The last issue of academic journal Game and Culture is focused on World of Warcraft. Lots of good papers here, for instance: Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore Building an MMO With Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft Abstract: World of Warcraft (WoW) is...
Pareidolia and design
Some definitions on the concept of pareidolia (a cousin of apophenia): "Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable" (Explore Dictionary of Psychology) "Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception...
Arrows indicating to press on missing buttons
Spotted in "Fashion Island", Newport beach (with Riad and Emmanuel): ...Arrows indicating to press on missing buttons... a really compelling metaphor of the place... self-revealing when you think of the area's atmosphere! ...
Palimpsest blogject
It's been a while that Wil is playing with the blogject idea and I haven't found time to explain what he is doing. He recently worked out this interesting prototype: This blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it...
About presence in VR
Being There Together and the Future of Connected Presence by Ralph Schroeder, Presence, Vol. 15, No. 4, Pages 438-454, 2006. The paper is about presence in virtual environment, a very broad topic. But I am less interested in presence per se than in some of the elements that contribute to this exper...
Seminar at Nokia Design
I was today participating in a Nokia Design meeting, presenting some stuff at their "IN&Out speaker series" in Topanga (California). My presentation (pdf slides, 6.2Mb) was about tangible interfaces and some potential misconceptions drawn from user experience research, concepts I found pertinent an...
Sony PS3 and geospatial databases
Excerpts from Ken Kutaragi's PS3 keynote at the Tokyo Game Show (taken from joystiq): "For us in the entertainment industry the other interesting thing for us is the map database ... including map data and dimensions of buildings and so on. You can use the joystiq to fly through the landscape creat...
Mexican standoff
Just ran across this concept (defintion by Urban Dictionnary): The awkward scenario where one person goes to kiss another on the cheek and the recipient moves for the mouth (or vice versa). This results in a repeated back and forth movement where both parties keep moving to rectify their facial pos...
Handheld printer
Via Mr. Watson, this very curious Handheld printers: The printer has the length of a normal ball-point pen while its width and height are more or less equivalent to the width of a modern mobile phone. The total volume is less than 300 c.c. and weights around 350 grams. This first version of PrintBr...
Hand gesture interface for Google Earth
Atlas Gloves is a "DIY hand gesture interface for Google Earth": Atlas Gloves is a DIY physical interface for controlling 3D mapping applications like Google Earth. The user interface is a pair of illuminating gloves that can be used to track intuitive hand gestures like grabbing, pulling, reaching...