Exit Festival in Paris

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Tomorrow begins the Exit Festival in Créteil (close to Paris) a great art exhibit where you can find artists' bricolage, hacks and tricks. One of my favorite piece of art is Veaceslav Druta's balancoire (i.e. the swing) which is a musical swing hanging from two wheels. The user/visitor sit on the swing. While swinging, he/she triggers the play of music that can change depending on the hands positions and the swing speed: There will also be Brad Hwang the guy who did the Incredible Strange Machines in 1993. Even though this one won't be at Exit, I cannot resist to put it here.

Using steam propulsion, Bratt Hwang constructed a huge instrument (10 meters long), consisting of 50 metal soup bowls which were suspended between floor and ceiling on metal wires. As the wires were vibrated by steam driven levers, the bowls functioned as sounding chambers. As part of the sound sculpture, the audience could eat soup from the bowls, thereby changing the quality of the sound.

Finally, Time's up (an austrian collective is also fancy) seems very appealing. Their SENSORY CIRCUS! looks good:

Sensory Circus is embodied in an interactive installation comprising an active, responsive and auto-generative audiovisual and architectonic system. The audience is central, and is principally responsible for their substantial contribution to the nature and dynamics of the whole environment

Through the different types of interaction with the components present inside Sensory Circus as well as their physical presence, every visitor mutates from a passive viewer to an active protagonist.

Sorry who the others I did not mention, there are also great!

Mobile phones, spirituality and ghosts

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There seems to be some people who connect personal mobile tech into spiritual practices around the world (genevieve bell at Intel as claimed by matt jones and smart mobs). Spirituality and mobile phone is a nice topic but there is something weirder: It reminds me this news from 2004:

A Wirral paranormal investigator has rubbished claims that mobile phones are chasing away ghosts. Tony Cornell, of the Society for Psychical Research, says the number of spooky sightings started to decline with the introduction of mobiles 15 years ago. (…) He reckons it’s all down to a lack of TV programmes like The X-Files rather than mobile phone microwaves in the atmosphere. He said: ‘In the run-up to the year 2000 there was loads of stuff on the telly about the paranormal and that made the public more aware. ‘But now people may have an experience and not realise that it’s of a paranormal nature. And, anyway, we use lots of hi-tech equipment in our research and that has no effect. Good solid reliable ghosts are there and they are as hard as ever to catch.’

Human Computer Interaction research journals

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This morning I tried to list the most important HCI research journals in my domaine (general + CSCW + mobile), with the impact factor:

Awareness box: a camera that does not take picture

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The Awareness Box is an art project by Alain Bublex (funded by Samsung). It's about designing a camera that does not record images. As the artists claims:

At the beginning, this project considered the result: the photographic image; then, evolved to center exclusively on the act of taking pictures. The act of taking pictures is about observation and awareness of one surroundings. As such, the object that I intend to conceive to heighten one awareness and attention should not be considered a camera at all, but is a new type of product, an electronic product that helps one observe better. My new product can be considered an "Awareness Box". I notice that in my case, as in the case of many photo enthusiasts, I take many pictures but rarely look at them afterwards. (it is the same case with video, which I watch even less frequently. As an artist, I also use photography in my work, and there again, I take many more pictures than I print or enlarge afterwards. I then asked myself the following questions: Why do I continue to take new pictures? If I continue to photograph, it is perhaps precisely for this reason, because it obliges me to go 'there' (...) Therefore I naturally imagined an electronic object specifically conceived for this use : an Awareness Box that allows you to capture an image once in presence of the subject, but without recording it, since this is unnecessary. (...)Why do we take so many pictures, is it to produce images or is it because it forces us to go somewhere. .. what is really important for us, the images, or simply observing the world?

Physiological computing

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So now, the next trend is not tangible! It's intangible instead! According to jennifer Allanson and Stephen H. Fairclough, physiological computing

involves the direct interfacing of human physiology and computer technology, i.e. brain–computer interaction (BCI). The goal of physiological computing is to transform bioelectrical signals from the human nervous system into real-time computer input in order to enhance and enrich the interactive experience. Physiological computing has tremendous potential for interactive innovation but research activities are often disparate and uneven, and fail to reflect the multidisciplinary nature of the topic.

More in this special issue of Interacting with computers. Of course there are already mind games applications like MindBalls released last year. It's a mind-controlled version of Pong. The more relaxed and calm a player's mind, the more the ball moves away from them. Mindball measures EEG or electrical activity in the brain.

Vertical or Horizontal shared displays?

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Collaborating around vertical and horizontal large interactive displays: which way is best? by Yvonne Rogers and Siân Lindley in Interacting with Computers, Volume 16, Issue 6 , December 2004, Pages 1133-1152.

Large interactive displays are increasingly being placed in work and public settings. An assumption is that the shared surface they provide can facilitate collaboration among co-located groups. An exploratory study was carried out to investigate this claim, and, in particular, to examine the effects of the physical orientation of a display on group working. Two conditions were compared: vertical versus horizontal. A number of differences were found. In the horizontal condition group members switched more between roles, explored more ideas and had a greater awareness of what each other was doing. In the vertical condition groups found it more difficult to collaborate around the display. A follow-up study explored how participants, who had previous experience of using both displays, determined how to work together when provided with both kinds of display. The groups exhibited a more efficient and coordinated way of working but less collaboration in terms of the sharing and discussion of ideas.

Why do I blog this? I was wondering about conducting similar investigations with tabletop displays...

Location-based services and lampposts

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An interesting news from this week: a British company plans to roll out high-speed wireless networks and location-based services using street lampposts.

Last Mile Communications says the humble lamppost can be used to provide broadband Internet access and also to store useful information about their location.(...) people who run an application called the MagicBook on a mobile device will be able to connect to their nearest enabled lamppost and access the information stored on it.

Last Mile is also hoping to win backing from emergency services agencies. For example, the precise layout of buildings could be stored on a lamppost and be accessible by firefighters in an emergency. (...) Last Mile cites as a strength its lack of reliance on other telecommunications infrastructure such as local telephone exchanges, which means it could keep working in the event of widespread network failure.

Apart from that other interesting and RELEVANT uses?

Some RSS side uses

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I am wondering lately about uses of RSS different than just news/blogfeed aggregation. I use RSS for:

  • checking my agenda: I export a RSS file from my calendar.
  • listing my research bibliography (exported from bibDesk)
  • get weather forecast (taken from anti-mega)
  • check technorati watchlists
  • keep serious to-do lists

It's not that much. I tried to gather some RSS tricks and fell across this:

  • Chris Heathcote provided his blog readers with a html formular that pushesthe message into his RSS reader.
  • Danny O'Brien interviewed by Life Hacker talked about an RSS feed generator; "It’s tricky, but not impossible, to create an easy-to-use UI that would let you mark bits of a web page, and have those turn into the titles and items of an RSS feed. When new items appear, the app would attempt to spot them and fit them into the same template. It might get it wrong, but with more training it would get to the point where the RSS feed would work correctly (until someone redesigned the original Webpage). I picked this out as something important, because RSS readers are turning into the place where people keep broadcast announcements. Sysadmins don’t send out log messages any more, and people are running fewer announce-only mailing lists. You stick it in your RSS feed. (...) but what’s important here is that people shouldn’t have to depend on vendors for RSS feeds. You should be able to turn anything into an RSS feed - and share that template with the world."

Design for Future Needs

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I stumbled across this nice project this morning: Design for Future Needs. It's a EU project that aimed at discovering how designers' methods (to look into the future to meet people’s needs) can be transfered to policy makers.

The project, ran for the European Commission by a group of European design and business organisations, has researched how design techniques for envisioning the future can benefit EC decision-makers’ foresight planning and policy work. The project is aiming to help them respond to emerging issues and trends from environmental pressures to technological change.

The final report is here (.pdf).It's very well documented with good introduction on foresight and design. The most interesting parts IMO are the case studies:

  • Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5: it looks at the development of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in the UK. The study looks at what lessons we can learn about where and how to site airports and what technologies and environments will make it easier for everyone involved with air travel.
  • Humantec 'Reflexive Spaces': Humantec examines how changing working patterns will demand the development of different forms of office and home furniture in the next decade. If we spend more time working at home, how will our houses look? Will we need more “multi-function” furniture to cope with our different roles? As the technology in our offices has changed, office furniture has often been slow to catch up. Wireless technologies in development today may get rid of the cabling curled beneath our desks, but will unwieldy chairs and desks still tether us to one place?
  • Whirlpool "Project F": the case study aims to understand forecasting techniques’ role in the development of products ad services by focusing on two recent Whirlpool research projects. One looked at the needs of couples in various European countries to build up a picture of domestic life, and the other explored customer preferences in relation to the laundry process.
  • Decathlon: The case study looks at design forecasting techniques and their impact on the New Product Development process, as well as considering how design can be used as a forecasting tool.

Electronic Plastic (Büro Destruct)

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The reason why I am into electronic games lately is that I bought this nice book called "Electronic Plastic" by Büro Destruct.

Electronic Plastic turns time back to the Stone Age of computer games in the early 80s, long before Gameboy and Playstation existed. Designer Jaro Gielens collected more than 380 originally wrapped, battery-powered oldschool computer games. The finest and craziest ones are presented and commented on in Electronic Plastic. The layout is by Lopetz from "Büro Destruct", a latent computer game addict himself, and author Uwe Schütte putsus in the mood through his atmospheric introduction about the period end of the 70s - early 80s. From a cultural point of view, Electronic Plastic documents a bygone era of consumer electronics.Computer games like Blockbuster, Pinball and Race`n´Chase ruled. Today, the "Handhelds" and "Tabletops" fascinate through the wonderful retrodesign of the game shells, packages, logos. Anyone enthusiastic about design, typography and/or computertrash will even just enjoy the boxes and the typefaces used and will acknowledge how consistently the game shells and the packaging perfectly match the games´ concept. Besides that, the manufac-turers - with fine names like Bandai, Bambino, Epoch and Gakken - also managed to develop highly entertaining games with very simple means: a miniscreen and a few small buttons. The "oldschool" computer gadgets were superseded by exchangeable cartridge systems in the middle of the 80s. Handhelds and tabletops disappeared from department stores. Today they are rare collector items which one usually only still gets to see in dusty attics, or in Electronic Plastic.

A nice resource, with great pictures attesting the diversity of interfaces at that time!

Tabletop head-to-head electronic game

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Tabletop handheld is an old type of electronic game of the past that I still find of interest since they provide users with a very simple way to interact. There are no useless buttons, nor hardrive crash. Here are two examples. The first one is Gakken's paint roller: The second is Kenner's Star Wars Electronic Laser Beam: What is nice in these 2 examples is that there used to be simple interface (with a screen in example 1 and without in example 2) to support tabletop head-to-head game. Now everybody is struggling to find ultra hype interfaces (tangible or not), with crazy interactive tables/walls/carpets/bathrooms/put whatever you want here/chairs... I am a bit nostalgic of the diversity/creativity of electronic games at that time: so many companies, so many interfaces, so many colors/forms...

And the best is when there is no screen! It's great to see how designers manage to create nice products without any display (or just 2-3 LEDs, well at that time...). I like the idea of leaving the screen aside. What I would like to claim here is that now that technology could be integrated, it's maybe time to think about interactive stuff not based on the desktop computer paradigm. The point of designing interactive tables for instance is not to support the same processes as those implemented in computers, it's more to support activities...

3D sounds and virtual environment

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Using 3D sound as a navigational aid in virtual environments by R. Gunther, R. Kazman and C. MacGregor. Behaviour & Information Technology, Volume 23, Number 6 / November-December 2004

As current virtual environments are less visually rich than real-world environments, careful consideration must be given to their design to ameliorate the lack of visual cues. One important design criterion in this respect is to make certain that adequate navigational cues are incorporated into complex virtual worlds. In this paper we show that adding 3D spatialized sound to a virtual environment can help people navigate through it. We conducted an experiment to determine if the incorporation of 3D sound (a) helps people find specific locations in the environment, and (b) influences the extent to which people acquire spatial knowledge about their environment. Our results show that the addition of 3D sound did reduce time taken to locate objects in a complex environment. However, the addition of sound did not increase the amount of spatial knowledge users were able to acquire. In fact, the addition of 3D auditory sound cues appears to suppress the development of overall spatial knowledge of the virtual environment.

Why do I blog this? Because I believe that sound awareness is important in VE. This paper provides good references.

Do not put too much faith in mock-ups but...

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A relevant column in ACM's Interactions magazine by Lars Erik Holmquist about the use of mock-ups and prototypes in interaction design. His claim is that it is certainly fruitful in participatory design (where users are brought in very early in the design phase) but "there is a danger with putting too much faith in what is, after all, only a shadow of the real thing". He clarifies his point using the cargo-cult metaphor

What is the difference between the positive and negative uses of representations? (...) cago-cult is a certain form of religious movements started to spring up in the Melanesian islands in the South Pacific. These religions thought that the goods—the cargo—that started to arrive on ships and planes had a divine origin, or more specifically that it came from their ancestors.(...) The Melanesians reasoned that if they could build exact replicas of the white man's artifacts, they would receive the same benefits. What they failed to realize was of course that their replicas, made from bamboo and straw, while superficially similar to the real thing did not capture the essence of the original artifacts.(...) We can define cargo cult design as creating a representation without sufficient knowledge of how it actually would work, or presenting the representation while not acknowledging such knowledge.

Then there is a nice discussion of the concept of representations:

In a design process, representations are a physical embodiment of something that otherwise would only exist as an abstraction. Without getting deep into the epistemological definition, we can say they are the embodiment of knowledge. But mock-ups and prototypes represent knowledge in different ways.(...) However, to give any kind of reliable information, the representation must give a realistic impression of the intended end product. If the representation is based on insufficient knowledge of real-world factors, presenting it to potential customers or testing it with prospective users will not make much sense

He concludes about to use mock-ups and prototypes:

When presenting a mock-up or prototype, the interaction designer should always ask:

  1. Am I fooling myself? Do I really have enough knowledge of the technology and the users to gain valuable insight from this representation, and will it help me to construct the "real thing"?
  2. Am I fooling the layman? Is there a risk that people mistake the representation for the real thing, and thus believe that I have solved problems that I have not?

But the interaction designer should also see the value in representations as generators. Even when the knowledge that goes into a representation seems questionable or even irrelevant, it can still be valuable, as long as the results are treated responsibly. There is value in toying with and the possibilities of technology and being inspired by them; prototypes that may not seem useful can give rise to many unexpected ideas and eventually form the basis of successful products. With the concept of generators comes an explorative attitude to the development of interactive artifacts. Interaction designers should be encouraged to take representations, prototypes and mock-ups of all kinds as starting points for exploration—but never accept them at face value.

An internet table

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Intelligent Vibrations provides an "internet table" specially designed for bars and Internet Cafés :

The whole surface of the table is an interactive TapScreen: clients Interact by tapping with their fingernail, pen, fork or spoon... Customers can place orders for food or drink directly from their seats, choose items to view on the computer, or...go on-line. Water, grease, food and scratches do not disturb the functioning of the TapScreen. It works even when objects are placed on it. Interactive zones on the table can display menus, advertise local businesses or present other information

Picture found on craowiki: What's interesting here is the technology they use which is based on the detection of Bulk Acoustic Waves. It's then a kind of communicating glass.

TViews2: another interactive table

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Ali Mazalek's interactive table is nice: tviews1 and tviews2. Made at Media Fabrics Group (MIT Media Laboratory)

TViews is an integrated display and interaction platform designed for collaborative and social exploration of multimedia applications in the home or classroom environment. It can support a variety of interactive applications, including spatial and multi-viewpoint storytelling systems, narrative simulation games, and media content browsing.

An interesting application is the Tangible Viewpoints project which xplores how physical objects and augmented surfaces can be used as tangible embodiments of different character perspectives in a multiple point-of-view interactive narrative.

After NFC, there is RedTacton: sending data over the surface of the skin

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NFC (Near Field Communication) was already a protocol for very close communication:

It enables the user to exchange all kinds of information, in security, simply by bringing two devices close together. Its short-range interaction over a few centimeters greatly simplifies the whole issue of identification, as there is less confusion when devices can only "hear" their immediate neighbors.

Now there is RedTacton, which according to Taipei Time/The Guardian allows to send data over the surface of the skin at speeds of up to 2Mbps. The backbone could now be used as a broadband personal network.

Using RedTacton-enabled devices, music from an MP3 player in your pocket would pass through your clothing and shoot over your body to headphones in your ears. Instead of fiddling around with a cable to connect your digital camera to your computer, you could transfer pictures just by touching the PC while the camera is around your neck. And since data can pass from one body to another, you could also exchange electronic business cards by shaking hands, trade music files by dancing cheek to cheek, or swap phone numbers just by kissing. (...) It doesn't need transmitters to be in direct contact with the skin -- they can be built into gadgets, carried in pockets or bags, and will work within about 20cm of your body. RedTacton doesn't introduce an electric current into the body -- instead, it makes use of the minute electric field that occurs naturally on the surface of every human body. A transmitter attached to a device, such as an MP3 player, uses this field to send data by modulating the field minutely in the same way that a radio carrier wave is modulated to carry information. (...) An intriguing possibility is that the technology will be used as a sort of secondary nervous system to link large numbers of tiny implanted components placed beneath the skin to create powerful onboard -- or in-body -- computers.

Why do I blog this? vow that's the future, cyberpunk scifi is very close!

RFID tag implanted in one\'s hand

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Some crazy folk implanted a RFID chip in his hand as depicted in this Flickr picture: Here is explained the point of this.

FAQ (frequently asked questions) Q: can't they track you?! A: no. the read range is only 2 inches max. even with a high powered reader, the chip itself does not have the capability to transmit farther than a couple inches tops. this makes it very difficult to scan my RFID chip without me noticing, and it's definitely not possible to scan it just by me walking by a sensor or something. It has to be pretty deliberate.

Q: why the hand, and your left hand to boot? A: well, I reach for my car door handle with my left hand, and I can get used to opening my front door with my left as well. plus, being right handed, my left hand is far less likely to get crushed, mutilated, or otherwise damaged... and I'm sure granules of crushed glass, silicon, and other metals could cause health complications, aside from having a crushed hand.

Q: did you do it yourself? A: hell no. a client of mine is a doctor and we traded services.

Well, it's crazy :( Some odd experiment...