That's something I'm interested in (see here). I found two examples:
That seems to be good setp! I am still expecting MIDI guitar to control your WoW character ;)
I am late on this but I like the idea: Pokia proposes interesting retro phones interface to be plugged into your bleeding edge cell phone!
I find this interesting since mobile tech (as a subset of technology in general) is sometimes frightening for lots of users, here they offer a funny way to get back to the past. I would like to know more about current use of those old-school handset!!!
I really appreciate zengestrom's take about sociale software. He adresses the use of thos services. This question always bugged me. The starting point of his discussion is the fact that some people (like russell beattie are linking out of such services.
the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (like I do) instead of social networks.
It's indeed very relevant to connect this to the activity theory since it underline the very notion of 'objects' or goals that people want to achive by performing an activity (in this context, registering, logging and linking). He quotes examples of object-oriented social software that are obviously successful like:
Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects.
He also points the problem with FOAF:
Sometimes the 'social just means people' fallacy gets built into technology, like in the case of FOAF, which is unworkable because it provides a format for representing people and links, but no way to represent the objects that connect people together.
And even though I agree with this from the activity theory point of view, I would argue that FOAF should not be seen as a service but instead as an architecture on which designers can rely to design services. It might be possible to design object-based social software using the FOAF XML grammar. Other interesting things about this in his post!
Blisterent "is developing and publishing mobile location–based games and entertainment products to wireless carriers around the world." They have their own location application platform called LAP:
The LAP provides mobile content developers with an efficient and simple way to deliver their products to mobile operators. In turn, the mobile operators now have access to a location platform that can help expand their product offering to customers by increasing data traffic on their networks. The LAP provides these companies with new technology and more product distribution channels.
In terms of games, they developed the game Swordfish I already mentioned here.
(via), the bluetooth rifle by USC student John Hering:
John Hering, a student at the University of Southern California, has developed the BlueSniper rifle, a tool that looks like a big gun which can "attack" a wireless device from more than a mile away -- several times the 328-foot maximum range of Bluetooth.Hering, cofounder of a wireless security think tank called Flexilis, says he uses the "rifle" only to determine security vulnerabilities, not to actually hack wireless devices to obtain personal information. (...) Hering says his goal is to boost awareness of the vulnerabilities in Bluetooth. But in laboratory testing, Hering says, his company has been able to access SMS messages, passwords, phonebook contacts and camera phone photos from Bluetooth-enabled phones.
Of course my favorite part concerned the devices, especially with regard to the design POV: how earlier designers thought about the affordances, the design, the forms, the colors... Here area few devices:Bell's phone:
Adler's phone: the first mobile phone:
The first Minitel (1983):
The first Matra visophone (1982):
A Radiocom 2000, a famous french portable phone (not mobile because you cannot put it in your pocket) :
There was also a spectrometer to see a concrete representation of radio waves depending on their wavelength (FM - TV - GSM 900 - DAB - GSM 1800 - UMTS):
It reminded me this "Tuneable city" project where people could see a concrete representation of the radio waves in a certain are (here in the exhibit it' just the spectrum at a certain location) but I though it could be nice to have a device to see colored forms (depending on their type (= wavelength). Like for instance red forms for WiFi and blue for UMTS. This might be useful for not so common waves (I don't care to have a representation of FM or GSM which are everywhere).
This dummy head is used to calculate dosimetry (according to wikipedia: the measurement of doses in matter and tissue from ionizing radiation); this head is called SAM (acronym of something I forgot). It's made up to measure the SAR = energy absorbed by a body receiving mobile phone emissions. This head adopts the morphology of the human head and is filled with a gel that "possesses the electrical characteristics of the human brain" (vow our head is filled with gel, isn' it?).
The most interesting part of the exhibit is all the artifacts presented there. The point of this show is to explain to clarify the infrastructure of mobile telephony, explaining to people what are the 'backbones' and the functions of all the devices (from the phone mass to the cell phone as well as radio waves). I am not so much a technofreak with regard to infrastructure concerns (for instance I do not really care about otpic fibers, servers or computer chips). However sometimes it's refreshing to see our technology works. And on which concrete artifacts mobile services rely on.
For instance, it's the first time I see this:
Also known as "leaky feeders", those antennas are radiating cables intented to improve covergae in confined spaces such as roads; railway tunnels or car parks. They covers frequencies including GSM 900/1800, UMTS, energency services and FM broadcast (no tv :( ).
The most interesting part of the exhibit is all the artifacts presented there. The point of this show is to explain to clarify the infrastructure of mobile telephony, explaining to people what are the 'backbones' and the functions of all the devices (from the phone mass to the cell phone as well as radio waves). I am not so much a technofreak with regard to infrastructure concerns (for instance I do not really care about otpic fibers, servers or computer chips). However sometimes it's refreshing to see our technology works. And on which concrete artifacts mobile services rely on.
For instance, it's the first time I see this:
Also known as "leaky feeders", those antennas are radiating cables intented to improve covergae in confined spaces such as roads; railway tunnels or car parks. They covers frequencies including GSM 900/1800, UMTS, energency services and FM broadcast (no tv :( ).
I am currently participating to an experiment/ergo-ethnological study for a big telephone company in France. I am in Paris at la cité des sciences et de l'industrie. I attented the exhibit about mobile telephony which is an interesting account of how radiotelephony evolved from the beginning to nowaday's UMTS terminal. The following posts will show various stuff I found relevant here.
An interesting account in The Guardian about mobile games:
There's a palpable feeling that mobile games are about to go big. Established publishers such as THQ are creating mobile divisions (...) Mobile phone gaming has yet to deliver a killer application. And before it does, the hurdles preventing this burgeoning market from reaching its full potential have to be removed. There are 60m handsets in the UK, 25% of which have colour screens and are capable of playing games. It's a potentially huge market, says iFone's marketing manager, Enda Carey: "The numbers are just frightening — in 12 months, everyone in the UK will have a colour Java-capable phone, and in countries like India and China, the potential is huge".
The article raises the problem of mobile game on cellphones:
When games are available, they often only work on a selection of handsets, which limits the potential audience.
Handsets also often remain "hot" for only a few months, so by the time a game is written — the development cycle is between six and nine months — the handset may be obsolete. And games themselves are not well designed for the phone's form factor, which is by necessity vertical and by preference small, while a game-pad is typically horizontal (...) This is a considerable array of obstacles, but the mobile gaming market is only four years old, and is changing rapidly. The problem of usability is being addressed with innovative form factors, such as Sony Ericsson's S700i, the keypad of which swivels to facilitate the ergonomic advantage of horizontal control combined with a vertical screen.
What is amazin is this:
The games industry wants to extend established console game brands on to mobiles, but figures show users prefer "casual" games, such as Pool and Tetris. (...) iFone has just released Lemmings. It is a port of an old Amiga game that is very addictive and ideally suited to mobile devices. But, says Vout: "Killer apps must be exclusive to a format. Lemmings is basically a clone of the Amiga version, so while it's great, it's not the killer app.
Yes that's what the users want! How to engage them in other scenarios (alternate reality gaming appears to be an interesting option)
I'll be in Paris till Friday, meeting some people, trying some mobile applications and giving some talks at R&D labs.
Nice new concept from the urban dictionnary:14:59: It comes from the "15 minutes of fame" catchphrase coined by Andy Warhol. A celebrity that is 14:59 is on the cusp of losing their relevance and falling out of fame.
"Madonna's attempts to become a children's writer is a sure sign that she has gone 14:59."
"Democratizing Innovation" by Professor Eric von Hippel (MIT)The discussion will be introduced by Professor Christopher Tucci (EPFL) Where: ODYSSEA Building, EPFL When: May 2, from 17:00 to 18:30 (with reception to follow) Eric von Hippel is Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management
This seems to be brand new: Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media:
Games & Culture is a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due March 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. The journal will serve as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking and germinal work in the field of game studies.Games & Culture's scope will include the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of perspectives, including textual analysis; political economy; cultural studies; ethnography; critical race studies; gender studies; media studies; public policy; international relations; and communication studies.
Judging from the associate editor, it seems pretty valuable. I don't know why the psychological dimension is missing (for instance social and cognitive psychology are very keen on that topic...)
A very nice and calm project by David Lu, Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine: Fingerprint maze. The point of this installation is to let one wander through a 3D labyrinth made from one's own scanned fingerprint. They use this hand crafted fingerprint scanner:
This is how it works:
The scanned fingerprint is saved to another computer running the Fingerprint Maze game. An OS X application, written in C++ and OpenGL, picks up fingerprint files and renders them in 3D. For each dark pixel it finds in the image, it places a translucent cube in virtual space. The labyrinth can be navigated from above, or explored at ground level, as seen here. What we made is something between copy machine art and generative architecture. At left is what resulted when Amy kissed the surface of the scanner. I saw this project as an opportunity to encourage reflection about fingerprinting and identity, which are very interesting issues in the current political climate, in a very neutral, understated way—a non traditional, non-violent video game.
A nice paper about the Urban Tapestries project: Urban Tapestries: Experimental Ethnography, Technological Identities and Place, an LSE Electronic Working Paper by Roger Silverstone and Zoetanya Sujon.
Urban Tapestries provides a mobile location-based platform to connect people with the places they inhabit through their stories, experiences and observations. Currently based on an 802.11b mesh network in the heart of London, ordinary people author their stories of the city and embed them in the places that inspire them. Others who are logged into the system can read these stories, author their own and engage the largely invisible, multidimensional layers accumulating in the city. Our research asks if people use UT in meaningful and interesting ways. Drawing from theories of everyday life and urban space, we have developed experimental ethnography as a method for investigating the relationships between communication technologies, users and the socio-geographic territories around them. Respondents are asked to play with an early Urban Tapestries prototype and this research explores what they do, their technological identities, their relationship to place and the meanings they generate. Urban Tapestries facilitates the negotiation of boundaries and we found that it does augment notions of connectivity – to place and to those within that place. However, our research revealed that some do not interpret this connectivity positively.
Why do I blog this? I find interesting to have a usage analysis of a specific locative media. The study if very relevant (I appreciated the fact that they took into account the level of technological comfort which is very important if you want to deploy this kind of tech at a large level). The content analysis of the 'pockets' is nice as well:
Perhaps the most interesting part is the conclusion in which they extract the most significant results (I quote):
What we have found and suggested during the course of the study are a number of dimensions of this problematic of socio-technical change, dimensions which are particular to the affordances offered by UT.
- The first is the question of the contradictory and unstable relations that individuals have with their technologies. Everyday life is, albeit variably as our respondents have illustrated, dependent on a range of increasingly portable technologies that are both enabling and disabling of social interaction; that are both liberating and constraining.
- The second is the issue of identity. Marshall McLuhan famously described media technologies as extensions of ourselves. (...) Our research suggests how important such a notion is, and in what ways these extensions are, or can become, crucial parts of our identities, as projections of the self, as well as props and supports in our struggle to sustain ourselves as viable social beings. (...) But understanding technology as a constituent of identity is key if we are to further an understanding of how such technologies as UT could develop, or indeed how indeed one might develop UT in the future.
- Mobile telephony is both an extension of self and an intrusion. UT technology likewise. Its essential double-edge will need to be managed if it is to have a value in the enhancement of social life.
- a number of them [users -n] talked about UT as, possibly, an opportunity for play. And the idea of playing in and with the city appears, at least to some, attractive. (...) UT was seen as toy-like, and as such possibly marginal to the real issues of the everyday. [indeed, see anne galloway's work]
- This leads to the final issue. The issue of place. UT is a technology that engages directly with space and place. It offers a way of fixing location, a kind of marking of the city with meaning. (..) UT is a way of marking that significance both for the individual and, in principal, for the collectivity – both the ad hoc collectivity of passing tourists and the more grounded collectivity of neighbourhood and community. [here see timo arnall's work]
I also liek the conclusion "The research reported here, then, suggests that technologies are never less than social. They emerge from social action, and they continue to be dependent on social action if they are to have any meaning or usefulness.". That is definitely the point here with today's technology. Such technologies will work only if a critical mass of people use it, the real power will emerge from this.
On a different note, I am stilll waiting locative media studies much more focused on smaller scales group. Like for instance how small groups of people use them to do something jointly. And what would be the socio-cognitive consequences of using such information. Well of course, it's closer to my phd topic ;)
Via reg:exp, Oroboro by Björn Hartmann and Jennifer Carlile is:
OROBORO is a novel collaborative controller which focuses on musical performance as social experience by exploring synchronized actions of two musicians operating a single instrument. Each performer uses two paddle mechanisms – one for hand orientation sensing and one for servo-motor actuated feedback. We introduce a haptic mirror in which the movement of one performer’s sensed hand is used to induce movement of the partner’s actuated hand and vice versa.
This is an amazing example of how tangible interaction techniques coudl support innovative joint activities. Applied to other context (i.e. ... video games) this would be nice.
Some people are wondering about the name of this blog, some others are going further, trying to think about which blog title might be the best (descriptive blog name, named after the author, something linked to the subject or off-the wall like here). Maybe it's time to tell you the story of this blog's name. Actually I did not think about it myself. It's more related to my weird foods habits: I used to cook some pasta with vinegar (+ tuna). At that time, my italian roomate/colleague Mauro Cherubini was so scared that he ended up running around in our former flat praising the Lord about this bloody french eating his country's pasta with aceto (i.e. italien for vinegar). Then it struck a chord. I was certainly not about to quit my odd food habit. However it reminded me the content of this blog: both serious stuff (about human-computer interaction, user expirience, locative media, tech stuff, futuristic trend, innovation) and weird things (about digital culture, street art, pictures, crazy toys or things...).
So that's the story I think the title matched pretty well the content of the blog... Sometimes I a bit pissed by this mix and I want to create different blog about each of the topics but I feel like it's funny like that. I am just wondering about how people make sense of all this mess.
On a personal note, it's a long time I have not cook pasta with vinegar.