is “pixel”, its number of revolutions and the intensity of the light of its LED varies according to the level of gray corresponding to the pixel of reference. ...
Ecological approach to kids palyground
An Ecological Approach to Children’s Playground Props by Susanne Seitinger (Smart Cities Group / MIT Media Lab ), in Proc. of IDC'06 (Tampere, Finland, June 2006). This paper describes an interesting approach about the designing of a new kind of kids' playground. The authors try to bring forward a ...
V-Migo: virtual pet with 1st world connection
V-Migo is a very curious and simple plug-and-play console in which you have both the set-top box connected on your TV AND a mobile version that has a pedometer. The point of this is to raise a dog a la nintendogs; and it seems that the pedometer allows you to measure the distance you travel with yo...
Flea market on saturday
Yet another example of 1st life/2nd life combination: this post-it on a Nintendo DS with a sticker that says "Flea Market on saturday" so that the owner could be reminded that there is actually a flea market in his Animal Crossing game next saturday: ...
HCI: the gap between research and practice
Parush, A. (2006): Bridge the gap: Toward a common ground: practice and research in HCI, interactionsVolume 13, Number 6 (2006), Pages 61-62. This article addresses an important question: the one of the linkage between the study of behavioral, social, organizational, and other phenomena associated ...
Digital patina: Lucent's Live Web Stationery
Lucent's Live Web Stationery is an old project (SIGGRAPH '97) that shows the concept of "virtual aging": a web page ages as if it were a physical piece of paper. It's a project by Dorée Duncan Seligmann and Stephan Vladimir Bugaj. As described in the press release: Live Web Stationery is a demonstr...
u-texture
In the last issue of ACM interactions, Lars Erik Holmquist mentions a very intriguing technology called u-texture: Another laboratory at Keio SFC is run by Professor Hide Tokuda. This lab concentrates on the enabling technology for ubiquitous computing, such as operating systems and networks. One f...
Would-be skyscraper structure
I was in Zürich last week and I ran across this interesting structure: It seems that when a skyscraper is built in Switzerland, the population should first be aware of the expected heights. What is interesting is how they create this impression using this metal structure: a sort-of building gauge....
Ghosts of Liberty
'Ghosts of Liberty' is yet another mobile/pervasive game (played in Boston) and designed by Urban Interactive. Players roam through the lamp-lit alleys of Boston's North End, following a trail of ghostly messages to track a mysterious enemy of the state. A cell phone weaves electronic gameplay and ...
Day of the Figurine evaluation
The last deliverable of the IPERG project is of interest for people into pervasive gaming development/observation. The iperg project is EU funded research consortium that looks at pervasive gaming from a multi-disciplinary angle (since the consortium is composed of researchers from various discipli...