Crossmedia gaming: Epidemic Menace

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Epidemic Menace:

"Epidemic Menace" is the first cross media IPerG prototype and will be played at the Fraunhofer Institutszentrum Birlinghoven in Sankt Augustin. The campus will be integrated in the game via mobile computers, smart phones and augmented reality- and will transform the campus into a game area - reality, fiction and gameplay will fuse: A scientist has stolen dangerous viruses and contaminated the campus Birlinghoven. The gamers have 48 hours to find all virus instances, capture and disarm the viruses and find the villain. The game is played in two groups partly on the campus and partly on PC's in control rooms. The game can be observed via the Internet.

"Epidemic Menace" is an official IPerG game funded by the EC. The consortium consists of: Swedish Institute of Computer Science (Coordinator), Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Sony NetServices Berlin, Daydream, Interactive Institute, Nokia, University of Tampere, University of Nottingham and Blast Theory.

Why do I blog this? I like the crossmedia idea, I believe it's a good way to create interesting gaming experiences on various platorfms.

There is going to be a paper at CHI2006:

Combining Multiple Gaming Interfaces in Epidemic Menace A crossmedia game, Epidemic Menace, including a game board station, a mobile assistant and a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) system is described. Early results of an ethnographic observation are described, showing how the different gaming interfaces were used by the players to observe, collaborate and interact within the game. Irma Lindt Jan Ohlenburg Uta Pankoke-Babatz Wolfgang Prinz

Junk prototyping

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In the last issue of ACM Interactions, there is an intriguing article about prototyping with junk by Nancy Frishberg. The idea is to go beyond paper by using the materials of kindergarten to the world of design. This can be used to achive four goals: encourages communication both within a team, gives a product concept or workflow a physical instantiation, quickly visualizes proposed solutions with little investment of time or money and promotes fun at work (this would please people from imagination lab).

What Is Junk?

Materials collected from the recycling bin are great additions to those found at school supply shops, the dollar store, and sale tables of your favorite craft counter. Picnic supplies, such as paper plates, as well as cafeteria (or fast food) cardboard trays work well as a base or frame for other structures. Pipecleaners, packing materials, coffee stirrers, toothpicks, wooden ice cream sticks, wire hangers, egg cartons, and the usual selection of old magazines or gently used gift-wrapping paper and ribbons also make great prototyping materials. We supply inexpensive plastic toys, party supplies, twist-ties, modeling clay, candy past its expiration date, and beads, as well as various sorts of cutting implements, glue, and tape. Paper, pens, and crayons are invited as well

The only drawback the author mentions is:

"One downside of prototyping with junk is that its benefits accrue to physically present participants. We've attempted to include people remotely by audio or even video conference, but so far have found it difficult to integrate the local and remote.

The overt, externalized results appear as these representations made of otherwise useless materials. The covert, intangible results include lasting communication within an ephemeral or stable work group."

Why do I blog this? even though we often use this kind of technique during our workshop, I am sometimes dubious of the outcome of such activities. Some others have pointed on the drawbacks of prototyping: it can't emulate complex interactions, it can't find complex issues or it can't simulate “real” interaction with a live system. But perhaps the point in prototyping sometime is not to create something altogether but rather to tighten team relationship, make colleagues/partners aware of specific phenomenon and for instance, for R&D/foresight people to translate ideas, concepts and content to marketing or people more in the production process. And this is already a huge achievement (given certain types of organization for which ideas are difficult to transfer to support innonovation). And then that's why we still do that :)

Anyway, the whole issue of the journal about this topic and there are worthwile paper about good examples!

The Orb: Passive Stumbling and Information Awareness

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Hector Jaime from Restate Media pointed me on their project called The Orb, which is a wireless network stumbling platform. They describe the purposes of stumbling as:

  • we could make out of the information visualisation. all those nice net art pictures or fancy colours making up forms.
  • [people] could also be aware of the amount of information travelling around and on which directions, with this information we acquire the generation of an urban understanding of the nature of the regional digital information, its flows, density reach and quality along with consuming habits of small regions and communities. in short we can profile the information flows
  • Publishing localised information of near information access points permits citizens to gain awareness of places to access relevant information within their local context, activating in such ways new information flows there for common localised knowledge.
  • Social Information Awareness
  • Identify Knowledge Sources

Why do I blog this? I would say that I am more interested in the visualization of information flows, perhaps this is due to my curiosity towards the overlay of virtual layer on top of the virtual world (and the fact that I am not so confident in using this raise social information awareness).

Entrepreneurial spirit is alive in Europe, on the web

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The IHT has an article showing how "anyone who thought that Europeans were not as entrepreneurial as Americans has not been watching people doing business on eBay".

Over 170,000 people in 12 European countries make money selling on the site and 50 million Europeans buy or browse, according to research commissioned by the company. Trading activity generated sales worth $947 million in 2004.

In the United States, buyers and browsers total roughly 90 million. EBay's home market generated 55 percent of the company's $4.55 billion in global sales last year.

"Europe is one of our fastest-growing markets,"

And about what is sold:

in France, someone uses eBay to sell a comic book every minute, on average. In Germany, someone buys a bulldozer every three hours, while in Britain a teddy bear changes hands every two minutes on the online auction site.

Somehow related to the minipreneur or consumactor trend.

Some of those things that blog

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Working on the blogject workshop debriefing, I tried to gather some examples of 'objects that blog', or objects that upload their story up to web. The simplest form Alex Pang from the IFTF suggested me are webcams but they are rather passive instruments, "reporting" whatever they see. Another simple example is a lamp which can show a history of persons who have entered a specific room (see this aula lamp on page 4).

Another suggestion (by fredhouse) was this project at EPFL that had a bunch of RSS feeds for sensor data from a mote-based sensor net. Using an embedded server component that publishes RSS data feeds and a datablogging platform could be a way to upload these information. The point, as Gene described would be that every connected thing has syndication as a default capability, which is one of the thing we discussed in our workshop the other day.

Of course, there is the AIBO blog (see the aibo blog aggregator too) and the pigeon that blog thing I blogged about last week is very close to this: "Pigeons with GPS enabled electronic air pollution sensing devices, capable of sending location based air pollution data as well as images to an online Mapping/Blogging Environment in real time".

Those things exist already, now there are some thoughts that begin to pop here and there:

Sascha think about something quite beyond that:

I spend some time thinking about object that would tap into the flow of money within Google AdSense, ultimately ending up with an artifact that could make (grow?) money for you. I believe that this would be especially interesting because you then could give people that have no access to these abstract means of generating value (e.g. having a website or blog) or are even illiterate the means to access it and even make a living using paradigms that are coming from a completely different background. Imagine an artificial plant that would generate clicks (money) on it's own AdSense-equipped website whenever its solar cells are being exposed to the sun, thus combining the most

Overall, I like the datablogging concept because it's really close to the idea of various data aggregated with a potential goal, as in blogjects.

Well, we still have to write the workshop report :)

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Support the Basel Action Network

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Basel Action Network

BAN is the world's only organization focused on confronting the excesses of unbridled free trade in the form of “Toxic Trade” (trade in toxic wastes, toxic products and toxic technologies) and its devastating impact on global environmental justice. Working at the nexus of human rights and environment, we confront the issues of environmental justice at a macro level, preventing disproportionate dumping of the world's toxic waste and pollution on our global village's poorest residents. Further, we promote sustainable and just solutions to our consumption and waste crises.

One argument - among others - in favor of their action:

A sea of television housings, cathode ray tubes, computers, monitors and other imported electronic waste not salable at the Alaba market in Lagos, Nigeria, is dumped here in a nearby swamp.© Basel Action Network 2005

Why do I blog this? it's good to understand the dark side of IT...

CSCW course take-away

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Some take-away for students of our Computer-Supported Collaborative Work course:

Common errors:

  • Media Richness is the solution: no adding video channel is not necessarily better in terms of coordination effectiveness and group collaboration.
  • Text is knowledge: text is information but not knowledge, learning is not reading.

Challenges:

  • Mediating informal interactions among distributed teams
  • Invent uses of location-based services, pervasive comouting and awareness tools

Today's trends:

  • Computation is back to real, to things you can touch (roomware, tangibles,…)
  • Physical space, places, topology, context and infrastructure matters

Stuffed toy interface

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"Robo-Teddy: Today’s Stuffed Toys, Tomorrow’s Intelligent Agents by Benjamin Alfonsi. It seems that some folks move beyond the WiFi rabbit Nabaztag. This computerized plush squirell answers cell phone calls, takes messages, and alerts its owner to important calls or new voicemail.

The good old-fashioned teddy bear has become an intelligent agent. Computer scientists are now using stuffed toys as intelligent agents in an array of applications—from bunnies and squirrels that serve as cell phone answering devices to bears that function as “living” log recording devices. (...) Kenji Mase, professor of information architecture and technology at Nagoya University, is using a teddy bear—what he refers to as a “stuffed toy interface”

The reason for doing that is that users "react positively to embodied agents, such as stuffed toys, mainly on an emotional level".

Another project described in the IEEE article is Huggable—a therapeutic interactive bear for hospitalized children which seems to be interesting (by Cynthia Breazeal).

Why do I blog this? it's very interesting to see how toys and computing are now closer and closer; the teddy-bear interface is very trendy both as an input and an output.

Usability of video-games HUDs

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In Gamasutra, there has been a good article about Heads-Up Display last week. It adresses the topic of HUD usability. As they say, the developer's challenge is the following: how do you convey necessary information to the player without utilizing a traditional HUD?.

A HUD is simply a collection of persistent onscreen elements whose purpose is to indicate player status. HUD elements can be used to show, among many other things, how much health the player has, in which direction the player is heading, or where the player ranks in a race. (...) what would make console developers suddenly rethink the necessity of such a seemingly essential and time-honored technique as the HUD? Here are three compelling reasons. (...) millions of high-definition televisions have an Achilles heel that can hinder developers as well: burn-in. (...) it is caused by persistent onscreen elements that, over time, create a ghost image on the screen even after they are no longer shown. (...) yes traditional HUDs can pose a risk to many who play console games for extended periods of time on their HDTVs. (...) Just as a filmmaker doesn't want a viewer to stop and think, “This is only a movie,” a game developer should strive to avoid moments that cause a gamer to think, “This is just a game.” (...) nothing screams “this is just a game” louder than an old-fashioned HUD. It is not a part of the game world; it is an artificial overlay. (...) [casual] Gamers looking for a “pick up and play” experience are not inclined to spend time figuring out what all those bars and gauges are for.

The article then investigate "how to go HUD-less":

  • remove useless information, decide “Is this information essential to the game experience?”
  • use audio cues to either reinforce a visual cue or offer a unique message that is not easily shown visually.
  • if a HUD is really need, only show an element when the player status changes.
  • another solution is to allow the player to control the appearance of the HUD.
  • remove static elements from the HUD

Astrodiapers

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A picture of what astronauts had to wear when flying to the moon: undershorts layered with absorbent material:

At that time it was really lowtech, now it can recycle fluids into drinkable water.

Robot toy: beyond Furbies: Pleo

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It seems that while Sony is stopping its Aibo/Qrio projects, some others are still believing in robot toys: the SF-based company Ugobe. Here are some excerpts from the FT:

Sony may have abandoned its Aibo robot dog but metal pet lovers will soon have a replacement in Pleo, a lifelike dinosaur robot being unveiled on Monday by the co-inventor of the Furby. Pleo is viewed as a big advance in robotics, with its fluid movement and sensors that stop it walking into walls and falling off edges.

It does not require a remote control and can cough, blink, chomp, twitch, sigh, sneeze, sniff, yawn and move its tail.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in this part:

Pleo, the work of Furby co-creator Caleb Chung and a team of biologists, animators, robotics experts and programmers, is the first of a range of “designer life forms” that will be able to evolve and interact with one another, says Ugobe.

This could lead to a new kind of gameplay between light-sabre wielding robots on the tabletop rather than on the computer screen.

You can find some information about their projects here but there aren't any picture of the product yet (on the web).

Ubiquitous Computing and RSS

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In his post entitled "grazing", Danny Ayers shows a comment by James Corbett who claims that ubiquitous computing might rely on a RSS infrastructure with regards to information flows:

As Zigbee sensors, RFID chips and GPS trackers proliferate we’ll be drowing in an RSS-everywhere world if we don’t change our approach.

We don’t subscribe to all the sensory feed in physical world, we sample, nibble, taste, glance. Taskable and OPod (and whatever Kosso’s working on) are first generation “Feed Grazers” IMHO. They allow you to graze feeds without ever subscribing. All we need is for static OPML directories to proliferate and for OPML search engine

Why do I blog this? "reading" information from physical objects/building/moving artifacts (self or others) might be the future in the expected 'ecology of things', will RSS be a way to provide us with those information? well it could be: you can get weather forecast for instance, why not the state information about the room I will teach in tomorrow (the building is full of sensors and provide some information about temperature for instance)...

How will computation transform the new spaces that it comes to occupy

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Williams, A., Kabisch, E., and Dourish, P. (2005.) From Interaction to Participation: Configuring Space through Embodied Interaction. Proc. Intl. Conf. Ubiquitous Computing Ubicomp 2005 (Tokyo, Japan). This paper addresses this very important question: how will ubiquitous computing transform the new spaces that it comes to occupy; or What sorts of impacts on space result when it is populated by ubicomp technologies? The paper starts by describing how space and social action are tightly entwined. Then they examine the development and evaluation of a collective dynamic audio installation called SignalPlay (a series of physical objects with embedded computational properties collectively control a dynamic “sound-scape” which responds to the orientation, configuration, and movement of the component objects).

Some excerpts of this insightful paper:

Our fundamental concern is with the ways in which we encounter space not simply as a container for our actions, but as a setting within which we act. The embodied nature of activity is an issue for a range of technologies. (...) This social character means that spaces are not “given”; they are the products of active processes of interpretation. The meaningfulness of space is a consequence of our encounters with it. For ubiquitous computing, this is an important consideration. (...) The research challenge, then, is to understand how it is that computationally augmented spaces will be legible; with how people will be able to understand them and act within them. (...) A number of broad observations are particularly notable. (...) First, it was notable that people sought to understand the system not as a whole but in terms of the individual actions of different components. (...) Objects take on meanings and interpretations in their own right rather than as elements of a “system.” This suggests, then, that user’s experiences and interpretations of ubiquitous computing systems will often be of a quite different sort than those of their designers, because of the radically different ways in which they encounter these systems. (...) Second, one particularly interesting area for further exploration is the temporal or- ganization of activity. (...) The temporality of interaction and encounters with technology is a neglected aspect of interaction design and an important part of our ongoing work. (...) Lastly, ubiquitous computing technologies are ones through which people encounter and come to understand infrastructures. (...) The presence or absence of infrastructure, or differences in its availability, becomes one of the ways in which spaces are understood and navigated. At conferences or in airports, the seats next to power outlets are in high demand, and in a wide range of settings, the strength of a cellular telephone signal becomes an important aspect of how space is assessed and used. As we develop new technologies that rely on physical but invisible infrastructures, we create new ways of understanding the structure of space. (...) Our design models must address space not as a passive container of objects and actions, but as something that is explicitly constructed, managed, and negotiated in the course of interaction

Why do I blog this? simply, a large part of my research is geared towards studying the relations between space/place and social/cognitive processes; this paper is very relevant for that matter since it offers some pertinent ideas about this would be applied in the field of ubiquitous computing. I also appreciated the idea of taking as the core of ubicomp the relationship between people, objects, and activities, cast in terms of the ways in which practice evolves. Each of their findings are important in the results I am currently analysing concerning the CatchBob! game usage:

  • As for the first point (people sought to understand the system not as a whole but in terms of the individual actions of different components), the features we provided in CatchBob have some individual consequence such as the location-awareness tool that in itself create a certain behavior consistency.
  • The temporal organization of activity is very important in the CatchBob! pervasive game: each different part of the activity is different can the interface features have a different impact on them.
  • The link with the infrastructure and the activity of using the ubicomp tech in Catchbob lays in the fact that sometime the network is available and sometimes not + the accuracy of the positioning/message exchange varies over time, well this will be fabien's phd work.

Chuck Norris-esque Wow items

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The Wow item creator (designed by Krigaren) seems to be a good way for Chuck Norris fans to express themselves in MMORPG worlds. There are indeed various norris-esque tool such as:

  • The Orange dagger of mighty Norris: Use: You become famous, shiny and every female elves all around just take their clothes off and throw them at your feets. Equip: Make you look like Chuck Norris
  • The Eye of Chuck Norris: Call forth the eye of chuck Norris to Roundhouse kick your ennemies. Equip: 50% Chance for an ennemy to flee at the sight of the Eye of Chuck Norris. Equip: 100% Chance when In melee for the eye to say " HOW DARE YOU LOOK AT CHUCK NORRIS ???" Equip: 20% chance to call Chuck norris to your aid

Check also this interesting Chuck Norris Fact Generator that can post random Chuck Norris facts found on ChuckNorrisFacts.com

Articulating residents' design priorities

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In the last issue of Metropolis Mag, there is an intriguing article entitled "Found in Translation: Laying the foundation for more sensitivity within a community's public spaces". It's mostly about how urban designer can articulate residents' design priorities. What is interesting, is this project they mention: "Hester Sign Collaborative": Those students, interns with a nonprofit design outfit called Hester Street Collaborative, are investigating how Chinatown's jumble of signs, icons, and sidewalk food vendors can reflect a look that residents actually want. With the supervision of Anne Frederick and Alex Gilliam, Hester Street's full-time staff, students create "nonverbal tools" for residents who don't speak English (or design jargon). Last year, intern William Chung designed a board game, Bad Design Darts, to serve as a community survey. Hester Street would post a neighborhood map at a town hall meeting and the block that residents hit most frequently with darts would receive a cleanup or gardening campaign initiated by civic groups.

Jenny Chin, another of the collaborative's interns, developed Step On Your Neighborhood, in which the collaborative lends residents a small handheld paver. People would take the pavers around the their streets and stamp impressions of found objects in concrete. "Here's this way of making things that could be beautiful and are entirely specific to that neighborhood," says Gilliam of Chin's innovation, "This is something many ages can do." (...) The collaborative will soon install a ribbon of symbols to inject more immigrant histories into the flow.

Why do I blog this? I find relevant to study how people think in terms of urban planning/design ideas, especially in diverse neighborhoods. This idea of 'non-verbal tool' is simple and appealing. Besides, I really like this: "the Hester Street intern demonstrates how making casts of found objects can feed a useful English-free design lexicon": (Photos courtesy Hester Street Collaborative)

Jan Chipchase and blogjects

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Jan's blogpost about Traces of events is very well-connect to our blogject workshop:

In our perfect future we can accurately track everything - the exact location, temperature, who and what is in proximity for how long, the information that was exchanged - every last minute detail. Some of this data could help ensure that your luggage arrives in tip-top condition, in the right place and on time. Or not. You land in a new country and immigration doesn't only check your luggage, it checks the history of your luggage. (...) It's 2012- your luggage in the hold of the plane and can communicate with the other luggage. What would they say to one another? Would they even speak the same language?

Why do I blog this? this is what we discussed last wednesday: traces are one of the feature of blogjects and indeed luggages could be an interesting examples.

Channel of communication and location-based services

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http://www.bernhardseefeld.ch/archives/000112.htmlBernhard Seefeld blogged a relevant question he asked to usage watcher Stefana Broadbent at LIFT06:

After a data-rich and fascinating talk about the specialization of communication channels at LIFT yesterday someone asked if the introduction of position-information of your communication partner would alter the communication patterns. Stefana's suggested that there probably would be not much change in the pattern, since the 4-6 people that you do the bulk of synchronous and nearly synchronous communication with, you know well enough to know where they most probably are at any time anyway. Taking this further, these would of course be the same set of people that would probably give you the trust rating to expose their position. Thus, the question: Is there any market for all these mobile location based communication systems?

Not in the obvious implementation case. Maybe either by restricting types of locations, like Plazes does (which maps places I'm online, thus probably working and almost never my spare time) or by coming up with a system that is anonymous enough, but yet useful and not annoying (permission spam) so that you could extent the service to a much wider circle.

On the other hand, IM-style presence indicators (from "away" and "busy" to "phone", "meeting", "in the zone") potentially fulfill a much more important note in this context. Maybe phones start listening to things like how many voices (and at what volume?) there are in the room, how fast the typing-sound is, etc. They could at least switch to silent mode in this case? Hmm, how reliable could you detect that the owner is sitting in a movie or a talk? And why is there no "silence please" beacon installed in every cinema that mobile phones could pay attention to?

Amateur content creation

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The IHT has an interesting article about the pro-am debate. It starts from the rise of the amateur digital content producer and the corollary problem that this situation fosters: regulation are quite difficult to create. Some excerpts:

Established media companies that have already seen their business models emasculated by illegal file sharing are nervously watching the rise of the amateur content producers and distributors. These amateurs are changing the media landscape again and in some cases becoming the new entrepreneurs with the hot product that may make what is new today obsolete tomorrow. (...) How do you define an amateur? If somebody distributes content over the Internet, does that person have to follow regular broadcast laws, or should there be special regulations for the Web? Should the government step in to shut down blogs that incite illegal behavior? What about blogs that provide a forum for people to sympathize with outlawed groups?

Why do I blog this? this concept of amateur content creation is larger than just cultural product; I think it's interesting because it reshape the boundaries of organizations and work. I connect this amateur concept to the idea of independent workers: people in no organizations (or creating their new one far from the big structures) to do what they want to carry out: creating content, doing research, performing arty activities...