INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY 2006:

ACM SIGCHI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY 2006 is going to happen in June, 14-16 in Hollywood, CA:

The field of computer entertainment technology has aroused great interest recently amongst researchers and developers in both academic and industrial / business fields as it is duly recognized as showing high promise of bringing on exciting new forms of human computer interaction. Now deemed deserving of both serious academic research, as well as major industry and business uptake, techniques used in computer entertainment are also seen to translate into advances in research work ranging from industrial training, collaborative work, novel interfaces, novel multimedia, network computing and ubiquitous computing. 

The purpose of this conference is to bring together academic and industry researchers, artists and designers and computer entertainment developers and practitioners, to address and advance the research and development issues related to computer entertainment. 

Prospective authors are now invited to submit Papers/Posters/Demos electronically via the conference website: 
http://www.ace2006.org by 15th February 2006

Why do I blog this? this conference is a very good event in the sphere of innovative gaming technology

Cell phone usage and sleep

Research Proves Mobile Phones and Sleep Do Go Together, astudy conducted by Swinburne's Brain Sciences Institute examined the impact of mobile phone use immediately before bedtime on the brain and sleep patterns:

The quality of sleep for Australia's 12 million mobile phone users is not affected by calls on mobiles before bedtime, according to the world's largest independent study into mobile phones and sleep quality. Although the results showed there were differences in the brain's electrical activity in the initial part of sleep as a result of using a mobile before bedtime, this had no affect on sleep variables such as the time it takes to get to sleep, the length of time asleep or whether the person slept lightly or deeply and therefore does not affect the overall quality of a person's sleep. (...)

PhD student, Sarah Loughran, undertook the study and said the results indicate that using a mobile phone before going to sleep does not appear to influence whether a person has a good night's sleep. (...) The study confirms the results of a previous study carried out in Switzerland involving a smaller number of participants.

A social itune?

Fabien just sent me this tool that seems highly interesting: MyStrands, a kind-of 'social itune':

• Explore Recommended Songs: Songs are recommended based on the song that is actively playing and recently played songs. You may read about a song and in most cases listen to a clip by clicking the arrow which will take you to the songs homepage at the MusicStrands website.
• Explore Recommended Tags: Tags of interests are recommended realtime based on recently played songs. You may explore music related to the tag by clicking on the tag of interest.
• Publish Playlists: You may tag and publish your active playlist by clicking the edit button next to your playlist tags. When you tag a playlist, the playlist is uploaded to the website and published.
• Tag songs: You may add/edit tags for your active song clicking the edit button. When you add a tag, the tag is also added to the MusicStrands community for others to explore.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in social sharing phenomenon like this, besides I find it could be a powerful way to discover new something. I believe a lot in social navigation recommender systems like this.

Technorati Tags: mystrands

Noise sensitive project at the lab

At the lab, JB Haué and Guillaume Raymondon are working on a very interesting project: a noise-sensitive table. There is a blog about the project there. The table is meant to perceive nearby users' noise and diplay various things based on it (by LEDs or a beamer). Currently the prototypes are really ROUGH (but nice from my point of view, maybe it's because I like this sort of 'bricolage picture'):

Why do I blog this? We will ask students of our Computer Supported Collaboration Work course to test various configurations with it, that's why I follow the project closely. I am looking forward to see what will happen

Philosophy of Bullshits

Might be good to read this book:

"On Bullshit" (Harry G. Frankfurt)

Mary Park describes it as (editorial review from Amazon.com):

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit," Harry G. Frankfurt writes, in what must surely be the most eyebrow-raising opener in modern philosophical prose. "Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted." This compact little book, as pungent as the phenomenon it explores, attempts to articulate a theory of this contemporary scourge--what it is, what it does, and why there's so much of it. The result is entertaining and enlightening in almost equal measure. It can't be denied; part of the book's charm is the puerile pleasure of reading classic academic discourse punctuated at regular intervals by the word "bullshit." More pertinent is Frankfurt's focus on intentions--the practice of bullshit, rather than its end result. Bullshitting, as he notes, is not exactly lying, and bullshit remains bullshit whether it's true or false. The difference lies in the bullshitter's complete disregard for whether what he's saying corresponds to facts in the physical world: he "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Developing technology interventions to activate community spaces and public life

It might be a good talk (at the Future Design Days): "Play and the Everyday – Developing technology interventions to activate community spaces and public life" by Margot Jacobs.

Whether one lives in the city, its suburbs or a small town, the changes affecting everyday environments and their public spaces are vast and significant in our lives. In light of this, the usefulness of analyzing and understanding this phenomenon becomes quite evident.

The key question is no longer how to use technology to support work-oriented tasks or how to be more effective. Instead, the focus has shifted to how technology can support what lies beyond utilitarian demands, exploring for instance emotionally driven human needs such as supportive social systems, sustainability and even desires, such as expression, communication, and reflection. In this era, we should explore new design philosophies, combining information technologies with values of a more aesthetic nature, subtlety, and personal meaning that support happy accidents, serendipitous interactions, and the ebbs and flows of our evolving lifestyles. In sum, the play in the everyday.

‘Public Play Spaces’ was initiated at the Interactive Institute as a means of investigating the surge of computing technologies in the public arena and what the implications are for our society and culture. Essentially, ‘Public Play Spaces’ is a platform for creative work exploring the playful, emotional and appropriate incorporation of technology into everyday public life, focusing on developing both innovative design methods and experimental prototypes for social interventions in public space. Within this framework, we have taken the opportunity to reflect on, question and reexamine places, relationships and qualities for the design of technology in the public sphere. This requires that we ask different questions, apply new methods and try alternative means of prototyping.

During the Play and the Everyday workshop we will walk through a design process with a focus on a particular public space drawing on the approach and methods used within the ‘Public Play Spaces’ platform including rapid prototyping and public interventions. The purpose will be to explore new tactics for how technologies might offer critique, breaking down current accepted technological practices and challenging people to reflect as well as to add new layers for expression and participation. Outcomes will include prototypes, conceptual design proposals and use scenarios.

Awful baby carrier

(via A Welsh View), an atrocious and harmful baby carrier (featured here):

I am speechless

Free and open source tool to analyse video/audio data

I'm currently testing Transana, a free and open-source software for qualitative analysis, developed at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

Transana is software for professional researchers who want to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana lets you analyze and manage your data in very sophisticated ways. Transcribe it, identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share your analysis with colleagues. The result is a new way to focus on your data, and a new way to manage large collections of video and audio files and clips.

Transana runs on Windows in both single-user and multi-user versions. A Macintosh version is in development.

The beta version for Mac OS X I am testing seems to be pretty good.

P&V status

I currently feel like this:

An account of location-based games multiple play

A good read: Barkhuus, L., Chalmers, M., Tennent, P., Hall, M., Bell, M. and Brown, B. Picking Pockets on the Lawn: The Development of Tactics and Strategies in a Mobile Game. Proceedings of UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan. The paper tackles the issue of how the experience of multiple games changed they way users played with a location-based game and how this led to more complex form of collaboration and competition over time.

Abstract: This paper presents Treasure, an outdoor mobile multiplayer game inspired by Weiser’s notion of seams, gaps and breaks in different media. Playing Treasure involves movement in and out of a wi-fi network, using PDAs to pick up virtual ‘coins’ that may be scattered outside network coverage. Coins have to be uploaded to a server to gain game points, and players can collaborate with teammates to double the points given for an upload. Players can also steal coins from opponents. As they move around, players’ PDAs sample network signal strength and update coverage maps. Reporting on a study of players taking part in multiple games, we discuss how their tactics and strategies developed as their experience grew with successive games. We suggest that meaningful play arises in just this way, and that repeated play is vital when evaluating such games.

Why do I blog this? this is really close to what we do with our location-based games experiments (the methodology is quite similar, we just put more emphasis on quantitative data lately but we're also focusing on more qualitative insights). The strength of this paper lays in the multiple play: how repeated trials can be used to inform practitioners of a good game design.

Applications of ontologies in the field of pervasive computing

"Smart Artifacts as a Key Component of Pervasive Games" by Michal Roj (workshop paper for the Workshop on Gaming Applications in Pervasive Computing Environments 2004).

In this paper we present how smart artifacts can become a crucial element in pervasive games. In our vision, ‘magical’ artifacts play two roles: first, they are very attractive game gadgets (such as magic wands), second, they are able to handle the game (implementing the main game logic). We claim that in some cases no infrastructure would be needed to play a game. Artifacts, as we present here, are carried by players (or lying somewhere in the game area) and communicating through a wireless network. The vision has been inspired by a number of ideas and ongoing projects on smart devices and middleware platforms.

Why do I blog this? Michal is interested in by applications of ontologies in the field of pervasive computing, and, in a wider view, applications of ontologies in telecommunications. The topic of his PhD thesis is: “A methodology for ontology-driven programming artifacts in pervasive computing”. Even though his research is more related to architectural concerns

Mologogo: a free application for GPS enabled cell phones

Mologogo is a new and free application meant to track stuff/persons (alpha service):

"Mod a GPS enabled Nextel and fauxjack yourself or your car, or your kid, or a big dog, or an elephant. We really, really want to track an elephant. Mologogo is a free service that will track a "friends" GPS enabled cell phone from another phone(gps not required) or on the web. It currently works on pretty much any Nextel phone with Java and GPS - even a $60 no-contract Boost Mobile phone. Mologogo is totally "alpha" right now, but improving rapidly. It is was built as a Web 2.0 app, so expect integration with sites like Flickr, Upcoming.org, Judy's book, and lots more RubyOnRails/AJAX-y goodness added to our UI. And with our soon to be released API, you'll be able to access your own location data in other sites."

Technorati Tags: mologogo

'Table de synchronisation'

(via) At the Paris FIAC 2005 there is this intriguing and somehow fascinatin table called 'Table de synchronisation', a project by Suchan Kinoshita (more about the project on his galery's website):

Suchan Kinoshita who grew up in Japan emigrated to Cologne at the age of twenty in order to pursue a musical education at the institute where the contemporary composer Maurizio Kagel was teaching. Later, she worked for a theatre company in which members alternately assumed the role of actor, stage designer and director. Therefore, it is no coincidence that her work can be situated in many fringe areas: inside or outside the walls of the exhibition, with or without an active input by the public, recognisable as a work of art or camouflaged as such. For Ravenstein Galleries she create a specific environment, a "dépot de mots" like a storage and a table of sounds like a sound kitchen.

Why do I blog this? I like the concept of a 'sound kitchen' and they was it's represented is so weird that I find it cool.

Technorati Tags: Suchan Kinoshita

Mobile Gaming Forecast

Gamasutra featured a very relevant piece about the future of mobile gaming. It's actually a compilation of viewpoints made by Quang Hong. Here area few selection impressions I found relevant about the very questions "What interests you most about the prospects for cell phone gaming, and what innovations and trends do you think all game professionals should keep a close eye on in the mobile gaming market?"

I think the last thing to keep an eye on would be the prevalence of 3D applications. I personally don't think 3D really has a place on mobile (except for the “wow!” factor), but will wait to see where the consumers fall on this issue. It just seems to me that many big companies look at mobile as a natural extension of console. That concepts that work in their current medium will transfer directly to this new one. I don't believe this is the case. (Nick Smolney)

The interesting thing about the prospects for cell phone gaming is that we as an industry do not yet exist in the hearts and minds of the consumer. (John Szeder, Mofactor, Inc)

am most interested in the uniqueness of mobile devices and how they can be used to enhance gaming and make it different from fixed gaming. When people think about cell phones, they think about community and moving around. This leads to different types of multiplayer (given shorter play time and less bandwidth) and the possibilities of location-based games. Most people think of location-based games as these hardcore mobile games, but they do not have to be (Anonymous)

Why do I blog this? among all the statements presented in this article, I picked up those 3 points because I find them close to the reality. Mobile gaming will work if 1) it's not taken as a follow-up of game console (then 3D mobile games are a wrong path) 2) it should be taken as a new and unique phenomenon still to be understood in order to create new gaming experience 3) cell phones unique features (voice, geolocation, ptt, bluetooth...) could be seen as a basis to meet this end.

Rooftop tennis court

I really enjoy Arno Piroud's street artwork. One of is best piece is definitely this tennis court painted on a rooftop in Lyon, France:

Photo featured in the great book 'Art de rue' by Kanardo.

Placecasting

Via fredhouse, another neologism: placecasting:

'placecasting': networked publishing of digital media (esp. audio) that is logically associated with a physical location, to be experienced by suitably equipped people in that location.

fredhouse gives the example of the work did at Mobile Bristol (for instance this paper). Previously we refered to this concept by location-based annotations (be it a written postit/message or an audio note).

Of course, this lead me to type 'placecasting' in google, then I stumbled across this placecasting.com website which is just an appetizer:

Placecasting: Broadcast anywhere. Experience anytime.

Let's talk about • Podcasts • Vidcasts • Webcasts • Gamecasts? Making them, getting them, living with them.

Stay tuned for more info.

Ok we'll stay tuned ;)

Blooks = book based on a blog

Just got this email (I thought it was a spam) about an intriguing new concept, connected to the blooker prize event (a contest that to honor blooks, a new, hybrid literary form and the world's fastest-growing kind of book.):

(blook n. blook. A printed and bound book, based on a blog (cf. web log) or website; a new stage in the life-cycle of content, if not a new category of content and a new dawn for the book itself. cf. The Lulu Blooker Prize, ("The Blooker"), a literary prize, founded 2005, for blooks. [der. Eng. book, a bound collection of sheets of paper; blog (abbrev. web log, an internet journal, diary or personal website)])

"BLOOKS" ARE THE FASTEST GROWING NEW KIND OF BOOK– AND THE HOTTEST NEW PUBLISHING AND ONLINE TREND"

AFTER BLOOKS WILL COME "FLOOKS" – FILMS BASED ON BLOOKS

Digital culture and mainstream innovation

A very relevant article in the last issue of IEEE Multimedia is entitled "Digital Culture, Art, and Technology" by Andreas Broeckmann, the Transmediale art director. Very close to regine's point (as she presented in various places like reboot) which was "Why executives should go to media art festivals". In this article, Broeckmann tackles this very issue:

how the artistic work that engages technological developments has moved from the margins of society to being intricately linked with systems and themes that are economically, politically, and socially important. Multimedia itself has seen a similar shift (from specialized to general users), but is the way multimedia technology is being developed tightly linked to social and cultural issues? Or are technical researchers and developers still working at the margins of society?

Why do I blog this? I am also a proponent of this approach and it's interesting to see that more and more voices are supporting it.

Defensive space / dispositif spatial légitime

A very interesting article in french about defensive space: Nuisible ? (by Jean Rivière and Olivier Thomas). The starting point of the article is this impressive device, meant to prevent people from seating on a shop window: The concept of defensive space is used to describe an area that has been made a “Zone of Defence” by the design characteristics that create it: preventing people from doing something (seating, skating...). The french equivalent for this is called 'dipositif spatial légitime':

L’expression de « dispositif spatial légitime », proposée par Michel Lussault (2003), peut ici servir de grille d’analyse. Ce dernier en donne la définition suivante : « Agencement spatial produit par un (des) acteur(s) à capital social élevé, doté d’une fonction opérationnelle et normative. […] Le dispositif est une configuration stabilisée dans laquelle l’espace joue un double rôle : celui d’opérateur de traduction qui permet la transformation et la mise en scène de faits bruts en problème(s) social(aux) et politique(s). […] et celui d’un support de délégation, à savoir un objet spatial organisé — matériel et chargé de valeurs — sur lequel on se repose pour qu’une action atteigne ses objectifs ».

About this topic: Michel Lussault, 2003, « Dispositif spatial légitime », in Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés, sous la direction de Jacques Lévy et Michel Lussault., Paris, Éditions Belin, 1033 pages, pp. 266-267.

Connected pasta I already blogged about this concept here, with regard to antiskateboard devices.

WiFi/Bluetooth and the toy industry

Interesting report (one of the drawback is that it's 2 years old) about the integration of WiFi and Bluetooth in the toy industry. I think it's a relevant issue since toys are more and more interactive.

There are many ways in which children can interact with toys beyond the tradition touch oriented play. Electronics in toys range from simple button activation to Infrared and Radio Frequency technologies. Traditional remote control cars using RF have been around for many years, but now Infrared is being used to transmit control information to toys. Clicker technology and RF tagging have also been used to detect elements in near proximity and enhance the play pattern with “smart” reactions. Toys have also been coupled to the personal computer, incorporating either clamp on keyboard devices, or direct input. (...) With both clicker and tagging technology, the child's play with the toy is enhanced through the sensing of other accessories.

The document describes some potential scenarios but...

Although it was predicted that bluetooth toys would be the hit for the 2001 Christmas season (Walker), the technology has been slow to catch on in other consumer markets, leading to prices that are still too high. With the current technologies used in sensing and interaction in the toy industry, the integration of bluetooth and WiFi into toys seems like the next logical step.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in knowing how the merge between toys and new kinds of technologies like wireless protocols might give birth to new applications.