NordiCHI Oslo, Norway, October 14-18, 2006. The Fourth Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: "Changing Roles" NordiCHI is the main Nordic forum for human-computer interaction research. NordiCHI is the meeting place for researchers from academia and industry, designers, practitioners, edu...
"The adult's product and the child's are often one and the same"
In the NYT/IHT, there is a good article about As gadgets replace toys, what's in it for kids? By Michael Barbaro. It's about an important trend: adults' and kids' artifacts like high-tech gadgets are now tending to be the same. the push to sell consumer electronics to preteens is touching off an an...
Latency in MMORPG and user's performance in Warcraft III
I already mentioned how the topic of network latency might impact users' performance/expectations/pleasure while playing games. Here is an interesting article about how it modifies WarcraftIII's players performance: The effect of latency on user performance in Warcraft III by N Sheldon, E Girard, S...
About Campus Space
The new Steelcase newsletter raises nice questions about campus space (pdf, html). It's about the fact that the number of students is increasing (since few decades) and those people "has brought unique expectations and behaviors to campus." These trends are driving changes that are reflected in the...
MP3 Breasts
An odd news on Ananova today: musical breast implants: Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman's breast implants. One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person's whole music collection. BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available withi...
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY 2006:
ACM SIGCHI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY 2006 is going to happen in June, 14-16 in Hollywood, CA: The field of computer entertainment technology has aroused great interest recently amongst researchers and developers in both academic and industrial / busin...
A social itune?
Fabien just sent me this tool that seems highly interesting: MyStrands, a kind-of 'social itune': Explore Recommended Songs: Songs are recommended based on the song that is actively playing and recently played songs. You may read about a song and in most cases listen to a clip by clicking the arr...
Cell phone usage and sleep
Research Proves Mobile Phones and Sleep Do Go Together, astudy conducted by Swinburne's Brain Sciences Institute examined the impact of mobile phone use immediately before bedtime on the brain and sleep patterns: The quality of sleep for Australia's 12 million mobile phone users is not affected by ...
Noise sensitive project at the lab
At the lab, JB Haué and Guillaume Raymondon are working on a very interesting project: a noise-sensitive table. There is a blog about the project there. The table is meant to perceive nearby users' noise and diplay various things based on it (by LEDs or a beamer). Currently the prototypes are reall...
Philosophy of Bullshits
Might be good to read this book: "On Bullshit" (Harry G. Frankfurt) Mary Park describes it as (editorial review from Amazon.com): "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit," Harry G. Frankfurt writes, in what must surely be the most eyebrow-raising opener...