Project Ambient is a compilation of UC Irvine grad school projects. It's focused on the design of ambient display that would go beyond the dichotomy of peripheral and focal using the "foveal" meaphor": embedding interactions physically in space. One of the project I like in this list is SignalPlay ...
Sad Interface
Bad interface? Upset user(s)? Low-tech design? Wrong user context modeling? ...
Googleplex space redesign
Metropolis last issue has a very inspiring description of how New York workplace consultant DEGW and the L.A.-based design firm Clive Wilkinson Architects reexamined and redesigned the Googleplex. The article also describes how Google mix of openness and control is their office space. Page and Brin...
Cititag field study
Yanna Vogiazou, Bas Raijmakers, Erik Geelhoed, Josephine Reid, Marc Eisenstadt, (2006) Design for emergence: experiments with a mixed reality urban playground game. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol.10, 1, Springer This paper reports a field study of Cititag, a wireless location-based multipla...
Science 2.0 examples
OpenWetWare ("an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering") has a very nice page about ideas concerning "Science2.0". Some existing examples: - Regularly scheduled printing of journal issues -...
The Economist about life hacks
The Economist about "life hacking" (tricks or hacks to get things done, as described by Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann). I already mentioned that here, here are the tricks The Economist mentions: • Slow down your e-mail: Set your e-mail program to fetch new messages every 15 minutes or every hour, ...
Physical visualization bubbles
Seen this week-end in Geneva at the "Fête de la Musique" (a big gig in which there are music bands everywhere in the city). Like last year, the organizers adopted the following "bubble visualization" system to show directly on the street where stuff happens. Little bubbles are located in-between ar...
Food recognition through chewing sounds analysis
It is now possible to detect who is eating what by analyzing the sound of mastication. Researchers from the Wearable Group at ETHZ (Zürich) developed an automatic dietary monitoring system and demonstrated that sound from the user’s mouth can be used to detect that he/she is eating. As described in...
Google earth + sketch-up (2)
Tim O'Reilly posted his thoughts about the added value for Google of having bought Sketch-Up (the 3D modeling tool): Google Maps has more public reach, but it seems to me that Google Earth will ultimately emerge as the real platform play. What's particularly interesting is how much activity there i...
Gestural behavior in virtual reality and physical space
With the now overlapping on-line persona and our presence in the physical world, lots of questions concerning the connections between both worlds remains unanswered. This is the research issue addressed by the Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory at Stanford University. Devsource has a good overvie...