The other day, after reading (and writing about) Stowe Boyd's post about IM rules, I made a quick scanning of the HCI recent literature about IM and found this article: Broadcasting Information via Display Names in Instant Messaging by Stephanie Smale and Saul Greenberg (ACM Group 2005 Conference) ...
Quick statistics about smart phones
I was just wondering about the market of smart phones: via Networks Silicon: Smart phone shipments are continuing to grow steadily, according to research firm Canalys, up from 3.6 million devices shipped in the first half of this year to 9.6 million in the first half of 2005. (...) Canalys is predi...
Park your car in your appartment's balcony
Yep that's true, as attested by this article in german newspaper Die Welt: in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, some folks wants to allow people to drive their car into an elevator and up to the front door of their apartment: Autofetischisten werden diese Immobilie lieben. Im Berliner Stadtteil Kre...
Yet another plush-based remote control
This is another plush-based remote control: Plush Toy Gestrural Interaction: Using Everyday Objects for Remote Control (by Yoshinori Kawasaki): We plan to develop a system that allows users to control information appliances remotely in living environments using everyday objects such as plush toys. ...
Tremendous switches, toys and tangible interactions
While working on a project about kids' joysticks/pads and remote control, few months back, I would have certainly been happy to ran across this switches done by an australian company called Technical Solutions (found on this great blog about 'making toys'). They are amazing! I am a great fan of tho...
Mobile gaming future: "It's a phone, not a console"
It's a phone, not a console! is an interesting paper about mobile games by Marko Turpeinen, Risto Sarvas, Fernando Herrera from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. Some excerpts I found relevant: mobile gaming will be huge because everybody has a mobile phone. However, how can mass-...
Vegetables + R&D
Yesterday when visiting Swisscom R&D labs, I ran across this interesting thing, at the entrance of the R&D facility: ...
Fives rules of IM
Stowe Boyd sketched an interesting set of cardinal rules about IM uses: The social aspects of real time life will swamp any specific technology's impacts. I believe in tools, but effective application requires changes in behavior. For example, effective use of IM in groups means people must adopt t...
Bio-art and "meat production without victimization"
Via Networked Performance, a very insightful special issue of CIAC's electronic magazine about bio-art: There are articles about various artists ranging from Eduardo Kac (the guy who did the the lime-green rabbit) to Katy High's embracing animals. It's a very up-to-date picture of the bio-art scen...
Card-driven strategy gameplay
Discovered today, after a meeting at Swisscom, a video of a very innovative augmented-board game by Sega. It's callesd Sangokushi Taisen and it mixed arcade gaming with card-games. There is a description of this on the IGN website: As the name may suggest, this game is based on the Sangokushi his...