An autonomous robotic fish

Less sexy than Aibo but still nifty, this autonomous robotic fisch seems interesting. Designed by Dan Massie, Mike Kirkland, Jen Manda, Ian Strimaitis

An autonomous, micro-controlled fish was designed and constructed using sonar to help guide it in swimming. It was predetermined that constructing a mechatronic fish would be a large and demanding project due to the complex shape of a fish body, the unfamiliar territories of sonar sensing, the intricacies of fluid propulsion, and the challenge of keeping submerged electronics dry. However, the team was willing to put in a lot of time and produced an exceptionally successful first prototype by the name of Dongle.

The most important part is about the design and construction of this robotic pet: using soft-clay, a tail servo, microcontrollers...

A buddy finder for large-scale events

Olofsson, S., Carlsson, V. and Sjolander, J. (2006) The friend locator: supporting visitors at large-scale events, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10: 84–89. This paper is about the fact that during large-scale events, people tend to lose each other and a LBS system might support the "friend locator feature". It describes the findings of an ethnographic field study that was carried out during a music festival in Sweden. Well, it's another "where is my buddy?" system, in a design phase.

Why do I blog this? I am less interested in such a system than by the possible new applications the atuhors envision:

We believe that the friend locator also would be usable at other types of large-scale events e.g., at a rally it could be used to see where a specific competitor’s car is located, and the distance remaining until it passes the position of you as a spectator could be measured in order to estimate the time left. When the competitor moves between the different stages again, the GPS could be turned off to prevent a surprise from the fans. At large football tournaments for children, a team could be allowed more freedom if the coach could easily communicate and locate the entire team through a friend locator.

An electronic ghetto within the emerging information city

Today reading in the train: "Beyond Blade runner: Urban control, the ecology of fear by Mike Davis. An excerpt I liked:

Perhaps, as William Gibson suggests, 3-dimensional computer interfaces will soon allow post-modern flaneurs (or 'console cowboys') to stroll through the luminous geometry of this mnemonic city where data-bases have become 'blue pyramids' and 'cold spiral arms'.

If so, urban cyberspace - as the simulation of the city's information order - will be experienced as even more segregated, and devoid of true public space, than the traditional built city. Southcentral LA, for instance, is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing/jobs ghetto in the early twentieth century industrial city, it is now evolving into an electronic ghetto within the emerging information city.

Why do I blog this? what I like there is (1) this idea of embedding virtual data flows in reality (through light/displays, as in this project or this one for example), (2) the notion of electronic divide: there's going to be ghettos without data holes.

This is connected to Usman Haque's paper about Invisible Topographies quoting Antony Dunne:

Humans have only recently begun contributing to the cacophony with their pagers, medical devices, television broadcasts and mobile phones. This abundant invisible territory, a topography that is altered in shape and intensity by both natural and human-constructed landscapes, has been called "hertzian space" by industrial design theorist Anthony Dunne. He has observed that hertzian space is often ignored by designers saying, in Hertzian Tales, that the "material responses to immaterial electromagnetic fields can lead to new aesthetic possibilities for architecture.

An example of such idea is Tunneable Cities project by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, part of their “hertzian tales” (thanks you elastico!):

Ambient Information Visualization thesis

If you're into information visualization, the Licentiate thesis of Tobias Skog (Future Applications Lab, Göteborg) is very appealing. It's called "Ambient Information Visualization" (1.7Mb pdf here) and it deals with various issues regarding informative art, everyday displays as well as their utility and evaluations.

This thesis investigates the concept of ambient information visualization. It has its background in the research fields of ubiquitous computing and information visualization (...) The term ambient information visualization distinguishes an area where these two research fields merge, and can be defined as the use of visual representations of digital data to enhance a physical location. These visualizations are typically displayed using flat-panel displays or projectors and ideally act both as information displays and decorative elements in the interiors where they are placed.

The thesis describes a suite of design examples, where the first ones explicitly address the issue of creating a decorative surface by using the styles of famous artists as inspiration for the appearance of the visualizations, creating so-called informative art. Subsequent designs are developed under the superordinate term ambient information visualization and strive to find generic, inherent properties of peripheral information displays and how these properties come to affect design requirements. As a way of informing the design process, visualizations have continually been tested with users in different environments, including exhibition settings with large amounts of visitors as well as long-term studies of use in office settings with smaller user groups. The knowledge gained from the design and study of these examples is analyzed and the results highlight issues that are of central importance when designing a visualization. These issues are divided into three categories that concern the information source, the mapping from data to visual structures and the use of the visualization.

Some of the examples, my favorite is certainly the one using the Mondrian compositions as inspiration to show information about e-mail traffic:

Self-Replication of a LEGO station by a robot

Self-replication robotics is a curious domain. Unlike, self-reconfigurable robotics, the idea is to utilize an original unit to actively assemble an exact copy of itself from passive components. Greg Chirikjian of John Hopkins University created a self-replicating robot capable of driving around a track and assembling four modules into a robot identical to the original.

Prototype 1 is a remote-controlled robot, consisting of seven subsystems: the left motor, right motor, left wheel, right wheel, micro-controller receiver, manipulator wrist, and passive gripper. This particular implementation is not autonomous. We built it to demonstrate that it is mechanically feasible for one robot to produce a copy of itself. The prototype was made of LEGO parts from LEGO Mindstorm kits.

Why do I blog this? well, would the interactive toys of the future by like that?

Social functions of location in mobile telephony

Arminen, I. (2005): Social Functions of Location in Mobile Telephony. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. This article addresses a topic close to my PhD research: the importance of location awareness in (mobile) communication. Prior to studying the importance of location-based services (especially when it comes to buddy finder or granny locators), the author put the emphasis on the understanding of this peculiar feature: the discussion about one's location over the phone.

To understand the dynamic nature of location, we have to study the actual communicative practices in which location gains its value. (...) Weilenmann has studied particularly the ways in which location references are used to signal communication difficulties: ‘‘I can’t talk now, I’m in a fitting room’’ (...) Laurier, for his part, has shown how mobile professionals routinely stated their locations on a mobile phone as a part of their mobile usage. Both these studies on actual communicative practices point out how the value of location is embedded in the activity in which the mobile user is engaged. (...) 74 Finnish mobile phone conversations were recorded (...) The material covered both mobile-to-mobile and landline-to-mobile or mobile-to-landline conversations (...) The calls were transcribed and analysed in detail by using conversation analytical (CA) method. (...) The usage of mobile communication device does not technically require the parties to get to know where the other party is. (...) 62 mobile calls out of 74 involved a sequence in which the mobile party stated her or his location to the other party

As for the context of this question, the author found that:

Location telling during mobile calls takes place in five different activity contexts. In other words, location seems relevant for the parties in mobile interaction during five different types of activities. (...) Location may be an index of interactional availability, a precursor for mutual activity, part of an ongoing activity, or it may bear emergent relevance for the activity or be presented as a social fact. (...) Most location-telling sequences in these data are linked with practical arrangements. People state their location as a precursor for some practical arrangements (...) Location telling is also commonly done as a part of the real-time ongoing activity in which the parties are engaged. (...) Location can also be a mutual real-time co-ordination task, such as seeing each other in the cafeteria to meet there (...) Finally, a kind of location that is also realized during the ongoing activities is a virtual location referring to a web page or other material at hand to be shared with the communicative partner. (...) A not common, but existing, social practice involves location telling due to its social, symbolic qualities [exemple: beach which signify 'having fun']

Now, for the social functions of discussing locations:

Location may be an index of interactional availability, a precursor for mutual activity, part of an ongoing activity, or it may bear emergent relevance for the activity or be presented as a social fact. (...) International availability: audio-physical and social features of proximal location: noise (disco), network availability, (train, remote areas), involvement with proximal interaction, intimacy of situation (toilet, etc.) (...) Praxiological – spatio-temporal availability: readiness to engage in action (Are you doing anything special? Can you come to x?) – spatio-temporal location of a party vis-a`-vis the engaged activity: temporal distance (half an hour [by car, by train, on foot, etc.] – real-time perspicuous location in an ongoing action: visibility (I’m at x where are you), real-time location (I just saw a reindeer by the road, beware—[told to the car driving behind]) – instructable location: spatialized requests (I’m/accident at the crossroads of A and B, etc.) – proximate praxiological location: microco-ordination of activity (I’m feeling his pulse, the wound stretches from elbow to breast, etc.) – virtual location (I’m on the web page x) (...) Socioemotional – socio-emotional significance of location: biographical relevance (I’m at the cottage of x/my friend, I’m driving car with x), cultural significance (I’m visiting x (old church, museum, medieval city, etc.), aesthetic significance (it’s very scenic here)

Why do I blog this? this kind of study is of tremendous relevance to my phd research since I address the effects of location-awareness on collaboration processes: communication, coordination, division of labor, mutual modeling... What the author described here is very interesting, it's one of the seldom resource about this fact (along with Marc Relieu, Laurier (and there too, plus this one by Weilenmann).

However, the results from our field experiment with CatchBob makes me bit skeptical about the authors' conclusion; when it comes to the implications of this study to LBS, he says "Location awareness that would also indicate the user’s estimated temporal distance from the destination would have a wide applicability for a majority of mobile users. A simple and usable technical solution would immediately meet the end users’ needs". The reason why I am skeptical is that automating location-awareness can sometimes leads to putting the emphasis on an information (others' location versus others' availability, intentions...) that might be not relevant for the time being. Another problem is the kind of location that should be automated and made relevant for other parties (place? country? lat/long? ...).

Amazing railway velocipede

This afternoon I ran across stories about railway velocipedes and I think it made my day. For instance, this one is amazing at Catskillarchive.com.

The railway velocipede shown in the accompanying illustration is an adaptation of the design of the safety bicycle to track service, the machine having a, flanged tire on the front wheel and a blind tire on the rear wheel, and being held upright by a brace carrying a small guide wheel, with flanged tire running on the opposite rail. (...) The space occupied, when thus folded, is only 6 ft. x 1 ft. 6 ins., a little more than that required for a road bicycle.

Why do I blog this? first because it's definitely a nice objects and second because I am impressed by the concept of using infrastructures for other purposes (close to Situationists' concept of détournement), it's very like the skateboarding idea in which you use urban topographies to - mmmh - surf through the city.

Surrealscania: digital video with GPS-tech

Surrealscania is a web-based art project from Sweden that combines digital video with GPS-tech carried out by by filmmaker and videoartist Anders Weberg and ethnologist and cultural analysist Robert Willim. The project examines space/place questions such as "How do different places become interesting?", "Can a wet and dirty road running through a barren field be appealing?" or "What are the common denominators between a heavy industrial harbour and a nature reserve?"

ilmmaker Anders Weberg and cultural analysist Robert Willim started by visiting various points within a specific region. This time the region was Scania, located in southern Sweden. On the different locations video material has been collected, which was then used as the raw material for a number of short films. These films are now available for download. At the moment we provide six different films, but more will be added to the collection in the future. (...) All the films are accompanied with files containing the exact geographical coordinates for all the different places. By using Google Earth it is possible to view aerial photos of the points represented in the different films. Using a GPS-unit it is also possible to visit the locations where the visual raw material was shot. And as the films are provided in various file formats optimized for most mobile video players, it is possible to enjoy the filmic representations on the very spots where the material was filmed. In this way the imaginary can be compared to the real

A manifesto for networked objects - Why things matter

Julian finally released the manifesto about the future of artifacts and the Internet of Things. It's called A Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things. And of course the short title is "Why Things Matter" which nicely expressed the fact they - hey - in the future things will matter. The document elaborates on the idea of the blogject topic, answering to two questions: first, why would objects want to just blog? Second, why would I care if objects "blog"? It presents the idea of objects that blog, which characteristics they would have (traces, history, agency), which protozoic blogjects we've already seen (Aibo blog, the pigeon blogger...), what's at stakes and why do people envisionned that concept. My favorite part is certainly the end:

Forget about the Internet of Things as Web 2.0 and networked Barcaloungers. I want to know how to make the Internet of Things into a platform for World 2.0. How can the Internet of Things become a framework for creating more habitable worlds, rather than a technical framework for a television talking to my refrigerator? Now that we've shown that the Internet can become a place where social formations can accrete and where worldly change has at least a hint of possibility, what can we do to move that possibility out into the worlds in which we all have to live?

Why do I blog this? this is connected to the blogject thoughts I already discussed here, especially with regards to the workshop we had before lift06. The document also deals with issues very close to my current reseach (for instance when it's related to space/place and behavior).

In certain circumstances people do not even notice if a room grows to four times its size

A paper in Current Biology by Andrew Glennerster and colleagues shows that humans ignore the evidence of their own eyes to create a fictional stable world as described in the Oxford University News.

The Virtual Reality Research Group in Oxford used the latest in virtual reality technology to create a room where they could manipulate size and distance freely. They made the room grow in size as people walked through it, but subjects failed to notice when the scene around them quadrupled in size. As a consequence, they made gross errors when asked to estimate the size of objects in that room. (...) These results imply that observers are more willing to adjust their estimate of the separation between the eyes or the distance walked than to accept that the scene around them has changed in size,’ says Dr Glennerster. ‘More broadly, these findings mark a significant shift in the debate about the way in which the brain forms a stable representation of the world. They form part of a bigger question troubling neuroscience – how is information from different times and places linked together in the brain in a coherent way?’

Why do I blog this? this is an interesting example of the weird connections between cognitive systems and space perception.

Some Xslab projects

At XSlabs they seem to do interesting things: soundSleeves is a project by Vincent Leclerc & Joey Berzowska:

These sleeves are sensitive to physical contacts. When users flex or cross their arms, a sound is synthesized within the sleeves and output through miniature flat speakers. The idea is pretty straightforward: using very simple elements (metallic organza and conductive yarns) we created a flex and touch sensor made of hundreds of switches.

And of course, related to the blogject idea (and one of the project we discussed during the workshop) there is this Memory Rich Clothing: Garments that Display their History of Use.

Physical objects become worn over time. A worn object carries the evidence of our identity and our history. Digital technologies allow us to shape and edit that evidence to reflect more subtle, or more poetic, aspects of our identity and our history. This project focuses on the research and development of reactive garments that will display their history of use. We will employ a variety of input and output methodologies to sense and display traces of physical memory on clothing. (...) [Example: ]An Intimate Memory shirt with a very sensitive microphone in the collar and a series of light points in a flower pattern incorporated into the front of the shirt. When a friend or partner whispers something into your ear, the microphone will record this event and the lights will light up, showing that an intimate event has occurred. The number of lights indicates the intensity of the intimacy event. Over time, the lights turn off, one by one, to show how long it has been since the intimate event took place.

Why do I blog this? these tangibles interfaces are curious and interesting, I like the way technology is embedded into these common objects.

HP and its "misto" interactive table

CNET reports on that HP Labs celebrated its 40th anniversary this week with an open house in Palo Alto, Calif., in which several of its consumer-oriented projects were on display, including a coffee table that featured a touch-screen display that could be used for sharing pictures, playing board games, or looking at a map. It's called Misto, an hybrid of coffee table and tablet PC.

Why do I blog this? yet another interactive table that goes straight in my list

Millenials and workplace behavior

The last newsletter of Steelcase is about the behavior of millenials (born 1978-1999) in the workplace. Some excerpts of the findigns I found pertinent:

The youngest generation, the millennials, is entering the workplace. The oldest millennials are still in their 20s, but already they're creating some workplace trends of their own. (...) Among the findings: Millennials are three times more likely to work off-site or while traveling, compared to other office workers, Formal meeting spaces are less important to millennials than their older co-workers, Millennials are less distracted by noise. (...) “Millennial workers come to the business world prewired. Four out of five colleges offer wireless networks, and the average time a typical college student spends online has nearly quadrupled in the past eight years,” (...) Campuses provide a broad observation deck for seeing what’s likely to come next in the workplace, Roy continues. “We spend a lot of time on campus observing students and faculty. How are they using the space? How are they interacting? Are there any gaps? What could we provide that would make the environment work better? Students today want more flexibility, more technology, more cool spaces. They’re not looking to come out of school and go backward in time.” (...) Tech is both part of the millennial multitasking workstyle and an enabler of it (...) There’s also growing evidence that millennials, more than any other generation, value natural daylight in the workplace, and they’re more apt to ask questions about air quality, efficient energy use, “green” materials and maintenance procedures,and other environmental issues. (...) “When millennials start with a company, the Number One thing they request – and require -- is a mentor,” says Simoneaux. “One of the strategies we've proposed is a 'mentor pod,' an open workspace where experienced people can go to work. By simply being there, it signals they're available to counsel others.”

I like this result also:

For example, 91% of boomers, gen-Xers and traditionalists say that having meeting spaces available for scheduling is an important factor that affects their satisfaction with their workplace. Fully one-third say it's a problem finding those spaces. Fewer millennials think it’s of medium or high importance – 81%. After all, when you're used to collaborating informally, you tend to worry less about meeting rooms with big conference tables. As long as there’s a casual space like a cafe or lounge area, millennials can and prefer to work in a variety of places.

Why do I blog this? the relation between space and collaboration is both a research project here at the lab and one my favorite concerns. These results nicely highlights the relationships between space and collaborative work.

Inflatable and transportable structure

This inflatable structure enables lightweight transportable buildings, which is somehow intriguing:

Inflatable structures (aka airbeams) have developed rapidly in recent times, finding application in a variety of new engineering projects ranging from military tents in Iraq and Afghanistan to antennas in outer space. (...) By changing design parameters, the airbeam shape can be modified for different products. The team guided and matured two weaving and braiding capabilities into a reliable technology with unlimited potential, according to Leighton, and in the process created an economical manufacturing base.

And it seems to be quite robust as attested by this.

Why do I blog this? hum I am just impressed by inflatable structures...

Collaboration is made of socio-cognitive processes

In my PhD research I often mention the fact that I am studying how certain technologies (location-awareness features, tangible interactions, weird game controllers, voip...) might modify collaboration. The thing is that 'collaboration' is the research object and sometimes it's not so easy to grasp what it means. A relevant resource about this is a paper by P. Dillenbourg and D. Traum entitled "Sharing solutions: persistence and grounding in multi-modal collaborative problem solving", Journal of Learning Sciences, 15(1), 121-151.

current research no longer treats collaboration as a black box but attempts to grasp its mechanisms: What are the cognitive effects of specific types of interactions? Under which conditions do these interactions appear? These mostly verbal interactions are investigated from various angles, including: explanations (Webb, 1991), regulation (Wertsch, 1985), argumentation (Baker, 1994), and conflict resolution (Blaye, 1988). These various types of interactions contribute to the process of building and maintaining a shared understanding of the problem and its solution (Roschelle & Teasley, 1995).

As a matter of fact, collaboration is made of various processes that we can describes as being socio-cognitive. This means that it's both related to the information processing (cognitive) and bound to the social context (collaboration appearing in small groups).

Other collaborative processes are more focused on the activity: division of labor among the group, coordination over time, inference about partners' intents. I am rather focused on those.

References quoted in the excerpts above:

Baker, M.J. (1994). A model for negotiation in teaching-learning dialogues, Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 5 (2), 199-254.

Blaye, A. (1988) Confrontation socio-cognitive et résolution de problèmes. Doctoral dissertation, Centre de Recherche en Psychologie Cognitive, Université de Provence, 13261 Aix-en-Provence, France.

Webb, N.M. (1991) Task related verbal interaction and mathematics learning in small groups. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 22 (5), 366-389.

Wertsch, J.V. (1985) Adult-Child Interaction as a Source of Self-Regulation in Children. In S.R. Yussen (Ed).The growth of reflection in Children (pp. 69-97). Madison, Wisconsin: Academic Press.

Controlling computer games using everyday objects as input devices.

One of Timo Arnall's student at the Oslo School of Design, Are Hovland Nielsen has started a diploma project on the very topic of controlling computer games using toys as input devices.

The initial idea behind my diploma project came about when I was playing around with the idea of controlling computer games using toys as input devices. It seems to me that toys in general have something natural and intuitive to them in regards to the ways we interact with them. (...) After visiting a few toy stores I grew slightly worried that there simply wouldn't be enough toy categories around for creating a broad range of game and controller prototypes. Therefore I tried to expand the initial idea to also include other objects that wasn't necessarily related to toys.

I finally landed on everyday objects as the focus for the project. (...) rior to visiting the hardware stores I had set up a list of criteria that the candidates would have to fulfill in order to be included in the project. The selection criteria were as follows: Not too big / Not electrical / Not harmful / Not expensive

One of the first rough example is this coffee-mug game controller:

One of my assumtions with "homemade" game controllers is that familiarity makes them easier for people to interact with. Secondly I found the circular shape of the coffee mug interesting from an interaction point of view. (...) The interaction with the relocated "buttons" was set up slightly different from one prototype to the next. In the first version (seen in the top image) one only needed to slide a slightly moist finger along the rim where the wires were exposed. When the finger touched two horisontal wires at the same time it would register as a key being pressed . This meant that the interaction was rather gentle, but unfortunately the connection to the keyboard itself was very fragile. (...) The second prototype was much more robust. None of the connections have been lost yet and the prototype has been in relatively heavy use the last couple of days. This prototype was set up by soldering attachment sockets directly onto the keyboard "chip" and then simply placing wires into these sockets.

Why do I blog this? this is an interesting way to define innovative game controllers, based on this notion of 'touch'. I really like the idea of relying on the notion of objects affordance (the cup / the handle) which has a natural physical configuration meant to allow specific interactions; playing with these configurations to allow different game interactions is pertinent. However, the difficult thing is to find objects that has a proper physical affordance to mediate the interactions in the game. The dimension that I miss here (but I am tough the project just started) is how the interaction with this new controller would relate with the gameplay, which is somehow an intriguing issue in the HCI literature about controllers.

Ekahau location-aware device with a call-button

Via Medgadget, this Ekahau location-aware IV pumps

Ekahau T201 Wi-Fi Tag is a small active radio tag for tracking and finding people and assets. Once attached to an asset or carried by a person the target can be accurately tracked with the Ekahau RTLS platform within the coverage of an 802.11 network. It is most suitable for tracking equipment, personnel or high value assets in hospitals, manufacturing plants or in any other type of facility where knowledge of the actual and up-to-date location can improve efficiency and safety.

The T201 tag features an audio buzzer and two red/green LEDs that help to distinguish the tag location. For security applications the call-button enables sending alerts, including the location of the alerter, to security personnel or caregivers. Remote tag management and configuration capability ensures that also large number of tags can be easily managed.

The tag's small size, multiple mounting options and intelligent battery-life management including motion-activated tracking make its use carefree in all types of applications. Monitoring continuous and precise location information of mobile people and assets has never been this easy.

A locative media with just one (red) button which looks like an old NEC PC engine.

Wireless Mobile Booths

At 3GSM, with Fabien and Kosmar we had this discussion about mobile hotspots like taxis wandering around in cities offering a free wifi access. Fabien already found this interesting example: FirstMile Solution which tries to bring WiFi in developing nations with adequate technology. This is used in a project I like a lot: the Internet Motoman in Cambodia. Because the roads are so bad during rainy periods, MAP-enabled Honda motorcycles are used to connect schools to the wireless:

In Africa, there also projects about village mobile phones (but I did not find that much about it, still have to dig).

And of course, some artists took the idea to the letter with the Mobile Phone Booth.

But the idea of a mobile wireless hotspot is not meant to look like a phone booth as attested by this magic bike project: "I am like the ice cream man, but with no music and I deliver free wireless access and not ice cream." says Yury Gitman.

magicbike is a mobile WiFi (wireless Internet) hotspot that gives free Internet connectivity wherever its ridden or parked. By turning a common bicycle into a wireless hotspot, Magicbike explores new delivery and use strategies for wireless networks and modern-day urbanites. Wireless bicycles disappear into the urban fabric and bring Internet to yet unserved spaces and communities. Mixing public art with techno-activism, Magicbikes are perfect for setting up adhoc Internet connectivity for art and culture events, emergency access, public demonstrations, and communities on the struggling end of the digital-divide.

What is still unlikely (socially speaking?) is to have taxis that can provides wireless connections (well in NYC it's already the case) but those WON'T TAKE ANY TRAVELLERS, they'll just provide Wifi access...

Why do I blog this? I am just elaborating on this concept we discussed with fab and kosmar... which I find funny.

Evaluating the promises of pervasive gaming

Pervasive Gaming in the Everyday World by Jegers, K. and Wiberg, M., Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 5 (1), pp. 78-85, 2006. The paper is a smart study that look at how the vision of pervasive gaming is becoming reality in the context of SupaFly, an everyday-world pervasive game. They claim that pervasive gaming might offer 3 promises: mobile, place-independent game play /integration between the physical and the virtual worlds /social interaction between players. In this study they wanted to evaluate whether these promises could be held.

It starts by saying that pervasive gaming examples (Uncle Roy, Human Pacman, Songs of the North) are valuable but some limitations remains:

One such limitation is that people play few of the existing pervasive games in their normal everyday life, which makes studying the games’ role and effect in these situations difficult. Such research is necessary to help commercial designers create successful pervasive games and to help identify and explore the issues arising when such computer gaming becomes situated in the everyday world.

In this paper, they try to go beyond that by studying SupaFly, a pervasive game developed by Daydream to evaluate how people perceive and play the game in normal, everyday settings.

Some results were quite unexpected especially about the anywhere/anytime issue of pervasive computing:

Considering the two subjects who stated that they played the game mostly at work, the picture becomes somewhat more problematic. Both subjects stated in the focus group interviews that they normally don’t play computer games at work but that they considered the SMS game activities in SupaFly as different from traditional computer game playing. (...) Those two subjects’ decision to play the game during what they classify as work time seems to run contrary to how people generally separate activities into work and recreation, pursued at separate times. This observation calls for further research considering pervasive gaming’s anytime, anywhere aspect to clarify to what extent pervasive games might challenge people’s conception of social contexts and related activities. (...) Analysis of the focus group data reveals that the game’s integration of the physical and virtual worlds was of limited importance to the players. (...) From our evaluation, we conclude that the implemented integration of the physical and the virtual, based on location of players and virtual objects, was insufficient to be a meaningful and enriching part of the game. (...) We noticed that the players seemed to use the game to facilitate existing social interaction in groups that they belonged to before they played the gamements and social behaviors of people in pervasive-gaming situations.

What is interesting is also the overall conclusion:

Although the threefold vision for pervasive gaming hardly became a reality for the users in our study, it still might be a good catalyst for developing ideas for future pervasive-gaming platforms.

Which led them to refine their research agenda with new questions (that they will address through a longitudinal ethnographical study):

• In what situations do people choose to enter the game?
• Do people play alone or when they get together?
• Is there any learning effect (for example, do people internalize the SMS commands over time)?
• Does the cost of sending SMS messages create a barrier to long-term playing of the game?

Why do I blog this? I like this kind of empirical research of pervasive games a lot (even though my feeling is that we can go way beyond using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods), The results and the overall conclusion are very pertinent and make us rethink what pervasive/mobile games are presented by companies and labs: things are not that simple!

Location matters but... some questions raised by location awareness of others in multi-user applications

Location matters but... some questions raised by location awareness of others The "where are you..." question that opens mobile phone conversation is both a common social norm but also an example of how spatial information are important. Asking or giving one’s physical location can be helpful to ground information like conversionalists’ availability (with regard to a social context) or to support coordination of activities (e.g. knowing what others do or did).

Location-based services eases this process of knowing the others location, be it spatial coordinates, a place or a context. Among all of those services, one of the most obvious feature behind LBS is positioning and tracking of individuals. This kind of application is used in various context (ranging from family management to dispatched workers coordination)

Apart from individual applications of LBS, there is now a strong trend in the collaborative usage of geolocation services. For instance, location-specific annotations applications (like Urban Tapestries) allow people to drop annotations at a certain spatial position at a specific location with a mobile device or a through the web (and then the messages can be accessed indepently from the platforms). Other applications allows users who pass in the vicinity of a location can then read the messages and answers; giving them a feeling of re-appropriating the city. Also, location-tracking applications also received a lot of attention (see for instance how Dodgeball has been bought by Google but there are plenty of others). Now the field is know as "Mobile Social Software" (or MoSoSo).

That said, there seems to be a conspicuous lack of user-centered design in location-based services. User's context is often not taken into account, and designers frenziness to push for automatic positioning or complex features often leads to poor scenarios as Russell pointed out some time ago. What is missing is not the technology, of course there are lots of clever positionning techniques (GPS/WiFi triangulation/RFIDs/TV waves...) but rather a scenario that fits to users' needs and their context.

For instance, one of the crux issue in location-awareness usage is the necessity of automating the positionning mechanism versus letting users disclose their own positions. At our lab, we investigated those issues using various field experiments. We use a pervasive game as an alibi to test different interfaces. The game engaged players in a collaborative treasure hunt where they could communicate using an application running on a TabletPC. The application shows the field map as well as annotation sent by the participants. In one set of experiments, two kinds of interfaces have been tested: in one case, we provided the user with an automatic location-awareness tool (the position of their partners is displayed on the screen). In another case, players just see their own character as an avatar on the campus map without their partners’ position.

Automatically displaying the position of the partners on the interface did not change the groups’ performance. However not giving the partner’s positions led players to communicate more, expliciting a lot of their strategy. In addition, another side effect of being not aware of the partners’ positions is that users better modified and reshaped their strategy over time. Therefore collaboration was enriched by the absence of this location awareness tool. It appears that it was better to provide users with a broader channel of communication that would allow them to express what they want or find relevant. The results of this experiment show that automatic positioning prevented users from engaging into rich collaboration. Giving them the possibility to embed location cues with other kind of information like map annotations appeared to be a good solution to support collaborative processes like communication or strategy discussions. This is the reason why I put the emphasis on the idea that location matters but designers should keep in mind that automatic positioning is just sharing information whereas self-declared positioning is both an information and a communication act. Sending one’s position to the partners is indeed at the same time a way to make manifest a fact that the player estimated as being relevant for the activity. This is consistent with other user experience researches, see for instance what Benford and his team. They found that letting users manually reveal their positions was also good way to get rid of location awareness discrepancies (due to unreliable network, latency, bandwidth, security, unstable topology, or network homogeneity).

This post is part of the Carnival of the Mobilists XVI.