(Update: Thanks cb for telling me that this is really an april joke) Via, this 2005 april joke news (though I did not manage to find any other references about it). As the blog mentions: Researchers from Belgium have been able to extract voices and sounds from a pottery that is 6,500 year old. The ...
A recurrent drawing in Geneva
This drawing is somehow recurrent in Geneva (among lots of others, like this one which found also in Lyon and Barcelona), located in various places; even on a door left on a tree in the city. Just felt it was inspired by the sayajin armor from dbz. ...
Mattel+IDI workshop about new play experiences
Via Putting People First, Play Experiences for the Next Generation is a workshop that has been led by Mattel and the Interaction Design Institute at Ivrea. "Play is a critical and healthy part of growing up and remaining balanced during adulthood. But there are many changes in play today that provo...
3D printings of your WOW avatar
Following on this morning post about the connection between bruce sterling's shaping things and game design, I ran across this very interesting project about doing 3D prints of Second Life or World of Warcraft avatars. It's based on eyebeam's OGLE project OGLE (i.e. OpenGLExtractor) is a software p...
Deferring context-awareness elements to users?
Intelligibility and Accountability: Human Considerations in Context-Aware Systems , Victoria Bellotti and Keith Edwards, Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2-4), 2001, 193-212. The paper is a very high-level computer science article about context-awareness and its corollary social issues. It is focused...
Shaping Things and game design
Thanks Julian for pointing me on Raph Koster's thought about Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things. The blogpost deals with the connection game designers can draw from the book. Here are some exerpts I found pertinent: Gizmos are what we live in and around today: networked objects, highly featured and ac...
Contextual Flickr Uploader: a step towards a camera blogject
Transcripting the notes from the blogject workshop, I connected the first project (a blogject camera) to a contextual flickr uploader Chris recently sent us: the Context Watcher developed by a team led by Johan Koolwaaij: The Context Watcher is a mobile application developed in Python, and running...
Wearable mobile communication and safety device
Via Medgadget, this wearable mobile communication and safety device for the elderly and for those prone to getting lost: Sound the alarm, locate and communicate. Anytime, anywhere. That´s the key to Tadiran LifeCare´s SKeeper™ - a "peace of mind" product line designed to make life easier and safer ...
Vermersch's 'explicitation' interviewing technique
Today JB gave us a course about Vermersch's 'explicitation' interviewing technique (mostyl used in France in the field of ergonomics and within the education system). Meant to elicit verbalisations of an activity, the idea of this technique is to favor evocation versus rationalisation from the acto...
Robots as educational toys
The Robota project at EPFL is about using ROBOTA dolls, a family of mini humanoid robots, as educational toys. The dolls can engage in complex interaction with humans, involving speech, vision and body imitation. They have been used for instance in projects related with kids and autism (as I mentio...