Outsourcing research and development seems to be a new trend, as attested by this article in Der Spiegel. It's about small businesses and major corporations which use the Internet to advertise monetary awards for inventions. They call this concept "innocentive", the name is a fusion of the words in...
A 'cultural hub' in Dubai
I am not a great fan of Dubai architecture craze; however, there is this interesting new project called 'DUBAI HUB one' designed by GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA, via Bidoun Magazine (Arts and Culture from the Middle East). The proposal is for a series of cultural hubs which will act as focal po...
Phone masts disguised as trees
Preserved TreeScapes InternationalTM (PTI), a company specialised in replica trees. They now expanded their products to phone mast disguised as trees: Most recently, PTI has turned its experience and talents toward concealment solutions for the wireless communications provider. The tremendous inc...
Intriguing Toys, an LBS for kids
Today I went in a toy shop to buy some presents and I stumbled across this very curious Spy Gear by Wild Planet Toy, among I others I noticed: The Spy tracker system: "Set up three secret spy trackers, draw a map on your control panel showing where each one is, and you will know where and when intr...
Xmas post: MIT turned into a Mario Level
Just ran across this: a Mario-themed MIT hack that turned part of a building into a Nintendo/Mario level... ...
Paper accepted to the COOP Conference
Our paper "The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game" (by Nicolas NOVA, Fabien GIRARDIN, Gaëlle MOLINARI and Pierre DILLENBOURG) has been accpeted to the International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (May 9-12, 2006, Carry-le-Roue...
Designing collaboration in FPS
The Hunt for Collaborative War Gaming - CASE: Battlefield 1942 by Tony Manninen and Tomi Kujanpää, Game Studies, Vol. 5, No.1, October 2005. The paper addresses a phenomenon connected to our research, namely the all the cues that users loose when playing remotely. The lack of face-to-face interacti...
World Economic Forum 2006 about innovation/design
According to Bruce Nussbaum in Business Weekl, the World Economic Forum 2006 in Davos "may as well be called Design in Davos because for the first time there is an entire category of programs, meetings, dinners and late-nite talks called "Innovation, Creativity and Design Strategy". This year the c...
Times passes faster when classical music is played (but only for men)
(via) A weird result: MORE CHOICES AND SPEEDIER DELIVERY SIMPLIFY MUSIC AND MESSAGES ON-HOLDBy Milton Allimadi : The call center industry has shifted to digitally-recorded music and messages on-hold over the past two years for enhanced audio quality and faster shipment over the Internet and Web si...
ambx: augment game immersion with environmental perceptions
ambx (pronounced am-bee-ex) is a technology to be released by Philips in May 2006 that aims at improving the user immersion in games. amBX-enabled games will provide gamers with the ability to use light, colour, sound, heat and even airflow in the real world during gameplay. Imagine the room of th...