the age has a good article about John Buchanan (professor from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Centre in Adelaide). Some excerpts I found interesting here: "The video game industry has reached a point where its success is strangling innovation within the field. Developing games is now a ...
Telephone affordance
When there is no clear physical affordance... a metaphor can be useful: (Spotted in Zurich today) ...
AOL dataset plots
Some folks already plotted stuff coming form the super-quickly-available-and-vanished AOL datasets. See for instance u500k.erinye.com, who calculated various indexes and plotted some data (below is one of them that I picked up randomly). If you're one of the 10,000 users, this is a glimpse of your ...
Kevin Kelly on "street use"
Following William Gibson's quote, Kevin Kelly now has a blogpage about "Street use": This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versi...
Interactive fiction programming language
According to the Wikipedia, Inform is: Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. In 2006, Graham released version 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a ...
Pet collar with smart sensor and locative technology
Via petistic, this incredible new location-based application: Float-A-Pet by Jed Berk, which is an illuminated inflatable pet collar with smart sensor and locative technology. The collar serves to support two main situations. First, the passive system is used to recognize where your pet is located...
Location awareness and rendezvousing
Dearman, D., Hawkey, K. and Inkpen, K.M. Rendezvousing with location-aware devices: Enhancing social coordination. Interacting with Computers 17, 5 (2005), 542-566. A very interesting paper directly connected to my current research about the influence of location-awareness on collaboration. It exam...
Gary Gigax, RPG and the Web
In a recent blogpost, Charlie Stross - the american sci-fi writer - described the main thread of his next novel. Supposed to be set in 12 years ahead, the story will deal with how "existing technological trends (pervasive wireless networking, ubiquitous location services, and the uptake of virtual ...
Stairway to nothing
A curious assemblage between two buildings close to my appartment: Why do I blog this? I find those Chaotic Escher-ian stairs that lead to nothing quite intriguing. It reminds me how architecture could afford curious behavior: if this was an interface, what would it afford? ...
How unstable coordinates can be
You Are Here: Museu (MACBA, Barcelona; 1995) by Laura Kurgan is a very relevant (and early) project about locative media that I ran across recently; via Alex Terzich's contribution to the book "Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories", (Univ Minnesota Design Institute). ...