Yesterday in the IHT, there was an interesting article about mobile phone/billboard interactions. JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company behind the project, is that consumers consent to receive alerts about digital advertising as they move through the city. "We are switching from a one-time acti...
Stuffed-doll that reads emails
Regine pointed me on Ubi.ach, by Min Lee, Gilad Lotan, Chunxi Jiang. Close to the Nabaztag, it's a "ubiquitous, personalizable stuffed- doll that is able to read out your emails wirelessly and transmit voice messages" as the designers put it. In search of using calm technology in our project, we ha...
From Artifical Intelligence to Cognitive Computing
There is now a language shift from the previsouly so-called "Artifical Intelligence" to "Cognitive Computing" as attested by the news in Red Herring (an interview of Dharmendra Modha, chair of the Almaden Institute at IBM’s San Jose and IBM’s leader for cognitive computing). Q: Why use the term “co...
JPod by Douglas Coupland
I'm looking forward to read JPod by Douglas Coupland. From Publishers Weekly: Coupland returns, knowingly, to mine the dot-com territory of Microserfs (1996)—this time for slapstick. Young Ethan Jarlewski works long hours as a video-game developer in Vancouver, surfing the Internet for gore sites a...
Metaverse Roadmap: pathways to the 3D web
The Metaverse Roadmap is a ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets, and potential social impacts. What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtu...
A place like a Muscle
I am really enjoying this Muscle NSA project carried out at the Hyperbody Research Group at Delft University. This is a programmable building that can reconfigure itself. For the exhibition Non-Standard Architecture ONL and HRG realized a working prototype of the Trans-ports project, called the MUS...
Special issue of Psychnology about Mobile Media
The Psychnology journal (an online research journal) is going to have a special issue on Mobile media and communication – reconfiguring human experience and social practices? (edited by Ilkka Arminen): Mobile media have already become an essential aspect of everyday life. They alter existing commun...
A bag of wires
Seen in Stanford University yesterday: Is this what happen when a university goes wireless? ...
Workshop about space/place
In the context of the Participatory Design Conference, there is a workshop about place, space, and design (.pdf). While we are "Expanding Boundaries in Design", perhaps we should think for a moment on the significance of boundaries, which are essentially the separation of "this place" from everythi...
Video Games Event in Milano
Today was the games@IULM in Milano (could not be there...), an event co-organized by some good people I follow: The Humanities Lab at IULM University in Milan, Italy, is organizing a digital games conference and exhibition for May 3rd 2006. The event brings together game researchers from Italy, the...