I wrote a short introduction about roomware and interactive furniture for people who are not aware of this. It's actually a 2-pages pdf that describes the main idea + 3 projects + few relevant references. ...
Starbucks, tv, microwave ovens and distributed cognition
A talk by David Kirsh at a conference in lyon, France: Cost Structure and the Design of Environments : Design Lessons from Starbucks, watching TV and Microwave Ovens: I present a micro-analysis of espresso making at Starbucks, watching TV and using microwave ovens to show difficulties with the cos...
Bionic arms!
(via), an impressive artificial arm. What is very impressive is that the arms are attached to the guy's muscles. Therefore, he could commande them. Researchers have developed artificial arms that can be moved as it if they were real limbs, simply by thinking about making them move,. The world's...
Computer-generated directions sucks
The NYT has today a terrible piece about online mapping services failes to be a godsend for travelers. Roughly 1 in 50 computer-generated directions is a dud, according to Doug Richardson, the executive director for the Association of American Geographers. He blames inaccurate road information for ...
Yet Another Signless/letterless City Project
Christoph Steinbrener et Rainer Dempf covered all the signs, letters and commercial with yellow in Neubaugasse (Vienne, Austria). This is another example of a signless city, which seems to be a recurent pattern in art lately... Sommer 2005, die Neubaugasse, eine Einkaufsstraße in Wien – Für den Z...
IM and the future of language
Viewpoint: Instant messaging and the future of language by Naomi Baron, Communications of the ACM, Volume 48 , Issue 7 (July 2005). In this paper, the author claims that the writing style commonly used in IMing, texting, and other forms of computer-mediated communication need not spell the end of n...
DIGRA conference summary
For morons like me who missed the DIGRA conference, there is a short wrap-up on Gamasutra. Last week DiGRA, the Digital Games Researchers Association, hit Vancouver for its second bi-annual gathering. (...) Games Researchers are predominantly academics with the odd hybrid professional /journalist/...
Research paper idea
Idea for a research paper: how location-awareness has been interpreted and supported in different multi-user environments (textual virtual reality, 2d games, 3d games, mobile games) as technologies have advanced? I already have material for this, especially about MOO games, 3d games and a mobile ga...
Possible patent for a next Nintendo console pad
Some folks are wondering whether this patent is for the next Nintendo Console "Revolution" (others think it's for the next gameboy). United States Patent 6,908,388 Shimizu , et al. June 21, 2005 Game system with tilt sensor and game program including viewpoint direction changing feature Abstract: ...
eBook reader turned into a Game platform
Dave5 sent me his new project which I found very nice: The Librie as a games machine. The point of the project is to turn an electronic book reader (not a generic computing platform as he points) into a game platform. The trickiest part is to design stuff with the constraints of the device (which i...