[Research] Video Surveillance as a gaming platform

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Video Surveillance as a gaming platform is a project carried out by Bernd Hitzeroth and Myriel Milicevic at interaction design institute in Ivrea.

Surveillance camera systems work increasingly digital and are connected through Local Area Networks to PCs. This allows for the availability of surveillance footage via the Internet. Through image processing technologies (motion detection, face recognition, colour tracking, mapping 3D space through 2D images) real-time augmentation is now possible. Combined, these technologies can become the basis for an interactive gaming environment. (...) We want to establish a gaming platform, which is based on real time footage, connected to real spaces. The games will be played on home computers and receive live streams from remote surveillance cameras over the Internet. The player becomes an active agent in the surveyed world, experiencing a feeling of control and yet an uncertainty of what is fiction and what is real.

[Research] Mobiquitous: International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems

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Mobiquitous: International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems, August 22-26, 2004 - Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The conference seems rather technical than user-centered but it could be of interest to have a glance at the trends. For instance the panels (obvisouly more 'high level') called "Mobiquitous computing and spontaneous networking: are we there yet? Where will we go?", or "services and Mobile Computing (never the twain shall meet)".

[Space and Place] Street Talk: happening event

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Street Talk: An Urban Computing Happening, Friday 16 July 2004 in Berkeley. The programme is great with lots of interesting speaker (Anne Galloway, Howard Rheingold, Antony Townsend...).

Street Talk is a one day event to be held at Intel Research Berkeley focused on understand how the rapidly emerging fabric of mobile and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes

[VideoGames] Multiplayer Video Games Complicated Communications

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Halloran, J., Fitzpatrick, G., Rogers, Y. and Marshall, P. (2004) Does it matter if you don't know who's talking? Multiplayer gaming with voiceover IP. To appear in Proceedings of CHI 2004.

Voiceover IP (VoIP) now makes it possible for people in distributed online multiplayer games to talk to each other. This might not only influence game performance, but also social interaction. However, using VoIP in multiplayer games can often make it hard to know who is talking, an issue that other researchers have found to be problematic. In a 10-week study of a fixed group of adult gamers, we found that not knowing who is talking affects game performance differently according to the type of game.

[Research] Group Behavior in Virtual Reality

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This Jolanda Tromp seems interesting. Se works on "the development of structured methods to collect quantitative and qualitative usability evaluation data for novel artefacts. Involved in developing methods for rapid usability assessment of new technologies. Research involves task analysis, user requirements specification, experimental design, data analysis, study of user behaviour and classification of future technologies"Gotta find these papers: - Tromp, J.G. (2001). Systematic Usability Design and Evaluation for Collaborative Virtual Environments, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, UK. - Stedmon, A., D'Cruz, M., Tromp, J.G., Wilson, J., (2003). Two Methods and a Case Study: Human Factors Evaluations for Virtual Environments, in: Proceedings of HCI International (HCII03), Greece.

[Prospective] A remote control for your life

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A bit update but still interesting, "A remote control for your life" by Charles Mann in Technology Review (subscription needed).

The plan will go into gear this summer, when DoCoMo introduces a new and radically more versatile type of phone. Like a regular cell phone, it will make and receive telephone calls. Like a regular i-mode device, it will let you send and receive e-mail, play online games, and access any one of the 78,000 i-mode-compatible websites around the world. And like other DoCoMo phones, it will take photographs, read bar codes, and play downloaded music over headphones or tiny but surprisingly good speakers. But it will also contain a special chip made by Sony that lets it pay for groceries, serve as personal identification, unlock doors, operate appliances, buy movie and subway tickets, and perform dozens of other tasks.

[TheWorld] Do you prefer GMT or local time?

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It seems that some people like to use GMT hours and never forget to add "local time" when they talk about local time, which nobody normally does. Let's call those people "gmt freak".For those lost with UTC/GMT concepts: UTC/GNT conversion, you will better ground your conversation with your gmt-freak friends.

Since radio signals can cross multiple time zones and the international date line, some worldwide standard for time and date is needed. This standard is coordinated universal time, abbreviated UTC. This was formerly known as Greenwich mean time (GMT). Other terms used to refer to it include "Zulu time" (after the "Z" often used after UTC times), "universal time," and "world time."

[TheWorld] Now beta-testers show off

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Read in NYT, software testing used to be done by serious computer users. Now, testers are motivated less by service than by the status of being among the first to try the newest software.

"There's a lot of cachet associated with being an early adopter," said Nicco Mele, 26, a former Internet strategist for Howard Dean's presidential campaign who runs the Internet consulting firm EchoDitto. "It's similar to how, every time you're in a meeting, everyone wants to show off who's got the coolest new phone."

[Research] Jeffrey Huang

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Yesterday, I met Jeffrey Huang, who is Associate Professor at the Harvard Department of Architecture. We had a interesting chat about my phd and CatchBob. Huang, J., "Future Space: A Blueprint for a New Business Architecture," Harvard Business Review, April 2001. 

Although the Internet is an essential conduit for many business activities, it isn't rendering the physical world any less important, as the failures of many Web merchants demonstrate. People need social and sensual contact. The companies that succeed will be those best able to integrate the physical and the virtual. But that requires a new kind of business architecture--a new approach to designing stores, offices, factories, and other spaces where business is conducted. The author, a faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Design, provides practical guidelines to help managers and entrepreneurs think creatively about the structures in which their businesses operate. He outlines four challenges facing designers of such "convergent" structures, so-called because they function in both physical and virtual space: matching form to function, allowing visitors to visualize the presence of others, personalizing spaces, and choreographing connectivity. Using numerous examples, from a fashion retailer that wants to sell in stores as well as through a Web site to a radically new kind of consulate, the author shows how businesses can meet each challenge. For instance, allowing customers to visualize the presence of others means that visitors to a Web site should be given a sense of other site visitors. Personalizing physical and virtual spaces involves using databases to enable those spaces to adapt quickly to user preferences. The success of companies attempting to merge on-line and traditional operations will depend on many factors. But without a well-designed convergent architecture, no company will fully reap the synergies of physical space and Internet technology.