Yesterday at the WMTE Conference, there was a banquet showing a "Wearable Computer Fashion Show" produced by Mizuko Oe (fashion producer, UEDA College of Fashion, Osaka, Japan) and Prof. Masahiko Tsukamoto (Kobe University, Kobe, Japan). Some weird future costumes had been demonstrated, including w...
Mosquito sounds to avoid teenagers loitering
The IHT has a strange story about a device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying,"), that emits a high-frequency pulsing sound which can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to ...
New blog about user-centered pet gear
A new noticeable blog has popped out: petistic. The tagline is "fantastic pet stuff for animal lovers - a collective blog about user-centered pet gear". It's about "intriguing things, stories and artefacts about animals. There will be a peculiar emphasis on pets". ...
Conference backchannels: distributed intelligence or divided attention
Jacobs N, Mcfarlane A. (2005) Conferences as learning communities: some early lessons in using `back-channel' technologies at an academic conference - distributed intelligence or divided attention? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 21, No. 5., pp. 317-329 researchers attend conferences as...
Notes about spatial features in Japan
Two weeks ago, Matt Tiessen wrote this thoughtful post about spatial concerns in the city of Lyon, France. Wandering around in Japan, I tried to adopt the same perspective to briefly describe some intriguing phenomenon related to space and culture in Japan. my first impression was the tremendous i...
Ubiquitous-Computing System for Learning Japanese Polite Expression
Tonight, Hiroaki Ogata will present their paper about an ubiquitous-computing system for learning japanese polite expression. I think it's going to be close to the demo we had at CRAFT when he visited us last year. At that time he showed us 2 systems: JAPELAS (Japanese polite expressions learning a...
Japanese sign about smoke
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Autonomous sharing of music files on mobile devices
Designing a Mobile Music Sharing System Based on Emergent Properties by Maria Håkansson, Mattias Jacobsson, Lars Erik Holmquist (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Sweden), short paper for the conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. It discusses a system for autonomous sharing of musi...
Micro-GPS to track birds and study their navigation
Via nouvo.ch, an curious project carried out by Hans-Peter Lipp. They studied pigeon navigation using small GPS attached to the birds.This led them to "the best evidence yet of pigeons following roads" as reported by science week: The authors present an analysis of 216 GPS-recorded pigeon tracks ov...
Using tangible interactions to teach astronomical phenomenon
One of the project I bumped into this afternoon: Smart Planets is a project that aims at enhancing the teaching of astronomical phenomenons like eclipses and motions using tangible interactions. It's a project carried out by Bjorn Eisen, Marc Jansen and UlrichHoppe. Usually, the teacher takes diffe...