The last issue of Communication of the ACM is about "entertainment networking". One of the paper is interestingly dealing with the design of networked games to support users located around the world. As described by Cormac J. Sreenan and Kobus van der Merwe in their introduction: Jeremy Brun et al....
Ian Haig's brain tumour helmets
I have to admit that I am a great fan of project about visualizing electromagnetic waves. That's why I like Ian Haig's Brain Tumour Helmets with microwave: Exploreing the impact of microwaves and electromagnetic energy and their role in producing brain tumors as a form of body mutation, as in techn...
Wandering objects down the street
This week, there was a very cute article in a swiss newspaper about left things on the streets of Geneva. Entitled "Le temps de survie des objets errants" ("The time of wandering objects"), this article by Laurent Wolf details the author's experience of leaving objects down his street. Certains obj...
BallBot: a mobile robot that has only a single spherical wheel.
Just stumbled across the Ballbot (developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers led by Professor Ralph Hollis): a battery-operated omnidirectional robot that moves by balancing dynamically on a single urethane-coated metal sphere: Significant insights will be gained from this research toward ...
Creating a culture of design research
I recently read "Design Research: Methods and Perspectives" (Brenda Laurel, Peter Lunenfeld, Eds.). One of the chapter that I found relevant for my work is the one about Creating a Culture of Design Research by Eric Zimmerman. The author describes some of the strategies they took at the game...
Towards LIFT07
Here we go! the LIFT07 website has been released! Some more information on the blog. In sum: Join us next February to hear talks about the Web (Stephanie Hannon of Google, Pierre Chappaz, Sampo Karjalainen of Habbo Hotel, Lee Bryant, Colin Henderson or Daniel Kaplan), ubiquitous computing an...
A generic job title, such as "product manager."
An article in the Washington Post about Google says: Google employees are encouraged to propose wild, ambitious ideas often. Supervisors assign small teams to see if the ideas work. Nearly everyone at Google carries a generic job title, such as "product manager." ...
Processing power versus Soul
Last saturday, I had my weekly share of city flanerie (with a digicam) in Lyon, France. I stumbled across weird stuff. Among others, there was this poster: It says: My brain is too intelligent for me Auction! Sell brain: - good setting - 15/3 full - accessories not included - slightly overheating ...
User's perceptions of visual and arphid tags
User Perceptions on Mobile Interaction with Visual and RFID Tags by Sara Belt (University of Oulu, Finland), Dan Greenblatt, Jonna Häkkilä (Nokia Multimedia, Finland), Kaj Mäkelä (Nokia Research Center, Finland). This paper has been presented at the workshop "Mobile Interaction with the Real World ...
Death switch to pretend you are not dead has become an art form
In the last issue of Nature, David Eagleman wrote a good paper about "death switches". According to Wikipedia, a death switch is: "an automated program by which a computer regularly probes a subscriber. The subscriber is required to make a response -- consisting of logging with a secret passwo...