3 years ago, while becoming a PhD student, I had this wonderful "wireless notepad":
After 3 years, it's now an RFID notepad:
Of course, technologically speaking, both are fakes (the former is wireless in the sense that there is absolutely no wires and the latters just had the RFID tag of a cd I bough last saturday).
The Fourth Screen Global Mobile Media Festival Call:
The Fourth Screen Global Mobile Media Festival will focus on the mobile phone as an emerging social, cultural and technological phenomenon. We invite artists, technologists, and other creative thinkers to submit creations, inventions and concepts in two categories:1/ moving images: videos made with mobile phone, movies, animation and games intended for mobile delivery
2/ wise technologies: software art, software and hardware that proposes new uses for mobile multimedia communication, applications that have positive cultural, social and economic impact in diverse cultures
The use of phone cameras is already pervasive, millions shoot, share, watch video clips with this all-in-one personal production - distribution - player device.
Why do I blog this? cell-phones based art, that's an intriguing concept. What's cultural content creation with such devices? how they help circulating culture, there are interesting issues related to this festival.
Networked Publics Conference and Media Festival at the Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California (April 28-29, 2006).
This two-day event will bring together new media scholars and practitioners to exhibit and discuss the roles of audiences, activists, and producers in maturing networked media ecologies. The event is organized by the Networked Publics fellowship program (netpublics.annenberg.edu) at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication.The conference includes a media festival and an academic program.
- “Do-It-Yourself: Emergent Networked Culture,” is an experimental news and entertainment media festival featuring new kinds of viral, remixed, and amateur media works enabled by current networked ecologies. Categories of curated work include: political remix videos, the digital handmade, anime music videos, machinima, alternative news, and infrastucture hacks.
- The academic program is dedicated to three topics: Politics, Infrastructure and Place. For each of these topics, netpublics fellows will convene a session to interrogate current issues and controversies related to emergent networked ecologies.
The format of the event is designed to promote interaction and dialog across a diverse set of participants. Our goal is to facilitate conversation on topics of shared concern and a mixture of formats that include screenings, debates, and interaction around computer kiosks.
Why do I blog this? I'll be there (thanks Julian!), the event seems great and very pertinent to my interests.
According to Wikipedia, button mashing is:
Button mashing is the term given to repeated button presses over a short period. Most of the time, button mashing is seen in athletic and fighting video games. (...) Button mashing was first popularized by Track & Field in 1983 (...) Sometimes, random button mashing is actually more effective than skilled button pushing. This is frustrating to skilled players, who consider button-mashing a mindless action. There are many games that greatly rewarded the player for punching, kicking, or shooting a gun as fast as possible, which must be achieved through button-mashing. In order to reduce wear on controllers and allow players to gain the advantages of button mashing without having to actually mash the buttons, some game controllers feature a turbo button. This easily allows the player to maximize performance in games where a single button must be pressed repeatedly, but gives no advantage in fighting games or when two buttons must be pressed repeatedly one after the other. (...) Modern game designers recognize that many players do not enjoy hours of button mashing to complete games. The designers often incorporate auto-fire features or power-ups that alleviate button mashing requirements in their games. Button mashing is still used in gameplay, but sparingly during climactic points, such as a tight grapple with an enemy or breaking free from a confining attack.
Why do I blog this? button mashing refers to the good ol' day of video games but in terms of interaction design it was quite not that effective (not talking about the impacts of your joystick). However, the total craze it generated was quite funny (especially in those old sports games).
Protospace Demo 1.2 by the Hyperbody Research Group at TU Delft.
Protospace Demo 1.2, successor of Protospace Demo 1.1, explores 1) the appliance of swarm behavior in an early stage of a building project and 2) the use of experimental user interfaces with motion tracking, wireless controllers and speech recognition. It is a tool for designing diagrammatic layouts, in 3D and with dynamic (as opposed to static) elements. (...) Protospace is as much the intelligent design tools it provides as the user interface(s) for interacting with them. We believe that C(A)AD systems will benefit from more natural interfaces than the classic mouse, keyboard and small computer screen. In Protospace Demo 1.2 we experimented with wireless controllers, motion tracking, speech recognition and sensorial 'playing' field.
Why do I blog this? I like this kid of way of interacting in an embedded way.
Via news.3yen: Telephoneboxing is an art installation which very clear aims:
Telephoning has lost its physicality; it has literary become weightless. The smaller the telephone gets, the easier it is to communicate, anytime, anywhere, with anyone. (...) What would communication mean if a phone call would become an extremely physical action? When dialing a number requires a lot of concentration and words need to be exclaimed?"Telephoneboxing" is an installation which explores the borders of communication. In a 20ft container, 10 buttons are attached to the walls. The buttons look like boxing balls and that is exactly what they are. In order to make an international phone call, one puts on boxing gloves and hits the buttons to dial a number. When a connection is made, one has to stand in one specific spot and speak loudly in order to be heard. The answer can be heard on a spot a few meters further into the container. The calling person will automatically adjust the level of communication to his or her eagerness to talk and/or to his or her physical condition.
Why do I blog this? I like this idea of re-introducing physicality in phone communication using tangibility.
One of my favorite movie:"Polyester" (John Waters). Almost set here, with the odorama add-on:
I spent the end of the afternoon reading the whole set of papers from the future CHI2006 Workshop on Mobile Social Software. They're all available (which is great, I wish other papers from other worshops could be on-line too). Organized by Scott Counts, Henri ter Hofte, and Ian Smith, this workshop "workshop seeks to address these and other key issues around the proliferation of social software on mobile devices. Additionally, the workshop focuses on research tools and approaches for studying these questions, projected future directions for social software on mobile devices, and the role of related technologies, such as hardware and communication protocols. Workshop position papers cover a wide range of topics, from privacy issues to study methodologies to novel social presence mechanisms."
Overall, the papers are dealing with:
Among others, and related to my research I found interesting:
"Currently, short messages (e.g. SMS/MMS) are only available in visual form. However, in certain situations, users may like to have these messages presented in audio form. (...) Evaluation of this alternative presentation reveals that, for emotion recognition, it was easier to interpret emotion messages generated from affective synthetic speech."
"For disclosure applications to be useful and eventually prevalent they need to respect the privacy of their users when disclosing their location, ensuring no information or detail is revealed beyond what they are comfortable disclosing. Inversely, if the information disclosed is not appropriate to the task the requester is attempting to accomplish then they will not use the application."
This is explicitly an act of "mutual modeling" that aims at supporting coordination between agents (a topic I address in my research).
"a collaborative approach to minimizing inappropriate cellphone interruptions. The approach uses Bluetooth technology to discover and communicate with the surrounding cell phones in order to read their notification profiles. The profile of the majority is assumed to be the most suitable setting for the current social environment. Cellphones running the collaborative service can automatically update their profile according to the majority profile or at least alert the user to do so. (...) For instance if a user in a meeting has forgotten to turn his cell phone ringer off, his cell phone can contact other cell phones in the same room and learn that most of them have their ringer off. Consequently, the cell phone can safely assume that it should also have its ringer off, and when the meeting is over the cell phone can return to its default state (ringer on) without the user having to take action. (...) we envision many other interaction paradigms between users and the surrounding environments that could benefit from such approach. For example, cell phones may carry their users’ preferences for room temperature, and smart places could customize the room temperature according to the majority’s preference."
Why do I blog this? even though I am more concerned by how location awareness features of this sort of tool might modify collaboration, the topic addressed here are interesting and sometimes related to what we do with catchbob.
REXplorer is a pervasive game designed to enhance the tourist experience in the medieval city of Regensburg. More about it here: REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software by Rafael Ballagas, Steffen P. Walz and Jan Borchers.
Participants will begin by renting their “magic wand” (actually a smartphone loaded with custom software and data necessary for the game) from the visitor center. (...) As they move throughout the city, players can attempt to cast spells at historic buildings using the Sweep technique that performs motion estimation by the way of the phone camera, and gesture recognition in (x, y, theta) dimensions. In response, players hear voices from magical spirits trapped inside the buildings through their magic wand (the loudspeaker on the smartphone). If they cast the spell incorrectly, the spirits will be disgruntled and uncooperative. (...) Participants may also need to duel against other participants in a spell-casting battle to achieve their goals. In addition, and more importantly, players can “cellcast” cooperatively to solve challenges. (...) As visitors are capturing media of the city in the game, the Regensburg application servers are automatically cataloging the media content they create to generate a website to show where they've gone and what they've done. During the game, this blog can be used to monitor the current game status by getting an overview of the teams' progress.
Why do I blog this? I like the interface trick using the phone camera, that's a good hack to create an innovative gameplay. The game seems also to be a good situation to have cooperative/competitive behavior.
the Flock is an impressing project by Ken Rinaldo:
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The Flock is a group of musical interactive sound sculptures which exhibit behaviors analogous to the flocking found in natural groups such as birds, schooling fish or flying bats. (...) Our Flock consists of three 9 1/2 foot long jointed robotic arms, constructed from grapevines, which hang from the ceiling and interact with viewers, participants and each other. Each dangling arm has an array of three infrared sensors, projecting out from the top of the arm, which function as active eyes and permit the sculptures to avoid participants walking around the installation. Another infrared eye at the tip of each arm functions to allow the sculptures to approach and simultaneously react to participants presence. Each arm also has an array of four microphones which function as ears allowing the sculpture to move toward participants. The microphones are placed so relative volume levels of viewer/participants voices can be monitored. |
Why do I blog this? I like the integration between electronic and organic elements; also the relation between the viewers and the art piece is interesting too.
Among the curious trend on the web lately, I am quite fascinated by YTMND:
YTMND, an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!", is a website community that centers on the creation of YTMNDs, which are pages featuring a juxtaposition of a single image, optionally animated and/or tiled, along with large zooming text and a looping sound file. Most of these images are created or edited by users. Most YTMNDs are meant to expose or reflect the more inane facets of pop culture. Wikipedia definition)
Why do I blog this? I am always intrigued by some of the web trend regarding weird content reshaped by users. What is very powerful here is the level of private joke/common references those folks have.
My favorite is this one and of course the mac gyver one.
Even though the title of the article sounds a bit weird, there are some interesting issues there: Best-kept secrets of the world's best companies. Especially the "best practices" in R&D, I found those two interesting:
- IDEO: the "tech box," a freezer-size chest of drawers in each of its seven offices around the world. Inside each is the same library of up to 2,000 gadgets, materials, textiles, and artifacts that keep the creative gears of Ideo designers in constant motion. (...) "It's not a typical lending library," says Ideo designer Dennis Boyle, one of the company's principals and co-creator of the tech box along with Rickson Sun, Ideo's chief technologist. "People will pick out 20 items and bring them to a brainstorming session. We use the tech box to cross-pollinate every new project.
- Corning: A few times a year, the company runs half-day brainstorm sessions at its New York headquarters to kick off the quest for innovations. First, managers from a special marketing group--a 15-person unit tasked with identifying $500 million-plus business opportunities--gather for several hours to listen to outside experts, from renewable-energy gurus to nanotech engineers.
The group then breaks into teams of five, each assigned to drum up ideas related to the talk. After that, the most promising ideas are handed off to teams of two employees: one with a marketing background, the other with technical expertise.
Why do I blog this? I find interesting these ideas about enhancing the R&D process.
| Ted Morgan from Skyhook Wireless pointed me: Loki is a beta version of a new toolbar the integrates location in web searches and allows users to share and tag locations: |  |
Loki is the first application to combine the physical with the digital to make the Internet a truly personal and local experience. We let you harness the World Wide Web by automatically identifying your exact physical location and then making the web revolve around you.
With one click, instantly find the nearest jazz band, directions to the closest Thai restaurant, the cheapest gas prices in town... or even pinpoint your exact location on a map. You can even share that location with others
Why do I blog this? It's actually a good interface between the physical and the virtual world. I'd be interested in seeing patterns of usage of this tool (moving beyond buddy-finder issues), the advantage of the "search" feature is obvious but will there be ways to use the system in rich collaborative ways? That is around the topic of my PhD. The thing here is that you don't need gps/cell phone ID triangulation but WiFi hotspots.
I think Chris Heathcote got the point of the future Internet of things:
a rabbit twisting its ears and playing the a-team theme tune is the hello world of physical computing.
might referer to Nabaztag (which actually has new ears now).
This is actually the topic of this article (in Nature's last issue about 2020 - Future of Computing): Declan Butle (2006) 2020 computing: Everything, everywhere, Nature, 440, 402-405
In their current, mostly desktop, incarnation, computers used for science usually come into their own quite late in the process of inquiry. In the future, this set up could be reversed. (...) new computers would take the form of networks of sensors with data-processing and transmission facilities built in. Millions or billions of tiny computers — called 'motes', 'nodes' or 'pods' — would be embedded into the fabric of the real world. They would act in concert, sharing the data that each of them gathers so as to process them into meaningful digital representations of the world. Researchers could tap into these 'sensor webs' to ask new questions or test hypotheses. Even when the scientists were busy elsewhere, the webs would go on analysing events autonomously, modifying their behaviour to suit their changing experience of the world. (...) such widely distributed computing power will trigger a paradigm shift as great as that brought about by the development of experimental science itself. (...) But sensor webs currently have major limitations for people doing science in the field, says Deborah Estrin (...) Estrin says that sensor webs alone are often not sufficient for all monitoring needs, and that the cost of sensors prohibits researchers from obtaining the pod densities often needed for detailed field experiments. (...) Sensor webs will frequently be just single layers in a stack of data-collecting systems. These will extract information at different temporal and spatial scales, from satellite remote-sensing data down to in situ measurements.
Managing these stacks will require massive amounts of machine-to-machine communication, so a major challenge is to develop new standards and operating systems that will allow the various networks to understand each other
The article is actually good review of sensor-based scientific projects ranging from glacier surveillance to soil biodiversity.
According to Wikipedia, here are the features of the new Tamagotchi:
Tamagotchi Connection Version 3 (Also known as Version 3, V3, Ver. 3, VR3, or Tama V3)The third generation of the Tamagotchi Connection series was released at the end of January 2006. Like the Version 2, it borrows some features from the latest version of the Japanese toy, but greatly simplifies them. This means that the V3 does not go to school, get a career, or receive a salary. (...) Offers connection to Tamatown.com which, similar to the Japanese counterpart, generates codes which you can input into the toy and receive souvenirs, which are items that you can look at, but not much else. Passwords also give shop items and food, which cost Points. Other than the code from the Nintendo DS Game, the passwords unlocked on your pet or on TamaTown.com will not work on any other Tamagotchi.
6 new games:
- Get, a game where one must collect falling music notes into a bag, and dodge the falling messes(read: Tamagotchi poop)and other bad things, in order to get a score of 100.
- Bump, which is the same as the Connection Version 2 game, where your Tamagotchi becomes an almost sumo-like wrestler. However, point amounts are doubled from the Version 2.
- Flag, a kind of "follow the leader" game, in which a flag appears on-screen, and one must press the corresponding button(s). However, there are imitation flags that will end the game if pressed. So be careful of them.
- Heading, which is the same as the V2 version's heading, where the player must hit a falling ball back into the air. However, point amounts are doubled from the Version 2.
- Memory, in which a sequence of arrows is played, and one must follow that sequence. You need a good memory for this game.
- Sprint, which is essentially a button-mashing game where one must press any button continuously to help the Tamagotchi win.
From what I've read at Wal-Mart, the most interesting part is certainly the following:
The New Tamagotchi version 3 lets kids communicate with friends by using infrared capabilities. Each Tamagotchi stores up to 45 friends' characters in the Friend List (flash memory). You can visit friends, play games with them or alone and even give your friends gifts with the new Tamagotchi. Several generations of pets can be raised in each Tamagotchi 3 with the proper care and feeding. Enhanced play value in the new Tamagotchi 3 will be on-line compatibility and the introduction of the "The World of Tamagotchi Town" at www.tamatown.com.
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We're still waiting for "USB Tamagotchi" or tamagotchi blogging feature (as the AIBO does). And the fan connection is not a really achieved social software yet. Fortunately, there were previous versions equipped with a function allowing the toy to receive signals from cell phones. |
In the last issue of Metropolis, there is an interesting article by Bruce Sterling about his 2005 experience as a 'visionary in residence' (at the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California). Some excerpts:
Let me tell you what I learned as a visionary in art school. First: if people call you a visionary, you become one immediately. It's like becoming a pope. (...) My duties were light: they consisted mostly of high-velocity preaching (...) I had the run of the place, and a hell of a lot goes on there: it's like watching oatmeal boil. I now know what computer fabricators do. I can build mobiles out of wire. I can draw, or at least I know how it's done. (...) Before joining Art Center I had no idea how normal people got transformed into designers (...) Demo or die. Practice is the crucial difference between people who can talk (like myself) and people who can design (like my best students). (...) At design school I escaped a mental box. In my earlier self-definition I was a writer with speculative tendencies; I never created big goofy art installations. It turns out I can do that. It's possible. I just never knuckled down and tried it.
And what's interesting is the balance between "vision" and "action":
Design, as Charles Eames said, is a method of action. It's not a method of "vision." (...) When I used to write about design instead of teaching it, I found design exotic, attractive, and glamorous good copy. After teaching it, I changed (...) When I used to write about design instead of teaching it, I found design exotic, attractive, and glamorous good copy. After teaching it, I changed. Today I find design to be thoughtful and sensible, while the daily texture of my previous life seems muddleheaded to me now, sluggish, vaguely trashy, vulgar even. Why was I like that back then? Why did I make such half-assed decisions about my tools, my possessions, and my material surroundings? Why was I so impassive, such a lazy, inveterate slob? I wasn't any happier for that. Why did I allow myself to do little or nothing about the gross inadequacies of my personal environment? Why didn't I take action? Why didn't I do something pragmatic, observe the results, and improve that? Why did I rhetorically hand wave, blither my sophistries, and excuse so much? Why didn't I just...take the elevator to the street?
The Bubble is an interesting gaming platform produced by Bright Things PLC (ex-Eidos). It's a DVD games console that you connect wirelessly to your DVD player to allow kids to interact with characters from their favourite TV shows (actually it's a game controller). The website worldofbubble gives more detail about it.
Bubble is a DVD games console that allows pre-school children to interact with their favourite TV shows and characters in a unique, fun and educational way. This website is designed to provide more information about Bubble, plus some equally fun and educational links, information and activities that parents can share with their kids.Bubble can also be used away from the TV. Each game has an Away Play feature for use anywhere you'd care to carry our light, battery-operated console.
The Bubble DVD games console works via an infra-red connection to your DVD player. There's no wires, and no worries!
A simple press of the coloured, flashing buttons or the interactive activity book controls the real characters on-screen.
Why do I blog this? just watching what's happening in the gaming world for kids, lots of stuff going on there...
I think I saw this project on Regine's blog: Experiments in Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver by Garnet Hertz:
Experiments in Galvanism is the culmination of studio and gallery experiments in which a miniature computer is implanted into the dead body of a frog specimen. Akin to Damien Hirst's bodies in formaldehyde, the frog is suspended in clear liquid contained in a glass cube, with a blue ethernet cable leading into its splayed abdomen. The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera. Risa Horowitz (2003)
Why do I blog this? an intriguing biotech concept connected to the the origins of electricity, which is here transcripted in the world of internet connectivity? Does a dead frog can be used as proxy to reach BoingBoing from countries that do not allow their citizens to access it?
msdm:
a research-practice dedicated to mobile strategies of display and mediation. msdm projects explore media in context, including electronic tagging, locative media, games, bots, radio fm, para-architecture and urban screens, with an attention to collaborative experiments in free culture, and open source"
Their flickr account is full of weird pictures that concern the Internet of Things:
And this is almost a thinglink
Why do I blog this? I like this idea of having "mobile strategies of display and mediation", this is intriguing; but I found pertinent the mediation concept; in a world of interconnected things, some mediation occur, but to do what?
More about their work can be found at turbulence.