When knitting freaks meet topology mathematicians, the outcome is knitting one-sided surfaces or mathematical knitting pages. Mathematical Knitting seems to be a very lively domain, judging from the variety of examples and methods My favorites are certainly those: first is a klein bottle hat and se...
The "breath mouse": a breath-controlled device
Sometimes when I'm looking at weird game/computer controller, I run across good things. Tonight I found this breath-based controller by David MacKay; it's still a bit rough but it exemplifies the idea. It actually connects lung volume to the mouse y-coordinate More about it in the following paper: ...
EU research project that focuses on "Mobile Entertainment Industry and Culture"
The mGain project is a FP6 EU research project that focuses on "Mobile Entertainment Industry and Culture". What constitutes mobile entertainment? Our approach is inclusive instead of restrictive, including all entertainment delivered through a mobile device, whether it be a mobile phone, a persona...
Cow data and geolocation of a three-legged poodle
Help Jed Berk finding ideas about what to do with peculiar geographical data generated by wherifywireless: Write him there: berk (at) artcenter (dot) edu If you're curious about what jed berk does with animal data, have a look at his project COWdata: This is an ongoing project, begun in 1995. The ...
Qualitative data analysis in CatchBob!
This afternoon, I tried to formalize a bit my current research approach to analyse qualitative data of CatchBob! The point is to benefit from users' annotations (in game) and the interview I conducted after the game (based on a replay of the activity). This leads me to the extraction of different v...
A robot powered with flies
(Via social fiction) When San Francisco is interested in turning dog poo into power, some other folks have designed a robot that does not require batteries or electricity to power itself but instead, it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies. Dr Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team...
SUCKER location based game
SUCKER is a location-based game in the context of the ’Laboratory for Context-dependant Mobile Communication’ (LaCoMoCo). The project is running on PDAs, with a positioning system that use Ekahau but I cannot parse danish so... The game webpage seems to be down. ...
Weather in video-games
Just ran this interesting discussion about the weather in video games. The author, Matt Barton (University of South Florida) worked on this topic for a paper called "How's the Weather?: A Look at Weather and Gaming Environments" (in the "Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space, and Ecology" ...
A buddy finder for large-scale events
Olofsson, S., Carlsson, V. and Sjolander, J. (2006) The friend locator: supporting visitors at large-scale events, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10: 84–89. This paper is about the fact that during large-scale events, people tend to lose each other and a LBS system might support the "friend loc...
An autonomous robotic fish
Less sexy than Aibo but still nifty, this autonomous robotic fisch seems interesting. Designed by Dan Massie, Mike Kirkland, Jen Manda, Ian Strimaitis An autonomous, micro-controlled fish was designed and constructed using sonar to help guide it in swimming. It was predetermined that constructing a...