Now it seems that Cosmis Modelz has a website. I already blogged about it here); it's actually a subset of Dassault Systemes (the french company which does Catia, which is also related with their big mothership Dassault the private/military airplane company). In partnership with ZCorp, their motto...
CARPE: Capture, Archival, and Retrieval of Personal Experience
The last issue of IEEE Multimedia is about "Capture, Archival, and Retrieval of Personal Experience", which the authors refer to as "CARPE" (sounds fishy in french). What stroke me as the most interesting part is the introduction: The human preoccupation with capturing and archiving memorable exper...
Heading to Cinum
Today, I am heading to Margaux (small french town close to Bordeaux) to attend the CiNum seminar (i.e "Civilisations Numériques" = "Digital Civilizations") to meet up with nice brainiacs: Ci'Num is a 3-year collective and open strategic foresight process which focuses on "Digital civilizations". It...
Test Outfit in WoW
An interesting service for Worlds of Warcraft: TheoryCraft: Theorycraft places everything you need to know about your spells right on their tooltips. Or, if you're using the default action bars, on their buttons. Want to have a row of low rank heals with their heal values on the button? Too easy. N...
Environment XML
Environment XML, a project by Usman Haque: Many projects have been constructed in which objects (or webpages) respond to environmental conditions. Here we provide, instead, the environment that gets responded to: realtime environmental data from our office is released in XML format, with the hope t...
Cheating in multiplayer games
Cheating in multiplayer games is an intriguing issue, and it seems that it begins to receive some attention. See for instance "A Legal Analysis of Cheating in Online Multiplayer Games" by Joel Zetterström. Of course I am less interested by the legal aspects than by the cheating techniques employed ...
Improving the reliability of virtual organisations
According to this news, researchers at the University of Southampton are working on models that will supposedly improve the reliability and trustworthiness of virtual organizations. A virtual organisation is one whose members are geographically apart (usually working via networked computer applicat...
Traditions in HCI
Kuutti, K. Activity theory as a potential framework for Human-Computer Interaction research. (in Nardi, Bonnie A. ed.), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996, 17-44. Even though this paper is a bit old, I found interesting the part...
Robot painters
(Via Laurent): Leonel Moura is an artist interested in robot painters. For instance, there is this Robotic Action Painter: RAP is a new generation of painting robots designed for Museum or long exhibition displays. It is completely autonomous and needs very little assistance and maintenance. RAP...
Interview of BT Futurologist Ian Pearson
ITWales interview of Ian Pearson (BT's "futurologist") raises some interesting issues. Some excerpts about the methods: How do you and your colleagues make your predictions? I track future technologies that are coming over the horizon, so as soon as we learn that somebody is doing some research in ...