The IHT has this morning a very relevant piece about Location-Based Services; not really research-oriented, it's rather focused on pragmatic and business examples which worth it. The paper puts forward the difficulty to throw LBS to the market: Though cellular phone companies have been touting thes...
Pop Culture and Cognitive Improvements
During the week-end I read Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson. Some thoughts below: The author's take is that pop culture (mostly: video games/tv/movies) is not so dumb but foster interesting situations in which viewers/u...
Share location-annotations with placeshare.org
(via the geowanking mailing-list), a new website to "enable people to share location content": placeshare.org The goal of PlaceShare is to enable people to easily store information about places and share that information with everyone. The best way to start is to check out the examples or start by ...
Conference bag include a "maybecamera"
(via ), at the Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, the organizers turned every conference bag into a "maybecamera" replete with its individual dome. For people not aware of it, have a look here to know more about maybecamera... identityblog defines maybecamera as follows: Steve [Mann of ...
Papers about Mobile Applications Development
Communications of the ACM has its last issue about designing mobile device experiences. Relevant paper around (only of you have the ACM subscription): Designing for the mobile device: experiences, challenges, and methods: Introduction by Karen Holtzblatt Contextual and cultural challenges for us...
Taking advantage of camera phones to design mobile games
Camblaster, here is how the website describes it: Shoot at flying targets through the camera! Move the phone away and discover swarms of new targets to shoot! Come back, and see the previous targets still flying in the same zone! CamBlaster!™ creates a new gaming experience because it uniquely ...
An escape-pod to survive fire in tall buidling
The Economist has this week a strange piece about a russian invention that aim at surviving fire in high-rises. a new way of clocking up air miles was to be found. It looks like a small, orange, inflatable swimming pool with a pointy underside. And strapped inside it is a Biggles-like doll complete...
Using train storage area to take a nap
Via the very insightful french blog Internet Actu, this interesting account how about the designer Roger Tallon used Super-8 cameras in train to observe people and their behavior while travelling by train. The most interesting results he got was the fact that travellers used luggage storage area no...
Video Games Usability Testing
It's not so common to have articles in Gamasutra about usability testing in video games. That's the case this week with Better Games Through Usability Evaluation and Testing by Sauti Laitinen. The focus of this article is not only to tell why usability is important in games, but also to introduce t...
Wearable Body Organs: Scream Body
Just stumbled across this Scream Body project. It's carried out by Kelly Dobson during 1998-2004. ScreamBody is a portable space for screaming. When a user needs to scream but is in anynumber of situations where it is just not permitted, ScreamBody silences the user’s screams so they may feel fre...