Thanks to Mauro, I am a lot into grape racing lately: here is how it works (taken from here: What you need is a microwave oven, some grapes, a small measure of sunflower oil and some friends with which to compete. The idea is thus. Firstly, if the microwave is of the type that has one of those sill...
Solar-powered Electronic Lifeforms
(Via), elf (i.e. electronic lifeforms), a project by Pascal Glissmann and Martina Höfflin: 'Elfs' are small mechanical systems powered by solar energy that behave as natural living systems in many aspects. (...) 'Elf' is a two-part installation developed in the context of the research project 'ele...
The status of spectators in video games
Jutst stumbled across this document: Supporting Spectators in Video-Games by Ashwin R. Bharambe (Carnegie Mellon University), Venkata N. Padmanabhan (Microsoft Research) Srinivasan Seshan (Carnegie Mellon University). It's about the technical feasibility of including spectators in multi-player game...
Reports about Urban/Social Tapestries
Proboscis has recently released the final reports on the Urban Tapestries project. You can order them here. Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring, Place and Mobility A Proboscis White Paper by Giles Lane & Sarah Thelwall This white paper presents our vision for public authoring and our conclusions on ...
Urban Play and Locative Media Worksop in South Kora
INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON 'URBAN PLAY AND LOCATIVE MEDIA' ORGANIZED BY ART CENTER NABI, SEOUL, KOREA (OCTOBER 18-20, 2005) Emerging technologies such as wireless network, locative media, and pervasive computing have brought about new perceptions and social interactions in urban environment, transf...
Latency and user-behavior in video games
Latency and User Behaviour on a Multiplayer Game Server by Tristan Henderson - Networked Group Communication : Third International COST264 Workshop, NGC 2001, London, UK, November 7-9, 2001. Proceedings Editors: J. Crowcroft, M. Hofmann (Eds.): Chapter: p. 1. Multiplayer online games represent one ...
Head Mounted Display immersed within the aquarium environment
PANAquarium is a project carried out at University of Southern California: This collaboration between IMSC and USC School of Fine Art, involved building a circular fish tank around a panoramic camera with live tropical fish swimming within and a coral reef photo serving as background on the outermo...
Lapining: parkour for tree-huggers
There seems to be an intriguing trend in France: after "le parkour" (also did by the Yamakasi), there is now the equivalent, better suited for tree-huggers: lapining. Lapin-ing means acting like a rabbit (in french "un lapin" is "a rabbit"). The point is basically about running down the mountains...
The Feature is off
Sad news: The Feature (Nokia-owned independent non-branded blog about the mobile Internet) is shutting down today. Its goal was straightforward: "TheFeature aims to be nothing less than a voice -- an opinionated, independent voice for the mobility community."(...) in that sense, we can say "mission...
A shift in user-centered design?
Donald Norman wrote a relevant column in ACM Interactions, Vol.12, No 4 (2005), pp. 14-19: Fresh: Human-centered design considered harmful. His point is that user-centered design is now treated as accepted wisdom, which is bad since: One concern is that the focus upon individual people (or groups) ...