Make your own skateboard

skateboardsforschools is a positive resource that provides "teachers and their students with a new and exciting alternative to the old standard Wood Shop and Tech Ed. Projects". They show how to make a DIY skateboard. As the motto says "We're talkin' Skateboards".

The fact is, kids have always wanted to make skateboard decks in their woodshop classes but teachers and students never knew how to put the concave shapes and turned up nose and tail in the wood. Decks cut out of plywood and pine stock just don't work! And where do you drill for correct wheel placement in order to get proper flex and balance? Well, Skateboardsforschools.com has taken care of all of that for you!

Technorati Tags: skateboard

Last minute speaker at LIFT06

I finally managed to have the last minute speaker for LIFT06: it's going to be the US sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling. He will talk about spimes and the internet of things.

Technorati Tags: lift, lift06

TOBIDAC!D: Foldable stereoscopic viewer for PSP

Via Scott Fisher, a stereoscopic viewer for PSP (meant to be used with Metal Gear Solid Ac!d 2:

It’s a 3D image viewing system that comes packaged with AC!D2. It goes beyond pseudo-3D images of polygon games to generate solid three-dimensional graphics. Just place SOL!D EYE TOBIDAC!D over the LCD screen on your PSP and see Snake and Venus standing right in front of you, as if you could reach out and touch them. SOL!D EYE TOBIDAC!D delivers a phantasmal experience by taking 3D games to a whole new dimension. And it’s only available with AC!D2!

Some review of it in this blog:

It took a while to perfectly assemble it (which was scary because you only get one and a rip is all it takes.) but after a bit of origami and instruction reading I had it together and strapped it over my psp. for those of you who will download this game, youre missing out. this is definatly worth the $40 I paid for it. using Tobidacid text and stats float off the screen. There is depth between characters in the foreground and background, and all of the explosions and gunfire look unbelievable! also you can watch movies from MGS3 in 3D which is insane!

Why do I blog this? I am fascinated by such Do It Yourself modifications of artifacts to reshape a certain experience (the gaming experience in this case). In addition, the fact that it uses cheap material is impressive.

Technorati Tags: tobidac!d, tangible interaction, videogames

Old school cyberspace embed its own architecture

Alex Pang is working on the very intriguing topic of "The End of Cyberspace" (there is a short piece about it in Wired today). In one of his blogposts, he's wondering about the names that we given to cyberspace (the ultimate goal is to find a new concept for what is now cyberspace: ubicomp...). Concerning cyberspace names, I looked back at some old role playing games I had both in english and french, dated from end of 80's and 90's. There are names like 'virtual world', "the grid', "the matrix", "cyberspace" and so forth. Sometimes, the names of the artifacts gives the idea of the concept (in "information superhighway" that I really like, it makes me remembering by grandmother who kept asking me "where are those superhighways").

An important thing I guess is the difference or the mix between the idea of a virtual space and its physical representation (as for instance a network of cable or fibers) and the virtual counterpart (information flow).

About this, it's interesting to see that the first representations of virtual reality embed the concept of the cyberspace architecture (in a more perfect way of course). Networked virtual reality is made of wires/cables/fibers (to connect computers) and it's really represented as a grid/matrix. Check those pictures (Space Harriers and Tron):

The ground of this virtual space is - actually - a grid.

Latour's research inscriptions

Relying on Latour's sociology of science (+ others such as Latour and Woolgar, 1991; Callon, Law, and Rip, 1986), inscriptions (journal articles, conference papers, presentations, grant proposals, and patents, images of many sorts, databases...) are the core of scientific/knowledge work. Inscription is basically the process of creating technical artifacts that would allow to stabilize the research work so that it can travel across space and time and be combined with other work (and eventually establish the protection of an actor's interests/credibility). On a personal note, I still have to turn this into higher level research inscription:

This is a kind of summary of my research results so far.

Kids and robots learning to play hide and seek

The following paper describes a field study about Children and robots learning to play hide and seek (by a research group from the Naval Research Laboratory).

How do children learn how to play hide and seek? At age 3-4, children do not typically have perspective taking ability, so their hiding ability should be extremely limited. We show through a case study that a 3 1/2 year old child can, in fact, play a credible game of hide and seek, even though she does not seem to have perspective taking ability. We propose that children are able to learn how to play hide and seek by learning the features and relations of objects (e.g., containment, under) and use that information to play a credible game of hide and seek. We model this hypothesis within the ACT-R cognitive architecture and put the model on a robot, which is able to mimic the child's hiding behavior. We also take the “hiding” model and use it as the basis for a “seeking” model. We suggest that using the same representations and procedures that a person uses allows better interaction between the human and robotic system.

Why do I blog this? I found interesting the idea of "a specific object-relationship hypothesis dealing with how children learn to play hide and seek, and the second representational hypothesis dealing with the types of representations and algorithms or procedures that should be used for intelligent systems". Food for thoughts about cognition and problem solving.

A TelCo ran by nuns

General Management - Technical Services Vatican Telephone Service:

The Telephone Service of the Vatican State is responsible for the study, installation and management of the telecommunications infrastructure of the Vatican. It has been run since 5th July 1948 by devout members of the religious order of the Society of St Paul (la Società S.Paolo), employs over 30 laymen, a few priests and numerous nuns (suore Pie Discepole del Divin Maestro) who, on account of their distinct qualities of seriousness, reserve and in-depth knowledge of foreign languages are employed as operators in the day-to-day running manual switchboar

As a matter of fact, the network has very importance connections: " the first Italian link via radio connecting the Holy See and the Papal Residence at Castel Gandolfo".

Other facts about it here.

RSS Ideas for educators

(Via) Once in a while I check what's happening in the field of educational technologies because it's a very good field of application for IT and I stumbled across this very good resource: 50+ RSS Ideas for Educators, a work in progress paper by Quentin D'Souza. Apart from the obvious "conduct web searches when you sleep", there are some very relevant ideas like using RSS for reminders/calendars/tracking (students' collaboration/updates) / portfolio / todo lists / ...

The document is also illustrated with some scenarios.

Drucker on 'tribes'

During the coffee-break this morning, I serendipitiously ran across a printed paper of Peter Drucker, in which I found this quote that I like. To a journalist who asked "What will the organization of tomorrow and the executive of tomorrow look like?"

"You'd better stop studying the history of science and start studying the history of tribes, because that's what you're going to be. You're going to be the elder chieftain of the Cherokees." And they have no authority other than that arising from wisdom and competence and accomplishment.

What I like is that back in 1996, Drucker foresee how today's organizations would be: a network of acquaintances, contacts, alliances, joint ventures, minority participation, and very informal agreements... This is exactly like this, the 'tribe' concept is very relevant.

Human-Robot Interaction Studies

As the robot field grows, there seems to be some research projects which focuses on human-robots interaction (we already saw some examples with autists and robots). For instance, at the University of Hertfordshire, scholars are studying how robots could be social companions. There will be a BBC show about it:

The University of Hertfordshire has taken the robot out of the laboratory and has it living in a house nearby as part of a study of human-robot interaction.

The study, which will be broadcast on the BBC Three Counties’ John Pilgrim Show, on Wednesday 25 January as part of a two-hour feature on the University, aims to research how humans can comfortably interact with robots.

John Pilgrim how computer scientists and psychologists are working to understand how groups of individuals would like robots to look and behave, whether they need to be humanoid or just a computer on wheels, and the level of closeness and eye contact they would like if they had a robot living with them. (...) “We are studying how a robot companion can be personalized and modified according to people’s different preferences, likes and dislikes.”

More about it here.

Also check this conference which is organized next month about this very topic. There seems to be room for investigating 'user experience' of robots, with respects to specific topics. For instance in this paper: Empirical Results from Using a Comfort Level Device in Human-Robot Interaction Studies (by K.L. Koay, K. Dautenhahn, S.N. Woods and M.L. Walters from the University of Hertfordshire), the authors used a quantitative analysis to analyse the comfort level data of 7 subjects with respect to 12 robot behaviours as part of a human-robot interaction trial.

On a different note, I like when the first reference of such academic paper is a sci-fi novel: Asimov, I. I, Robot, Grafton Books, London, 1968.

Light-powered hearing aid

Medicat gizmos are sometimes very intriguing. This light-powered hearing aid is impressive for that matter. It's developed and manufactured by Godisa Technologies, a company from Botswana.

We manufacture three hearing aids; these use regular zinc air or rechargeable batteries. We've developed a solar power battery recharger and the first No. 13 and low-cost No. 675 rechargable button-cell batteries. The latter can be charged up to 300 times over its two-year lifespan and sells for less than US$1.50.

We meet our mission of lowering the cost of hearing aids and maintenance for everyone.

Social visualizations of aural group conversations

An idea close to the noise-sensitive table we have at the lab, this project has the same idea: creating social visualizations of aural group conversation. It's describe in the following paper: Visualizing Audio in Group Table Conversation by Karrie Karahalios and Tony Bergstrom:

These visualizations are tailored to a table setting. Examples of such settings are a family sitting about a table eating dinner or colleagues sitting about a table in a meeting. The form of the visualization is highly coupled to its function. People sit about the table structure and see their conversation visualized on the table surface as they speak. Using this physical structure, we present two graphical table interfaces. The first interface [Conversation Clock] depicts the rhythm and conversational patterns in table top interaction; the second visualization [Conversation Votes] extends this theme by incorporating a voting mechanism to highlight agreement and disagreement in spoken interaction. The visualizations evolve over time to create an evocative, graphical, interactive snapshot of the entire conversation within that table space.

The figure below depicts the two kinds of visualizations:

Why do I blog this? this is an interesting project, at the lab we're interested in this kind of visualizations as a way to give some feedback to groups about their own behavior (since it might be useful to improve collaborative processes like group regulation). The authors' goal is a bit different: they propose to use it to meet a certain need: "we find that participants frequently request graphical renderings of meaningful conversations as evocative souvenirs".

Social search issues

Business Week featured an interesting article about Yahoo's strategy and social software as a global paradigm on the Web. The author (Ben Elgin) address Yahoo's bet: changing the way people find information online by relying on "social search". Although I am a regular user of flickr or del.icio.us (not to mention others) and though I find the 'social search' idea useful/relevant for my interests, I think I can buy some of the author arguments:

• It's time consuming: "Most Internet users haven't even heard of Flickr or del.icio.us, let alone spent time sharing photos online or posting bookmarks of their favorite sites. Alexa Internet ranks del.icio.us as the 364,886th most trafficked Web site. Google is ranked third by the researcher. (...) the first major effort involves selecting a circle of friends. That means e- mailing people, inviting them to join a network, and responding to requests from others. After that, the more users interact with content, the more power social search will have. But that could involve more time-consuming online activities, from simple bookmarking to labeling and reviewing Web sites. It's not clear users will make that kind of investment.
• Others doubt the wisdom of crowds will offer much of an upgrade over the feats of raw computing power. (...) "The best description of a document is the document itself."
• As with all community sites, the benefits grow with the size and activity of the group. That means Yahoo's social-search trial, still in its infancy, could take months or years before reaching its potential. "Social search is not one of these things that will take off overnight," says Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. "It will take a lot of time to build."

I don't want to play the part pooper but some of those claims are important and it seems that some Web2.0 platforms try to address this by various means: not allowing the 'tag thing' but having au automatic parser of the document (text/pictures...) for example.

Still, it does not mean that it can't work but there are some things to consider. I would add that in some domains it can work; especially when there is a certain density in conversations about a certain topic.

Implications for design and ethnographical studies in HCI

A good read this afternoon: Dourish, P. 2006. Implications for Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2006 (Montreal, Canada).

The article criticizes the canonical papers (in the field of Human-Computer Interactions) which reports results from an ethnographic study with a final section called "implications for design". The normative epistemology of the HCI field makes it mandatory (as the author mentions "the absence of this section tends to be correlated with negative reviews"). In this paper, Paul Dourish wants to explore "the ways in which the “implications for design” may underestimate, misstate, or misconstrue the goals and mechanisms of ethnographic investigation". To him, this focus is misplaced and researchers are consequently missing the point of how ethnography could benefit to HCI research.

Some pertinent excerpts (with regard to my work + research interests):

ethnographic methods were originally brought into HCI research in response to the perceived problems of moving from laboratory studies to broader understandings technology use. (...) The term “ethnography,” indeed, is often used as shorthand for investigations that are, to some extent, in situ, qualitative, or open-ended. (...) a corpus of field techniques for collecting and organizing data (...) often been aligned with the requirements gathering phase of a traditional software development model [a good connection here -nicolas] (...) In reducing ethnography to a toolbox of methods for extracting data from settings, however, the methodological view marginalizes or obscures the theoretical and analytic components of ethnographic analysis.

But Dourish does not want to say that ethnography is useless to find implications for design, he'd rather want to show it's not only meant to bring out this kind of contribution. And this is very interesting:

Ethnography provides insight into the organization of social settings, but its goal is not simply to save the reader a trip; rather, it provides models for thinking about those settings and the work that goes on there. The value of ethnography, then, is in the models it provides and the ways of thinking that it supports. Ethnography has a critical role to play in interactive system design, but this may be as much in shaping research (or corporate) strategy as in uncovering the constraints.

Why do I blog this? while considering the global framework for my PhD thesis, I have in mind this kind of ideas; especially when it goes to the contribution to the HCI field. However, even though I try to include some mixed methodologies, my work is more quantitative-dominant, on top of which I use ethnographical methodologies (for instance for results triangulation).

Millenial folks and IT Consumption

There is very good article in the NYT about how millenials (those born between 1980 and 2000 now in their early to mid-20's) deal with current technology: A generation serves notice: It's a moving target by Tom Zeller Jr. The paper begins by explaining the importance of the Internet for this generation ("For Mr. Hanson, even his new job is an Internet-based, media-intensive labor informed by feedback") and the corollary topic is then:

The number of vehicles through which young people find entertainment and information (and one another) makes them a moving target for anyone hoping to capture their attention. (...) advertising and short videos for mobile phones, for instance, cell networks with dedicated game channels, and $1.99 TV programs to download to iPods and PC's.

What is very relevant is the qualitative trends the article describes:

"We think that the single largest differentiator in this generation from previous generations is the social network that is people's lives, the part of it that technology enables," said Jack McKenzie, a senior vice president of a market research and consulting firm specializing in the news media and entertainment industries. (...) "What's hard to measure, and what we're trying to measure," Mr. McKenzie continued, "is the impact of groupthink, of group mentality, and the tendency of what we might call the democratization of social interaction and how that changes this generation's relationship with almost everything they come in contact with." (...) And as the millennials diverge from their elders in their media choices, so do the ways in which they can be reached and influenced. (...) The preceding generation may have thought that e-mail, newsgroups, Web forums and even online chats accelerated the word-of-mouth phenomenon. They did. But they are nothing compared with the always-live electronic dialogue among millions of teenagers and 20-somethings. "What we're seeing is a whole different relationship with marketing and advertising which obviously has ripple effects through the entire economy, For the millennials, he said, "reliance and trust in nontraditional sources - meaning everyday people, their friends, their networks, the network they've created around them - has a much greater influence on their behaviors than traditional advertising.", Magid calls it the peer-to-group phenomenon, "When someone wants to share it, forward it, record it, take a picture of it, whatever the case may be, that puts it into a form of currency," Mr. McKenzie said. "And when marketing gets to a level of currency, then it has achieved nirvana status.""

Eventually, the author brings out some concerns about "the group-mentality dynamics that the Internet and the instant-message age may be fostering." as it can prevent some of them from developing as individuals (e.f. think and plan for the long term) and of-course the dangers of being "always-on" (To really unplug would be to risk being swept aside by a virtual torrent of information - or, worse, being forgotten.)

The whole article is very insightful and would be a good examplification of how certain people around here behave ;)

Update! The last report of the PEW Internet and American life project is about this issue. Get the PDF and see that "Internet users ages 12 to 28 years old have embraced the online applications that enable communicative, creative, and social uses. Older users are more likely to engage in online activities that require some capital: travel reservations and online banking. ".

User-Centered Needs in Pervasive Gaming

Player-Centred Game Design: Experiences in Using Scenario Study to Inform Mobile Game Designby Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä is an interesting paper I found in the Game Studies the (I would say 'an') international journal of computer game research, volume 5, issue 1, october 2005. The paper acknowledges the "need for systematic, research-based and tested game design methodologies that take the needs and preferences of different players into better consideration than the current industry practices"; It also take this approach in the context of pervasive game playing on mobile devices, which is actually our field of research. This is part of a research project called Wireless Gaming Solutions for the Future (MOGAME) carried out by the University of Tampere Hypermedia Laboratory’s (see also the iPerg project, the European Union project connected to it).

The paper is fully of relevant ideas. I like the following statement because it goes beyond the simple mobile gaming approach (i.e. developing old games for new phones, even though some are interesting):

we focused on developing mobile game concepts that are most suitable for contemporary kinds of wireless and mobile terminals. This involves taking advantage of these devices’ unique characteristics such as communication possibilities, mobility and positioning. n a previous research project on interactive television we have observed that communication with other players, especially those unfamiliar to each other in real life, may help in making the play experience feel more adventurous and interesting. Persistent communicative contacts are also important when developing persistent social networks, i.e. communities. Communication is thus an important component of social playability. Using a mobile phone as a communication device in the game also offers possibilities for telecom operators to take advantage of other sources of revenue than just the download price of the game.

The last part is very clever and close to what I've read (and blogged) last week in the IBM podcast about how the mobile devices complement online playing.

The article also presents 2 types of research: basic research on games, players and playability and applied research on the design of location-sensitive services and applications (basically a game called The Songs of North). Their aim was to evaluate the experiences gathered while using a scenario-based player study to inform pervasive mobile game design. The approach appeared to be good and the article described some flaws. Actually, since our research is less oriented towards designing games than studying how people use them, I was more interested by all the remarks about how the application/device impacted the study. for instance:

using player movement as a central game element may easily become too much of a burden for the players. Especially in a persistent game, designers have to take the daily lives of their players into consideration and try to intertwine the game movement to the daily routines or routes of the players to a certain degree. Otherwise the players will probably not have enough energy to keep on playing, possibly for several months in the persistent, mixed reality game world. One solution we came up with, besides taking advantage of the naturally occurring movement of the players, was providing support for team play. When playing in teams, players can easily reduce the amount of their movement if they jointly communicate and coordinate their gameplay. This was also in harmony with the aim of enticing players to communicate with each other – and informants’ wish to be able to form teams in games. (...) Contemporary mobile devices did not appear as very promising gameplay devices from the point of view of the player study informants. They felt mobile games often required too much concentration on the small device when trying to control the game using cramped buttons, and thus might take the attention away from the actual playing. Therefore we are emphasising the role of the auditory world of the game. (...) We are also aiming towards seamless integration of all of the game elements, including the mobile device and the real-world environment, so that the mobile device, for example, would not feel separate from the game

Why do I blog this? Judging from those results, I'd love to know more about it (user experience research methods + results), especially with regards to players' collective behavior and their movements in space!

A robot that can shit

Nam June Paik, is a korean artist who designed (in 1964) a robot that can shit in the streets of New York and call/mingle people who pass-by. According to an interview in Wired (back in 2000), it seems that it's the only pooping robot (well except Wim Delvoye's Cloaqua which is more a machine than an anthropomorphic robot). It's called "Robot 456" and the antropomorphism in this case was related to its innovative capacity to XXX.

(Picture Photograph: Hanns Sohm | © Nam June Paik taken here)

Why do i blog this? I like some of his statements like "I make technology ridiculous", the way he manipulated technology and humour is fantastic.

Pre-Lift Event: blogject workshop

In the context of the LIFT conference, I organize (along with Julian Bleecker) an invitation-only workshop called Blogjects and the Internet of Things.

Blogjects - a neologism Julian Bleecker came up with for objects that blog - exemplify the soon-to-come 'Internet of Things', i.e. a network of tangible, mobile, chatty things enabled by the miniaturization, the ubiquity of consumer electronics and a pervasive Internet. In its most basic form, a blogject is not dissimilar to people that blog - it is an artifact that can disseminate a record of its experiences to the web. It would report the history of its interactions with other objects and with people. (...) this topic ties into the idea of proximity-based interaction and usage scenarios for mobile contexts.

The aim of the workshop: is to discuss usage scenarios of blogjects, the design issues they raises as well as their significance in various usage and design contexts.

We will discuss potential ideas related to the Internet of Things, trying to sketch some new directions that - I hope - will go beyond current location-based applications.

Technorati Tags: lift, lift06, blogject

Notes about IBM podcast on online gaming

One month ago, IBM releases an interesting podcast about IBM and the Future of Online Games. An important note is that this is available on their 'Investor Relations' website. In this podcast (targeted to IBM shareholders), Quentin Staes-Polet, head of IBM's online gaming practice in Asia and Joey Alarilla, president of the Asian Gaming Journalists Association, discuss how online gaming's immersive, virtual environments are pioneering how we will play, learn and work in the future. The transcript of the podcast is available here.

Some pertinent excerpts:

There are changes in the business models in the way people are being charged for play. There's still a lot of experimenting being done with that.

You know the basic model works around you pay for one month's subscription. But you can also pay per the hours. You can pay per level you are going for games. And there's a whole paradigm now that is showing up around paying for items where you play for free but in order to succeed and do your game play you need to purchase certain items. (...) you can also buy real estate in the game. (...) Harvard Business Press published this book called Dot Game which talks about how the gamer generation is taking over the workplace.

It argues that, you know, we are learning a lot of real-world skills playing games. We're talking about resource management. We're talking about leadership skills, getting your team together. Focusing on an objective. (...) the funny thing about games is that we are willing to absorb a lot of information. We are willing to master a lot of skills in a very, you know, short span of time, in order to win.

Of particular interest is this part, that attests the use of various devices while playing:

the mobile devices complement your online playing, because you know you know that you can check up on your characters. You can chat with your friends or you can, you know, make small transactions during what's supposedly should be your down time. If you're waiting for a bus or waiting for your train. You can just check it using your mobile.

They also deal with human-computer interaction with this:

I spend half of my weekend with my son in front of a PlayStation 2 equipped with a camera interacting with virtual boxes and virtual ghosts and everything by not touching any controller. The camera just recognizes your movement and use this data to make you interact with a virtual environment. Now, again, those are technologies that we will be using. Nobody wants to use a keyboard. It's very impractical way to communicate to actually have to type on little squares..when you can actually just talk to that computer or make a move to explain what you're doing. So what we see the technology industry bring in to online gaming is a very good indicator, I think, of how we will in general interact with networks and computers in the future.

Since I am working on projects about collaboration and on-line comunities, the second part is very relevant for that matter:

In online games, you have clans. These are groups of people who band together. The thing about online games is it really makes it sociable because you can try to adventure all alone for a while, but at some point you need to form clans in order to tackle the biggest quest and bring down the bigger opponents.

Most games are built in that manner. The reality is that many of the early massively multiplayer online game to make sure there would be stickiness and people would come back, there was a requirement to team together, achieve things together, et cetera. So naturally the industry developed that taste for community, because it's good for the business as well. (...) Another aspect of it which we see in a lot of these online games is that you know people help each other out. (...) there's some games which actually have Wikis, so they're using this open source tool in order to in effect build, you have the gaming encyclopedia. You have people volunteering, contributing, okay, so this is really, this is what this monster is like. It's not coming from the company but the users themselves are building this pool of knowledge

Why do I blog this? this podcast offers great insights about the potential of the video game industry. They're useful as starting point for 'user experience' research projects.

The Economist on Knowledge workers

The Economist on Drucker-like knowledge workers: Thinking for a living. The most interesting part of the article (IMO) is the one that deals with how knowledge workers communicate:

how to improve knowledge-work productivity...is one of the most important economic issues of our time.” One way, he suggests [Thomas Davenport in his book “Thinking for a Living”.], might be to examine how different workers use knowledge; to see which technologies best gather and disseminate the information that knowledge workers need; and to find the workspace that is best suited to people who are highly mobile and need to concentrate a lot.

I took the liberty to put this graph I found pertinent, even though it's not commented in the article, because it shows the importance of e-mail for instance; it's a pity they did not discriminate the various forms of email (mailing-lists, one-to-one, group mailing...)

The source of this the book "Thinking for a living" by Thomas Davenport.