All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings by Adam Greenfield is a column in Boxes and Arrows. The author provides guidelines to deal with the issues raised by ubicomp. My sense is that the challenge of ubiquitous compu...
[Research] Analysis of players interaction in Star Wars Galaxies
The paper The Social Side of Gaming: A Study of Interaction Patterns in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (.pdf) by Nicolas Ducheneaut and Robert Moore offers an interesting methodology to analyze multi-players interactions in the video game Star Wars Galaxies. To understand the nature of player-...
[TheWorld] The Worst Jobs in Science
Popular Science has a nice column on the worst jobs in science: Anal-Wart Researcher/Worm Parasitologist/Lab-Animal Veterinarian/Tampon Squeezer/Landfill Monitor/K-25 Demolition Worker/ Ecologist at St. John’s Harbor/Iraqi Archaeologist/Tick Dragger/Nurse/Computer Help-Desk Tech/Congressional Scie...
[Space and Place] Bibop area: old french cellular network
Found at the railway station in Lyon, France; an old remnant from the first french cell phone network called 'bibop'. ...
[Space and Place] Third Places in games
Nicolas Ducheneaut will present a paper about "Designing for sociability in massively multiplayer games: an examination of the “third places” of SWG " at "the other players" conference in Copenhagen. It seems quite interesting: hile massively multiplayer games are often touted as successful social ...
[Video Games] Virtual world seems to be designed by newbies
Richard Bartle's take on Gamasutra is of interest for every person who works on virtual space. It is entitled Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really!. Virtual worlds are being designed by know-nothing newbies, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. I don't mean new...
[Space and Place] It used to be a road station here
Seen in Roanne, France: ...
[Research] Ubiquitous Computing Evaluation
Stumbled across this workshop about Evaluation Methodologies for Ubiquitous Computing Interactive systems, and in particular, ubiquitous computing pose more complex evaluation methodologies than non-interactive text retrieval. However, there are several possibilities. One possibility is to start by...
[Tech] From Dragonball Z to reality
Looks like the Personal memory aid (pdf page 13) is close to Dragonball z's gear, maybe a bit more low tech: ...
[Locative Media] A list of ubicomp patterns/applications
The group for user interface at UC Berkeley provides an interesting list of location-based services (.pdf). They presents it through a list of ubicomp patterns (each application is an example of a pattern). ...