VoMIT = voice over misconfigured internet telephones

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While doing some weird keywords combination on Mountain View's search engine, I ran across this interesting application allegedly called "Vomit", which means "voice over misconfigured internet telephones":

The vomit utility converts a Cisco IP phone conversation into a wave file that can be played with ordinary sound players. Vomit requires a tcpdump output file. Vomit is not a VoIP sniffer also it could be but the naming is probably related to H.323.

The vomit utility is distributed under a BSD-license and completely free for any use including commercial.

Interactive table by Philips

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Marc-o points on this new interactive table by Philips:

The Entertaible concept is a tabletop gaming platform that marries traditional multi-player board and computer games in a uniquely simple and intuitive way. Entertaible comprises a 30-inch horizontal LCD, sophisticated touch screen-based multi-object position detection, and all supporting control electronics. It allows the players to engage in a new class of electronic games which combines the features of computer gaming, such as dynamic playing fields and gaming levels, with the social interaction and tangible playing pieces, such as pawns and dies, of traditional board games.

Initially aimed at the out-of-home game market such as restaurants, bars, and casinos, Entertaible has the potential to evolve into a gaming platform for the consumer market.

Why do I blog this? first because I am following closely the interactive table design+user experience (for a course we give at the school), second because I see interesting applications of this to games. This one is not so original but hey it's Philips... when a mass-market consumer electronics enter this kind of field, I am curious to see how it can work out. Related see this list of interactive table I try to update.

Urbanhermes: redefining fashion and identity

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Urbanhermes is a project conducted at the Sociable Media Group at the MIT, Medialab by Christine Liu (good blog for knitting fans too) and Judith Donath
Urbanhermes is an augmented messenger bag that aims to incorporate the fluid, expressive signals of electronic fashion into the constrained, material-based environment of physical fashion. the bag is able to change its dynamic, temporal display within the context of its social environment, providing versatile means for face-to-face signaling. by accelerating the physical fashion cycle, urbanhermes facilitates more meaningful and communicative representions of self-identity.

Why do I blog this? what I like in this project is this concept:

fashion signals are important in displaying one's quality of access of information. electronic fashions, information that may circulate within blog circles or online communities, experience rapid fashion cycles as the information is easily disseminated and regenerated. physical fashions, such as clothing, are unable to update as quickly as information flow due to their physical structure.

Using fashion signals as a basis for design seems to be a clever way of creating new experiences

Pigeon-guided missiles

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According to Wikipedia, some folks tried to design a a pigeon-guided missile.. And it appears that those folks were lead by B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist psychology pope:

The control system involved a lens at the front of the missile projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while a pigeon trained (by operant conditioning) to recognise the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile's flight controls, cause the missile to change course. Three pigeons were to control the bomb's direction by majority rule.

Although skeptical of the idea, the National Defense Research Committee nevertheless contributed $25,000 to the research. However, Skinner's plans to use pigeons in Pelican missiles was apparently too radical for the military establishment; although he had some success with the training, he could not get his idea taken seriously

Related: bat bombs: a World War II proposal to drop bats carrying tiny incendiary bombs over Japan.

Some more thoughts about location-awareness (of others) and position sharing

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As Fabien points out, the MapQuest FindMe (integrated with AIM) is a clever service that allow users to use manual sharing of one's position. Which is one of the guidelines that would emerge from our CatchBob! experiments. Self-disclosing one's location seems to emerge as a good trend now, both in the real world of services and the academic world of research as in those papers:

Both paper advocate for self-disclosure of location. They rely on different approach to come up with this recommendation. Benford's paper has a qualitative approach and is more focused on users' thoughts. Whereas ours is more mixed-methods (quantitative methods dominant though), it proposed the same idea because of the underwhelming effects of automatic location-awareness on how people collaborate. Another paper for a conference about 'designing for collaboration' will deal with this issue.

I am still digging this issue of location-awareness on collaboration, working on both asynchronous location awareness and the importance of letting people express their own strategy.

New interaction design lab

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Interaction-Design Lab is a new lab in Milano (started by former-Interaction Design Institute from Ivrea):

We are a group of people from different disciplines and countries. We explore interactivity with objects and spaces, telling stories and creating experiences. Our main tools are simple: ready-made technologies, recycled, re-usable, light, off-the-shelf ingredients.

We are interested in designing the present. Our interpretation of interaction design is wide – as the only current way to think about design. The dialog is what interest us the most.

We combine in our activities a strong conceptual level, a process of crafting, commercial value for us and our clients, and a big emphasis on communication. Noting that concept, crafting, commerce and communication all start with c, we’ve named these: “the four Cs”: Concept - Commerce -Communication - Craft

Look at their first project called 999 cards!

Using technology to encourage displacement

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I just blogged on Petistic (our pet-centered stuff blog with Regine and Fabien) this improbable tool called Pee Post. The point of this tool is to encourage pets to eliminate in a specific area:

This reminds me this mosquito sound generator which aimed at avoiding teenagers loitering: a device that generate an awful mosquito sound to make bad guys go somewhere else.

Why do I blog this? It's another trend in technology: encouraging displacement. This is not really a location-based service but rather, a "go-to-that-location" direction tracker! Even though the underyling idea beneath the 'pee post' is interesting, the mosquito sounds seems to be pretty scary. What's next?

Mobile phone location in public places

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A good one about mobile phone location in public plaecs: WHERE'S THE PHONE? A STUDY OF MOBILE PHONE LOCATION IN PUBLIC SPACES by F. Ichikawa, J. Chipchase, R. Grignani (from Nokia), Mobility 2005 conference in Guangzhou, China. The paper describes characteristics of how mobile phones are carried whilst users are out and about in public spaces. This emereged from series of contextual interviews in public spaces of Helsinki, Milan and New York. The point of this research is to get some insights about designing handheld technology: there is a need for users to explicitly remember to carry them from place to place. That's why they investigated where people keep their phones when they are in mobile context so that they canFind out if there are specific profiles of the user tied to the phone location. The last goal was to verify if there is any influence of the phone location to the user or their perception on phone interaction.

most male participants carried their phones in trousers front pocket and female participants in their shoulder bags. High penetration of front pocket, which can be tight and uncomfortable, shows that a mere capacity of the location is not enough to influence where users should keep their phone. A high concentration of males over 30 used belt clips, which we interpret to be because of the relative importance of convenience and security (risk of theft of the device) over appearance.

Why do I blog this? once in a while Nokia gives a bit of its research... it's then nice to see what they are looking at and how they are doing so. The article is full of other interesting findings as well as ideas of how they can impact design of future products (flexible displays? what if new featurea re included...)

Ludium I: intellectual gathering made of participants embedded in a virtual world

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The Arden Institute organized a smart event called 'Ludium I':

Ludium I was an effort to develop and prove a radical new paradigm for intellectual gatherings. Abandoning entirely the standard speaker-audience structure, the ludium instead embedded participants in a game designed to generate both tangible output and emotional excitement and satisfaction - fun. It intentionally ignored the distinction between work and play, and sought to test the possibility that professionals engaged in a properly designed game would generate both entertainment and productivity at the same time. The Ludium was designed during the summer of 2005 and was held at Indiana University, Bloomington, from September 29 to October 1 of that year.

A selected group of academics and game designers were formed into five teams to play a competitive game of concept generation. The teams were tasked with developing proposals for using online game technology in university research; proposals were judged by a sixth team, with the best proposal earning a grand prize.

The report presents in some detail the five proposals on online games for research, and then appends a large amount of additional creative work and commentary captured from the participants during and after the ludium. Three kinds of readers may find this material useful. First, academics should find the proposals and associated critical discussions to be a valuable introduction to the kinds of university research one might do using online game technology. Second, game designers should find clues about the kinds of online games that may be viable in the academic gaming sector. Third, administrators should see in the structure of the event, and its success at enabling people to have fun while working very hard, a potentially valuable strategy for motivating their workforces.

There is a huge document that summarizes the event (25Mb). Still have to make a more serious pass on this (I just skimmed through the whole document, but from what I've seens there is a lot to grasp here in terms of online game technology used for other purposes...)

CatchBob! automatic data analysis

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Recent advances in the CatchBob replay tool project allowed me to automatically compute a new interesting index for the analysis of our pervasive game: the phasing of the activity. As emerged from the qualitative study of CatchBob!, the game is divided into 3 phases:

  • Dispersion of individuals to efficiently locate Bob's area.
  • When one player find the approximate location, the others converge towards him.
  • Then they re-spread to form the triangle so that they can surrounds the object.

What is great is that I now when each phases starts thanks to the analysis of the players' dispersion: the pictures below depicts the evolution of the perimeter formed by a triangle made up of each of the players' position. The evolution of this perimeter shows the 3 differents parts:

Kids, mobile phone and mobile haiku contest

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Children and mobile technology: the Japanese experience by Masanao Takeyama, in Proceedings of the Children, Mobile Phones and the Internet: the Mobile Internet and Children Conference, 2003. A paper full of compelling insights about how kids use mobile tech and the Internet:

Professor Takeyama described multi-media summer camps (...) in which the children experienced and experimented with new digital media through playing and learning. The children were given mobile technology to try out. The interest was to observe how the kids interacted with the new technology. (...) the children were using GPS, PDAs, digital camera and the Internet and the theme was ‘Exploring Tokyo with wearing digital media’. The kids were given assignments and control centres would receive the information the kids sent in and they would compute a kind of homepage from the uploaded information. The GPS functionality enabled the kids to know where they were and for the organisers to know where the kids were. It was found that the kids were able to learn how to use the new equipment quickly. They didn’t use all functionalities, though the children were able to teach each other. On the Okinawa camp, the children we using i-mode, digital cameras and notebook computers, and the theme was mobile collaboration.

They even performed a 'mobile haiku contest':

The mobile Haiku contest was designed so young people and older people can pair and express themselves by creating Haiku, 17 syllable poems, while walking around town. The same experiment was done throughout the nation. The poems were uploaded, and it was possible to evaluate and score the poems. Any one could participate and act as a judge.

It's a pity, the article is a bit short on how the kids employed the GPS, how they managed to use it and what kind of things emerged from this.

PhD mindmap update

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After two years working on my PhD, I though it was a good time to update my phd research mindmap. The previous one was here and there is the new version:

I only put on the map the topic I adress in the current research, that is why I removed some aspects, especially the whole part concerning the social functions of space/place. Awareness of others' whereabouts and the technology to do this as well as their impacts on small group-collaboration is the cornerstone of the project. What is interesting is to see how the project evolved in the last 2 years with some back and forth movements, the addition of new methods and how exploratory activities lead to new dimensions being tackled.

This investigation is mostly quantitative in the epistemological sense, which means that we followed an inductive reasoning, trying to benefit from hypotheses we had coming from virtual reality investigation (my masters thesis, see here). At the beginning of the project, the point was to replicate studies in VR to see if results held in the physical world: would people pay attention to others' location as we saw in VR projects? It's a curious way to do research though, but sometimes the insight to address a specific research question si weird. However it certainly makes sense to tackle the issue of how small groups pay attention to their members' location in real space since news technologies allow it. Maybe this weird circumvolution is due to the fact that this PhD is made in a human-computer interaction discipline and not in sociology, nor in psychology.

Finally, I would point that I tried to include some qualitative dimensions in my methodology, to get more details about the participants' experience as well as to deepen the understanding of the socio-cognitive processes involved. Some folks might find this not really valid from an epistemological perspective but hey that's a struggle out there between all the school of thoughts we have to deal with.

How video-games blur the boundaries of work and play

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In his paper The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur The Boundaries of Work and Play (Games and Culture, Vol. 1, pg. 68-71 (2006) ), Nick Yee explains how "video games are inherently work platforms that train us to become better game workers". The underyling assumption in this paper is that work being performed in video games is increasingly similar to the work performed in business corporations. The author hence studies online games and sees them as a way to "reveal larger social trends in the blurring boundaries between work and play". In order to assess these statements, he taks relevant examples such Star Wars Galaxies players who "operate a pharmaceutical manufacturing business for fun". He also underlines this interesting point: "The central irony of MMORPGs is that they are advertised as worlds to escape to after coming home from work, but they too make us work and burn us out". And now, the bunch of studies about virtual goods which have a real value can lead us to think that game play can constitute a real work... His last word is strikingly pertinent: "he blurring of work and play begs the question - what does “fun” really mean? ".

Yes guys, playing is hard and it's not a matter of toying with simple things as people reluctant to consider video games as a serious activity think.

Replay tool project update

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Fabrice (the master student I work with) has just completed another step in the replay tool project. The point of this is to have a tool that help us to replay the CatchBob! pervasive game so that I can use it with participants to gather information about their activity, what happened, etc. In the last version, it's possible to have a replay of each players' path (in the bottom left-hand corner hereafter) plus some visualizations like the distance between 2 players (in the bottom right hand corner) or the evolution of the group dispersion (in the upper right hand corner). This can be interesting to understand the players' behavior while performing the activity.

Geospatial web podcast

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Locative media freaks, geowankers, GIS hackers should have a glance at this discussion about geospatial web (available as a mp3 here, beware! 17Mb):

The many-talented Rekha Murthy was responsible for inspiring and producing the show, which features Mike Liebhold of the IFTF (who wrote most of the preface to "Mapping Hacks"), Christopher Allen from the trendy Yellow Arrow, and Peter Morville, the author of O'Reilly's Ambient Findability. Seasoned, jaded geo***ers may not find much new in it, but it would be a good thing for them to play to family and friends in an effort to explain what it is they are actually working on.

Why do I blog this? this discussion is definitely worth to listen to, in terms of the topics and the relevance of the point raised. Presentations are very clear and gives a good overview of the geospatial web phenomenon, as well as its links to pervasive computing. I like the difference of perspectives; for instance how GIS people sees the open innovation framework of this (free maps, free access to information, wifi to get away from the walled gardens of phone carriers...) whereas others thinks about how this could enslaves us (for that matter, the truck drivers "me and my nap" part is utterly pertinent!). As usual technology is about balancing advantages and drawbacks and this podcats gives clever points for both sides.

Here is a transcription of the talk:

Tom Ashbrook: A decade after its creation, the www now ubiquitous has made us blasé about information: we assume we can learn alsmost everything about almost anything at the touch of a keyboard but the revolution is hardly over. Now the digital round is epxloding in to the physical world: they call it the geospatial web. It means online maps loaded with information about the physical world; and someday, this physical world will be tagged and teeming with data: what is that buidling, where is my dog, who is that man?

Mike Liebhold (IFTF, Palo Alto): the geospatial web (geoweb) is a combination of digital map data combined with web-like hypermedia (web pages, video/audio objects) that are tagged with location coordinates in addition to a url. as you move through the world, if your device knows where it is, it can retrieve information about the area.

blackberry, cellular telephone, it could be a device like a swiss army knife that has location-sensing capabilities, a ad-hoc computer, a music player or it might be what is called a personal information ensemble: you might have an earbud in your ear connected wirelessly to your phone clipped on your belt, you might have a necklace with a camera, a wristband with a keypad. over time, we will have a whole range of devices to support augmented perceptions.

there is a variation of geolocation techniques and gps is only one; it is also possible to listen to wifi hotspots or to cellular telephone towers or even television towers.

examples of the kind of things done with maps on the internet: - people have taken google maps (the interface is simple enough), a little bit of code and paste it into a webpage and render google maps on their own webpage and then add point of interest or geo-annotation: it's called mash-ups. MS and yahoo are coming with similar things. Limit: you can't integrate information from more than 2 websites on a single-map simultaneously currently. that would require a technology called GIS (geographical information system) and that is the other revolution on the web: map information are available on the web in new standards: open formats that allows data to be integrated in a single view: data from multiple sources will ultimately be integrated. - there is a lot of experiments from the last 2-3 years, especially from a vibrant underground movements of computer programmers, digital mappers, artists, political activists such as the Locative Media Lab group (northern europe, boston, sf, nyc...)... as you move through the streets of amsterdam you can hear people telling stories... besides these experimental things, there are two other kind of things happening: - google mashup (like crime statistics overlayed on chicago maps): this kind of civic maps are created everyday all across the world in standard map format layered together. Often this information has not been widely accessible. the mobile companies offer some limited location-based services in what might be called walled gardens: you can only get the information provided the network carrier (yellow pages information about stores, prepackaged points of interests like historical points) and in most cases you cannot access to things out of this because the phone companies wants to control the access to info. - now people will have information attached to them that others could access: right now we're limited in what we know about the world (what we have inside our heads, what we've learnt, what someone had told us), now it might be different: you will have information connected to the place. but about people... there is a huge concern about privacy... about the information people disclose wirelessly about themselves.

-- jeff: example of a sailor who give access to his information through google earth: a way to explore the world cyberly --

Christopher Allen (Yellow Arrow, NYC): When you see a yellow arrow somewhere you know that there is more, some hidden details; each arrow links to someone's experience to a real location. people place yellow arrow to tag information to a location. ordinary people happen to have a yellow arrow decal, they fix it to some object and make a note about that object; then anybody who comes along can read the message with their device (pda, blackberry...): the most used version is the sticker who has a unique code on it, you send a text message with that code to the yellow arrow phone number and you get back the messages of the person who places the sticker. a very simple mean of leaving messages at a specific location without having to use GPS/wifi. We call it a massively authored artistic publication.

Examples of stickers: people add stickers to photograph in galeries and people can place comments ("a large projection of the game tetris" on an arrow which pointed on a buidling in copenhagen that said "what can happen in that place?", an it happened).

Where all of this is going? everything can have information attached to it? one of the most interesting aspects = sharing info in communities, to get enriching details about the world and the environment.

-- david (a homeland security consultant): comment about the fact this can save lives, flickr memory map to tag a house where you lived (to build a history of the house) or in Katrina's case, it can help to locate people; or you can locate people, with a low tech version such as dodgeball (they use database of cellphone numbers of your friends; on a social basis, it sends out a blast of message to all of your friends but only to those who are in the block radius, useful in the case of a disaster) --

Mike Libehold about the flickr memory maps: a lot of information can remain private; the only information that might be publically = civic data, reports... Tom Ashbrook is concerned by the fact that anybody can put information, Liebhold says that in many cases users can correct this (as in wikipedia)

Liebhold about yellow arrow: whereas now there is a real tag (the sticker), in the future, information could appear without fixing a piece of material/graffiti : just the location coordinates alone will be enough to retrieve information that someone left at this place.

-- joe (editor of a magazine in the field): business benefit for consumers like logistics: to retrieve location information at their fingertips, locate trucks... we're not that far away to locate a purple ulla-oop I would like to buy in the vicinity: Liebhold says that it's possible with Google Froogle which has local capabilities: show a map of local retailers nearby --

Chris Allen: I don't welcome the idea of geo-spam: the fact that company can send me ads based on my location. or having too much data or data that I did not request.

Peter Morville (Ambient Findability, Michigan): "what we find changes who we become" ubiquitous findable objects (ufo): increasing ability to track the location of objects (projects in the supply chain, pets, our physical selves...)... his favorite device = wifi watch with a gps built-in: to track the location of your child: people like or hate and other complains that it does not work enough; useful to keep track of kids in disney world...

a new framework of laws to protect us against this tacking? the technology is raising the head of society/laws/ethics... (see book about RFID: spychips, some valide concerns).

-- lee (a truckdriver): have a gps tracking system, everybody know where I am and what I am doing, it's terrible. before I could take a nap without any problems (it was me and my nap) and now... it's impossible (how come you're not moving?) --

examples by Liebhold: shipping logistics + civic/facilities workers + health workers to keep track of epidemics + farmers to precisely map fields + people in tribal area to record tracking history +

tom asbrook: ...geo-annotation is not widely done as in the USA...

Libehold: now there is a movement started by a group of people in London (open map movement) to make digital map available for the public and not by sale without copyright. they slowly created their map of london. Besies, there's a lot of movements to preserve privacy and does not disclose location information to other people: people have developped RFID jammers to be immune from surveillance.

Morville: no laws against it (RFID chips tracking) so far but there are allready anti-theft devices...

-- rich: what concerns me is the push to move towards the walled gardens: privately owned information that you pay for access to; is anybody considering the risks with standards --

Morville: governement should create digital parks as they do when buying part of the land and open them up as public parks! move towards an internet of objects

-- rick: better to meet people to listen to their stories instead of going to flickr to know the place history... tom ashbrook says it's the same as looking at graffitis "bob loves sue". Chris Allen says that yes it's democratic but not everybody has a cellphone to access to it --

Liebhold: there are lots of wonderful standards for a while to make information available (since gore) but about equity and access, it turned out that the cell phone is the world's computer: if cell phone are equiped with wifi access, then you don't necessarily have to dial to a commercial access: wifi can give you location informaiton and access to the web in a way that it does not cost money and it does not necessarily give your location. this device will be cheap enough that less privilged people can have access to geospatial informartion.

-- steve (salesman): sometimes I'd like to know what I'm looking at, it's cool if anybody tells what they see. the world as an open book --

Tom Asbrook to Peter Morville: how do you imagine human culture interacting with this technology over time: the geoweb as part of a broader trend: ambien findability: finding anything anywhere at anytime, as a librarian and information architecte I am sensible to the huge design of proper applications that would work for people: a central challenge: designing user-friendly systems to access to these information.

Tom: what about people who want to get lost? there will be always this possibility! lots of surprising will be along the ay (example: serendipity)

Liebhold about the timetable of this: MS, google and yahoo are raising their heads to build these capabilities and they are joined by leading GIS/mappign frism like ESRI; the challenge will be to have interoperable data that work together. A group in Boston is working on a standard way to do this.

Another Furby hacking

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eecue.com is into Furby hacking! Here is his research agenda with this marvelous toy:

The coolest thing I saw once I opened up Furby was that the board designers were nice enough to leave nice large pads for the RSC-4128 diagnostic interface, which hopefully should allow programming of the Furby. I am not sure, but I think the diagnostic port is a serial interface. I have ordered the development kit from Sensory Inc, and I'm sure this will help answer some of my questions. If I do end up being able to alter the programming / data on the Furby here are some things I plan on doing:

Give Furby a more colorful vocabulary Teach Furby some tasteless jokes Change Furby's voice tone to be less cute and more evil Give Furby a funny accent and maybe a lisp and a twitch Hook up some of the unused I/O ports to control other things (the chips has 24 I/O ports with 10mA outputs) Expand Furby's memory Utilize the voice recording function of the RSC-4128 Make Furby a voice controlled DTMF dialer Utilize the MIDI synth contained in the RSC-4128

Here is what I plan on doing even if I can change the code or data:

Add nicer switches to the make the Skeletal Furby easier to Pet Feed Tickle Turn off LEDs that light up when Furby moves Volume control for the speaker Put the Furby head on a Robosapien body

GPS for elephant

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This picture shows a GPS collar for elephant tracking:

It's part of an interesting project (described here) that aims at:

Through GPS tracking, STE has gathered fine-scale data on elephant movements, identifying specific elephant corridors and core parts of their range, and highlighting the need for an ecosystem approach to conservation by protecting the whole elephant range, rather then only isolated, protected areas. (...) Collared elephants are being monitored closely and data on their behaviour, associations and reproductive status are being gathered as part of two concurrent Ph.D. studies by George Wittemyer (Berkley University) and Henrik Rasmussen (Oxford University). (...) Elephant movements determined from GPS tracking have assisted in defining the elephant range in Samburu and Laikipia and thus delineating the boundaries of the site for Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE), part of a global programme to study trends in elephant mortality and the potential impact of ivory trade on populations of African and Asian elephants.

A similar project has been conducted in Myanmar by national zoo scientists of Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park. It lead to this kind of map: