The Institute For The Future (IFTF) has just released an interesting map [PDF] of signals and forecasts about robotics: "After decades of hype, false starts, and few successes, smart machines are finally ready for prime time. (...) This map, and the associated series of written perspectives, are t...
Grafikdemo: Transition between reality and 3D representation
Grafikdemo by Niklas Roy is another interesting project I stumbled across in Basel two weeks ago. The set-up is pretty basic: it consists in a physical wireframe model of a teapot included inside a Commodore CBM 3032 cabinet. The user/viewer can rotate the model by pressing some keys on the keyboa...
"Creative computing" magazine
Recently ran across this curious magazine called "Creative Computing", one of the earliest covering the microcomputer revolution (published from 1974 until December 1985). Readers interested in this can have a look at the some articles. With titles such as "Is breaking into a time-sharing system a...
Cybersyn: a real-time computer-controlled economy
Two weeks ago in Basel, at the Shift Festival, I saw some material about the Cybersyn project that struck me as fascinating: "Project Cybersyn was a Chilean attempt at real-time computer-controlled planned economy in the years 1970–1973 (during the government of president Salvador Allende). It was...
Geosocial/Location-based services usage according to PEW (#techusage)
The PEW Internet&American life project has a new report about usage of location-based services. As usual, it's mostly quantitative data (phone survey) and it's focused on Americans but it's full of interesting material for people who follow this domain. Before heading to the results, let's stop fir...
French-Cyrillic keyboard hack
A French Keyboard with stickers showing letters from the cyrillic alphabet, used by one of my students. Interestingly, some of them are absent on letters such as A, E, R, T... which corresponds to the ones most often used in French (I don't know why Z is in there...) ...
Beyond treasure hunt: locative games 2010 and the near future
Being interviewed by a French media about the state of location-based gaming, I took this opportunity as a way to frame my recent thoughts about this: Adoption :( An important adoption factor for social-locative games is simply... the players: lots of problems described by Dan Hon in his talk "Eve...
Workshop about Failures and Design Fictions at the Swiss Design Network symposium
Last Saturday, Julian and I gave a quick and punchy workshop called Using Failures in Design Fictions at the SDN 2010 in Basel, Switzerland. What's better than a broken iPhone screen in a workshop about accidents and failures? Here's the workshop abstract we proposed to the conference committee: ...
Gestures from the 21st Century: train ticket control
Seen yesterday in a Swiss train. Digital device to iPhone interaction for visual marker recognition. Yet another curious situation to observe in the train (after train sensors) because there are sometimes some problems for the system to read the 2D code. As usual with new forms of interactions, it...
Game maps evolution and level design
A map of Zelda found at Atari2600.com Last week in the Guardian gamesblog, I ran across this insightful piece called "The lost art of video game cartography". It's basically about " the homemade map remained an important navigational device" and the importance of map (hand) drawing on a notepad whi...