Mobile phone social networking system that trigger animal noises

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An intriguing location-based services: True Blue Love:

True Blue Love is a mobile phone social networking experience, designed to explore the politics behind intimate phone-based relations. Designed as a program for mobile phones; each participant enters into the program the characteristics of their ideal sexual mate, chosen from a series of preset selections. While the program is running, every time another phone comes within range, a love metric is calculated which is a representation of how close the incoming person matches the participant's ideal mate. If the match is close, the phone will emit a raucous mating call that will be unique to that participant. (...) The ridiculous sounds should function as social ice-breakers, and the unwilling couple may want to discuss what it is that they have in common that triggered the noise.

7 books to read according to Howard Rheingold

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Howard Rheingold wrote a clever piece in the last issue of Strategy Business. It's called Best Business Books of 2005: Seven Ways to See What’s Next (registration required). He presents 7 books he considers as important for future forecast:

These books are at best sketches of what aspects of future life might look like. It’s up to you to weigh the authors’ insights against their biases. But if any of these books seem particularly contrary to your own values, pay closer attention to them: If you want to see clues to what hasn’t happened yet, you need to recognize the meaning of what is right in front of you in new ways. Sometimes, that means looking through the eyes of those with whom you disagree. Precisely because their views conflict with yours, they might be seeing aspects of reality that you fail to see, refuse to see, or don’t want to see.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson

In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World by John Thackara

The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler

Massive Change by Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries

Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means To Be Human by Joel Garreau

A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age by Daniel H. Pink

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman

Having read some of them, I find interesting the way Rheingold describes what he found which findings are relevant to his concerns.

Video games and libraries symposium

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What an interesting connection: gaming in libraries is a symposium about gaming, learning and libraries:

This exciting two-day event will bring together librarians, researchers, and educators from around the country to learn about and discuss the potential of and the issues related to the video-gaming generation and the use of gaming in public, academic, and school libraries. In particular we will focus on the learning aspect of gaming and how libraries can capitalize on it.

Les Gasser's talk seems to be compelling:

Both the content and the cultural roles of libraries are being re-stimulated by new media, new online cultural forms, and new trends in information economics. We'll look into how games, gamers, and game cultures provide a fascinating window on these provocations, and illustrate many of the challenges and opportunities emerging in a new landscape for libraries.

Constance Steinkuehler's talk about "The Gaming Generation and Libraries: Intersections", Beth Gallaway's "What Libraries Can Do for Gamers Other than Programming", or George Needham's "What Can Librarians Learn from Gamers?" seems also relevant to my interests. I hope there will be some proceedings.

Glucoboy: a glucose meter for gameboy

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Finally, I found a picture of the Glucoboy, a glucose meter that can be inserted into a Nintendo GAMEBOY.

The product operates independent of the video game system but downloads video game programs that are contained within its circuitry into the GAMEBOY as a reward for maintaining good blood sugar control. With the patient being responsible for so much of proper diabetes management the GLUCOBOY® carries an essential dual role, providing accurate medical diagnosis for the disease as well as an incentive delivery platform which serves as a key portal for obtaining patient-critical medical data; the foundation for fully automated, individualized, disease management program.

Comments about serious games

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What is crazy here is that the largest number of projects are based on false premises like what is good to extract from games is 3D environments, cool in-game features or (again) using 3D environments as real-world look-alike. Of course it's part of the experience but the most important thing in games is what the first speaker (jesper juul) explained: video games is a matter of having (or not) goals. Players then enjoy the challenge of working towards this goal (and if the challenge matches the player, he or she's gonna be in the state of flow). Also it can be about ignoring the goals and still getting an experience. What we see in lots of serious game projects is that there is an overemphasis on the environment, the game levels used to (re)create the real world. That's why there are tons of boring 3world in which participants have to play the role of firefighters/military/nurses... But hey! this is not a video game... Having little characters on a 3D levels and an in-game menu to move them is clearly not a good way to let people reach a state of flow so that they can learn how to fix the situation. Furthermore, from an educational technology point of view, the underlying pedagogical model (or even the pedagocial scenario) are clearly undefined. I am always amazed by the belief that a new media (like radio, tv, the web, video games) might be the solution to every problems. It's based on the assumption that the intrinsical properties of them media may support learning. The most important part is not those properties (3d rendering, cool features...) but instead what players/learners can do: their interaction between them or with the world, the activity they are engaged in, the pedagogical scenario they are involved in... For that matter, Jim Piggot's presentation about the game his company (TPLD) develops was interesting. They work on multi-users projects that aims at 'collaborative training': training people to collaborate achieving a common goal. In this case, the emphasis is put on collaborative dynamics and processes trough a very simple interface which engages players in simple activities. Caspian Learning's engine also has a good approach, trying to rely educational or cognitive psychology theories like Bloom's taxonomy of educational activities. They also stated their commitments towards attesting the validity of their products as well as their integration into existing settings (it's impossible to use Civilization in a 45minutes history lesson).

Anyway, I need to express that this is not so general, there is just a trend. There are however relevant applications that are based on interesting game features. Finally, I was really interested in how Ben Sawyer defined the serious games. He definitely expands them to all the applications that use video games in other context than just playing. Among what he said, here is a short list of pertinent serious game application, not so-tightly related to learning:

- consoles as low coast videoconf systems - pain distraction - LAN parties as team building exercises - general purpose GPU programming - machinima (game based movie marking) - game devs input on vheicle and interfaces - polling method: logging gameplay choices - economic research in online worlds (games as a petri dish for economics) - exergaming and rehabitainment (sony kinetic, using eyetoy for exercises) - PostTraumaticStressDisorder and AttentionDeficitD treatments - phobia treatments - unrealart.co.uk: artistes using game tools for artwork creation - Communication in various context (medicine, soldiers.....): VoIP chat via wifi for DS, web browser and RSS feeds to PSP, Xbox live with soldiers, in game chat in onlie games and worlds, eyetoy phonecam and xbox tv chat, p2p handwriting chat with DS

I played the party pooper here but this is really my feelings. What strikes me is that video games is taken as a miracle solution to do training or elearning by using platform that takes game aspects that are not really relevant to meet this end. I don't even mention the fact that serious game client wants packaged solution that may allow their learner/player to learn as fast as possible using the platform. This does not really work like that! To connect what Jesper Juul and Ben Sawyer said, I appreciated this comment by Ben: "beginning a news job is like beginning a new job in the sense that you have to figure out what you have to do".

Location-Based Services failures

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Even though the LBS concept is still trying to finds its way, some already dropped it, as attested by this account from the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment tradeshow in San Francisco:

While location-based services are finding some applications with enterprises, they have failed in the consumer market.

"Finding a friend is fine maybe once," said J H Kah, global vice president at South Korea Telecom. "We do make a good revenue from it, but it's still a small portion [of our overall business]." Mahesh Prasad, president of Indian mobile operator Reliance, added: "There are no compelling applications for consumers. Find a friend is not what I call a compelling application for people to pay for." (...) The services are a typical example of businesses getting over excited about a technology while failing to look at the usage case for consumers, argued Graeme Ferguson, director of global content development at Vodafone.

Why do I blog this? yes the Vodafone's guy is so right: there used to be a technological frenziness; for that matter, the claim that " services are finding some applications with enterprises, they have failed in the consumer market" is utterly crazy: what's the need of having applications if there is no consumer market!??? This means that they implement services first and then they think about the market. How weird! And what is pitiful is putting LBS in the closet... Well like Timo's comment in my yesterday's post, I am still positive of LBS but they might be different from what we/they expected. Besides I like SK telecom statements about the "Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town" thing: "Finding a friend is fine maybe once". Come on, let's keep exploring user scenarios and LBS usage!

Video Game settings

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(Via trendwatching) For people interested in what setting video game users are playing, there is this interesting resource that shows plenty of video games-related pictures: http://games.textamerica.com. The best are the video game settings:

Why do I blog this? when studying how people use video games, I've always found the game settings interesting and relevant: how people seat, which artefacts do they use (apart from the game pad, like notes on paper, a music player, a cell phone to communicate with remote players or just to chat...), whether there are friend or co-players (co-present person who has not the pad but help the main player completing the game...).

This is of particular interest, especially when doing 'user experience' research of mobile applications like location-based games or mobile game. Look for instance at this picture I took last week in Japan, it's a group of kids all participating in playing a DS game.

I do think there is a lot to learn of studying such settings and all the interactions that occur between participants/artefacts.

WOMBAT: Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town

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A new acronym I was not aware of: WOMBAT = Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town?. It's actually taken from a recent EURESCOM study which "explored the communication needs of teenagers, how they could be met by location-based services, and which location technology is best suited:

In the EURESCOM study WOMBAT (Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town?) researchers from major European telecoms companies developed real-life user scenarios for teenagers to see how well the different location-based technologies could serve young people’s needs. (...) The researchers identified among others, three major communication needs: to know where their peers are, to let their peers or their parents know where they are and to arrange and rearrange schedules for social events at short notice.

I am a bit doubtful concerning the 'needs' they collected. In the EURESCOM final paper, here is how they 'extracted those needs':

The study took an innovative approach to this question by using a solid social science basis from which to derive the needs, culminating in a series of user scenarios. (...) As the first step in this work we concentrated on the investigation of youth cultures and their mobile service needs. Existing data and material on young people were sourced from academic journal articles and books on youth culture, market research data, press articles, and data from various ongoing research projects. These sources were pulled together to form an understanding of young peoples’ lifestyles, culture and use of current mobile technology.

Here is scenario they envisioned:

"Imagine a group of teenagers who arranged to meet in town before going to a concert. One is already there and wants to know if he has enough time to do some shopping before his friends arrive. He checks his mobile device to see where they are and realises that one is passing a nearby shop. So he decides to wait for the close-by friend before going to the shop.“

Why do I blog this? mmh I am a bit skeptical with their 'solid science basis' and also about the needs they figure out. I think that "knowing where my buddies are" is very different from "automatically knowing where my buddies are". The main difference lies in the fact that giving one's location is both conveying an information (one's location) and an intention (that my buddies may need this information). Of course, it might be better to get my friend's position since he may not be able to give to me but he or she may be uncomfortable to disclose it on a regular basis... That's really a tricky issue. Though, there are some interesting ideas anyway (like strengthening the problem of technology acceptance by the users).

Interview of Nokia's Director of Design Strategy

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A very relevant interview of Nokia's director of design strategy. Among all what he said, some excerpts I found interesting:

We actually do studies - with full consent of the users - on smartphones. We do 100% tracking of all functionalities over a period of time. This means, we have granular view of usage. So then we can look at what are people using, why, what paths aren't working. This has been missing from an industry that tends to ask people "will you use an MP3 player on your phone?" and they answer "yes" and typically people will overestimate their own interest in it. (...) the definition of hackability is too narrow. Hackability is much more about everyday kind of things, starting from the colored replaceable covers. You might say, that it is too tightly driven but the trend of customizing the generic will continue. This will continue both in hardware and in software. We have tools to sketch in software, like on the Nokia series 60. I am not a programmer but it took me two hours to learn it and to write applications that I use nearly everyday. So that's me sketching my own use. I think that's another way of staying close to users and usage. Hackability is broader than just open software. (...) one thing that we have launched publicly is an application that allows people to have a local Bluetooth web-page while they are walking around. It can be read by other people in their proximity. We are trying it out just by having the software available for the Nokia series 60 phones. I think the software that we are building for the series 60 will allow a lot of innovation in that area that we can't anticipate.

Why do I blog this? it's vers refreshing to get Nokia's director of design strategy. His insights about Nokia's paths are very insightful and might shape some current trends.

Last issue of Vodafone's Receiver

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I just saw the last issue of Vodafone's Receiver which seems to be a great wine. There are papers by Mark Pesce, Jonathan Donner, Marc Prensky, James Katz,Mark Lowenstein,Nathan Eagle and Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Lars Erik Holmquist, Sara Price and Yvonne Rogers and Jeff Pierce.

Sara Price and Yvonne Rogers's Designing new learning experiences with pervasive technologies, Lars Erik Holmquist's The mobile user experience - how boundaries between devices are starting to disappear are of particular interest with regard to my work. More and comments about those later on here.

From direct physical interaction to hardware-based input devices

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A very good resource about game controllers in Gamasutra: "Controller Mediation in Human-Computer Play". It's actually a thesis from Stanford University by Tony Thulatimutte.

In the mid-to-late-20th century, the advent of the computer game signaled the beginning of a new mode of play interaction. Whereas previously playing a game would typically involve direct physical interaction with its elements (soccer balls, billiards, chess pieces), computer games introduced the notion of using hardware input devices to produce game action, with the consequence that any arbitrary quantifiable physical input might be transduced to produce any arbitrary game output. Computer input devices are therefore novel intermediaries in games and the act of play, and the psychological and qualitative impacts of their design and usage on players, as well as their symbolic role in an increasingly mediated society, are the topics of this paper.

Why do I blog this? it's a good discussion of game controller practices, design and evolution, which fits very well into some projects with what I do for video game companies.

A study of martial art in mixed reality

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I think I alreadyRegine blogged about Kick-ass Kung-Fu last year. It's a mixed reality game that merges virtual and real worlds to let players control a Kung-Fu game with their movements.

What is interesting is that, the designers conducted some studies about its usage:, 46 persons tried the system: Hämäläinen, P., Ilmonen, T., Höysniemi, J., Lindholm, M. & Nykänen, A. (2005). Martial Arts in Artificial Reality. In Proceedings of Conference of Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005), 2-7 April 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Various factors are studied. However the most interesting investigation is certainly the motion exageration which seems to be an intriguing factor to investigate. I guess it might contribute to the 'fun' of the game.

According to our experience, Kick Ass Kung-Fu can augment and motivate martial arts and acrobatics training, at least at beginner and intermediate levels. For more advanced technique and combat training, the users wanted the game to be more realistic. Our low-level computer vision system allows multiple players and practically all weapons, but in the future, we will consider model based computer vision for increased realism. Using a skeleton model would enable you to block attacks and interact more realistically with the virtual environment. However, realism poses challenges in interaction design as well as technology, since it is nontrivial to control an avatar that reacts to the environment. Currently, the mapping between the user and the avatar is one-to-one, except with respect to vertical position. The mapping breaks if the avatar can trip over virtual obstacles without real-world counterparts, or if impact forces are applied to the avatar.

Although motion exaggeration was found fun in the game, many experienced martial artists requested a training mode with realistic motion and enemies.The Kick Ass Kung-Fu user interface can be considered to develop motor skills and fitness, but from an educational point of view, this is only part of the experience.

Mobile HCI 2006

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Good to know:

CALL FOR PAPERS - MOBILEHCI 2006 The 8th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services

Dates: 12-15 September, 2006 Location: Espoo, Finland Website: www.mobilehci.org

Deadlines: * Papers, Workshops and Tutorials: 1 March 2006 * Short Papers, Posters, Demos, Panels, Industry Cases: 7 May 2006

Why do I blog this? Perhaps we could write a short paper with the results of catchbob second exeriment.

'Beta' as a long-term label...

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The WSJ last week had a good column about an interesting fact: for some technology companies, 'Beta' becomes a long-term label (by DAVID KESMODEL)

For years, the term "beta" referred to a relatively short period of testing by a select group of outsiders. These days, beta editions are not only released to the public, but also stay in that mode for months, or even years. Google News, Google's news aggregator, has been in beta for three years. Microsoft's antispyware application has been in beta for nearly a year. (...) The companies say consumers benefit from the practice because the widespread testing helps them make critical improvements and determine which extra features users want.(...) Many consumers will tolerate problems encountered with beta services because many are offered free of charge

Maybe it's connected to the 'kidult' phenomenon (Kidult = A middle-aged person who continues to participate in and enjoy youth culture)?

Gonzo Gizmos

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This seems to be an intriguing resource:


"Gonzo Gizmos: Projects & Devices to Channel Your Inner Geek" (Simon Field)

Here is the blurb:

It's possible to use optics to roast a hot dog without electricity or a stove; to make a simple radio with just an iron, a few basic circuits and three shiny pennies; and to assemble a simple steam-powered boat with a plastic bottle, a candle, copper tubing and a nail. Of course, only die-hard science nerds would attempt these projects. But information systems specialist Field knows he's a geek, which is part of the charm of his science manual-cum-survival guide. Like Cy Tymony's recent Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things, Field's book does not depend on high-tech equipment. Most of the "shopping lists" he includes for each gizmo consist of items that can be found in hardware stores. His experiments range from the disarming (e.g., a plastic hydrogen bomb which, he admits, "sounds a bit dangerous" but can also function as "a high-tech squirt gun") to the useful (such as a "quicky electric motor"). Throughout, Field shares explanations of each process, with sidebars entitled "Why does it do that?"

Scientists, please share your data!

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A step towards publication-sharing: scientists must embrace a culture of sharing and rethink their vision of databases, a great article in Nature. I fully conccur with the vision presented here. The point is that research can be empowered by webservices in multiple ways. This idea is well described with this excerpts:

Web tools now allow data sharing and informal debate to take place alongside published papers. But to take full advantage, scientists must embrace a culture of sharing and rethink their vision of databases.

Upload and share your raw data, and have a high impact factor for your blog — or perish? That day has not yet come, but web technologies, from personal publishing tools such as blogs to electronic laboratory notebooks, are pushing the character of the web from that of a large library towards providing a user-driven collaborative workspace

Why do I blog this? This shows that a revolution is happening: from publication to data-sharing, the scientific practices can be fully reshaped to be more efficient, less lab-centered and is based on 'networked collaboration' ideas. Of course there are some limits:

As web services empower researchers, the biggest obstacle to fulfilling such visions will be cultural. Scientific competitiveness will always be with us. But developing meaningful credit for those who share their data is essential, to encourage the diversity of means by which researchers can now contribute to the global academy.