The IHT reports on the story of a new service in Japan that allows to "point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at". The new service is m...
Toewie: Puppet game controller
Toewie by Jelle Husson (postgraduate in eMedia in Belgium) Toewie is about a 3d game for pre-school children. Most 3d games are being navigated by means of the arrow keys for movement, and the mouse for looking/direction. Because this is quite complicated, especially for very young children, Toewie...
Positioning and seamful design
Åsa Rudström, Kristina Höök and Martin Svensson (2005). Social positioning: Designing the Seams between Social, Physical and Digital Space. In 1st International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, at HCII 2005, 24-27 July 2005, Las Vegas, USA., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates The pap...
Awareness and Interruptions
Dabbish, L., Kraut, R. (2004). Controlling Interruptions: Awareness Displays and Social Motivation for Coordination, in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2004, ACM Press: Chicago, IL. p. 182-191. The paper addresses the notion of awareness with an intere...
Flip Frogs
Flip Frogs is a curious project from 2004 by Meridith Pingree: rainbow ribbon-wire, green LEDs, MDF, conductive nickel paint, backflipping plastic frogs, aluminum foi. An image of water in conductive paint covers the surface of the shelf. Every painted line feeds into one of the strands of rainbow ...
"The Networked City", a presentation by Manuel Castells
Some notes from "The Networked City: Information and communication technologies, spatial structure, and urban dynamics", a presentation by Manuel Castells at EPFL today. He addressed the transformation of urban/spatial forms due to IT and transportations systems. The presentations was in french, ...
Availabot: tangible resence awareness via USB
Availabot is a tangible presence awareness device designed by Schulze and Webb: Availabot is a physical representation of presence in Instant Messenger applications. Availabot plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away. I...
The Orbital Browser:networked services management
Trevor Smith describes a new sort of user interface called the "Orbital Browser" meant to enable users to "discover networked services, select a subset of them, connect them, and finally control them in an appropriate manner". This is about "service composition", an interesting metaphor that would ...
Media Space Reflecting on 20 Years workshop at CSCW 2006
What happends to "media space" when you have ubiquitous cell-phone cameras, web-cams, iChat, architectural scale displays, the Internet, and globalized work. That's the sort of questions a workshop led by Steve Harrison at CSCW 2006 will try to address. Since the first media spaces were created in ...
Appropriate tangible interactions
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about tangible interactions (because of the wii and certain projects here and there). Wired News also addressed that issue, focusing on some very important questions: But do such physical motion-sensing controllers really signal the beginning of an emerging trend? "...