Google Map Games

Game on Google Maps offers a very good overview of the existing games that take advantage of google map. It ranges from very simple concept (finding a landmark) to more elaborate. With also ideas for possible implementations (Warcraft-like games or Risk or a revival of Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?).

An interesting existing project is Brewster Jennings Protects America: The global spy hunt game.:

Remember playing "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" as a kid? Well now the new game Brewster Jennings Protects America brings this classic adventure into the 21st century by merging the game play with Google maps technology*. In the web-based Brewster Jennings Protects America game you race around the globe as a government agent trying to stop a deadly terror attack from taking place....

The story so far: You are an undercover CIA agent claiming to work for the fictitious "Brewster Jennings & Associates" company. You were just awoken at three in the morning by a phone call from The Chief telling you to report to your office immediately. From what he told you it looks like a terrorist is set to attack today and you are the country's last and only hope.

The "control your airplane" is almost an old-school shoot'em up with a google map.

My favorite is maybe Tripods in which you have to battle invading Google Maps tripod markers that are invading Manhattan!

Why do I blog this? with open platforms such as google map, there might be an opportunity to have creative location-based games/applications (with of course still some user interface issues).

MySpace and Space to hang out

Catching up with tons of papers, feeds, emails and crap after one week away, I was struck by a talk by Danah Boyd about MySpace called "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace". Apart from the identity production topic as well as the social analysis of this platform, I was particularly interested in this:

So what exactly are teens _doing_ on MySpace? Simple: they're hanging out. (...) For many teens, hanging out has moved online. Teens chat on IM for hours, mostly keeping each other company and sharing entertaining cultural tidbits from the web and thoughts of the day. The same is true on MySpace, only in a much more public way. MySpace is both the location of hanging out and the cultural glue itself. MySpace and IM have become critical tools for teens to maintain "full-time always-on intimate communities" [4] where they keep their friends close even when they're physically separated. Such ongoing intimacy and shared cultural context allows youth to solidify their social groups. (...) It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online - it's the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted. (...) structured activities in controlled spaces are on the rise. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends.

By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.

Yes, what lots of researchers and designers tries to do in the late 90s with VR about creating virtual space topology so that people could "hang out" on-line has been achieved through blogs, social software and platform such as MySpace.

Why do I blog this? what I found important in this analysis is that the author is taking space as the cornerstone of the activity. This is an important topic: how space affords social (and also cognitive) practices. And of course, compared to parents concerns, it's less visible than thinking that myspace is a dangerous place to meet peodphiles. This situation expresses a very relevant spatial phenomenon.

Dark side of computing

As we were discussing with fabien, the dark side of computing may lead to new fossils in the future. See this atrocious dump in Lagos, Nigeria.

(Picture © Basel Action Network 2006)

It's from the Basel Action Network, a very important NGO "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".

Why do I blog this? I tend to blog and reblog this kind of picture to be reminded of what is the other face of technology, the one we do not know, we do not perceive (apart from old tv set thrown in the sidewalk that we sometime see in cities). It seems that emerging tech (pervasive computing) take the same path.

Visual Patterns and Communication for Robots

The Future Applications Lab in Gotenborg, Sweden is involved in a very interesting project (from my point of view) called ECagents (meaning Embodied and Communicating Agents).

The project will investigate basic properties of different communication systems, from simple communication systems in animals to human language and technology-supported human communication, to clarify the nature of existing communications systems and to provide ideas for designing new technologies based on collections of embodied and communicating devices.

The project is a huge EU thing but what the FAL is focusing on is about investigating how such mobile ommunicating agents would become a natural part of our everyday environment. In the masters thesis proposals, there is a description of what they're up to:

We have previosuly developed a number of ideas for possible application in the form of personas.

This thesis proposal is inspired by the persona Nadim. It is about developing a language for visual patterns using e.g. genetic programming, cellular automata, boids, diffusion-reaction, naming game or any other combination to visualize patterns on a small e-Puck robot. The robots should be able to develop as well as communicate such patterns through the language so that new and interesting patterns emerge from their perception of their environment and interaction with each other. The goal for the thesis is to either make a real demonstrator on the suggested platform (requires some previous knowledge about software implementation on embedded systems) or to make a simulated demonstrator based on the prerequisites.

Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the implementation and technical aspects but rather by the situatedness (or non) of communication between robots/artifacts of the future and human users. What happen during the interaction? what are the inference made by individuals about objects and vice-versa? How to improve this by creating new affordances?

Kafka Index

Last week, during an offline week in greece, I ran across this very curious new concept: the Kafka Index, created in France. It is basically and index that measures the complexity of a project/law and its impact. Referring to Franz Kafka's great novel "The Trial" in which a man tries to struggle against an atrocious bureaucracy, this index will be public (yeah, let's see what institutions are kafka-esque) and would be in the form of 1-100 scale "measuring how many hurdles, from forms to letters or phone calls, are needed to win state permits or aid for a project" (via). For those who can read french, here is the account from the Assemblée Nationale:

un indice - provisoirement baptisé « indice Kafka » - va par ailleurs être créé pour mesurer la qualité des projets de loi. À la place des études d'impact, qui ne fonctionnent pas, chaque projet de loi sera accompagné de deux notes : la première traduira la complexité de la loi et la seconde appréciera son impact, notamment en termes de coûts. Les grilles d'analyse élaborées ont été appliquées à des lois passées et donnent des résultats très intéressants. Cet indice étant public, chaque ministre sera incité à travailler davantage pour améliorer les dispositions de ses projets de loi ;

And it's only a provisional name!

Why do I blog this? Although it sounds amusing, I am curious about how people put meaning behind this kind of measure. I would prefer having visualization of the process liek the temporal description with the people in charge... hmmm activity theory?

Sterling on Independent Research

Bruce Sterling's "Visionary in Residence : Stories" include an intriguing novel called Ivory Tower, which has already been published in Nature in April 2005 for a special issue about "What does the next half-century have in store?".

It addresses a topic I am very interested in: independent research. Some quotes:

We were ten thousands physicists entirely self-educated by Internet (...) In the new world of open access, ultrawide broadband, and gigantic storage bank, physics is just sort of sitting there (...) we demanded state support to publish for our research efforts (just like real scientists do), but alas, the bureaucrats wouldn't give us the time of the day.

So to find time for our kind of science, we had to dump a few shibboleths. For instance, we never bother to "publish" - we just post our findings on weblogs, and if that gets a lot of links, hey, we're the Most Frequently Cited. Tenure? Who needs that? Never heard of it! Doctorates, degrees, defending a thesis? Don't know, don't need 'em, can't even be bothered. (...) You're one in a million, pal - but in a world of ten billion people, there's ten thousand of us. We immediately started swapping everything we knew on collaborative weblogs. (...) we established our Autodidacts' Academy... we also had unlimited processing power, bandwidth, search engines, social software and open-source everything.

Why do I blog this? This is not the current situation but the tools Sterling describes (which we already have) reshape the research practices. Researchers begin to use blogs, tagging (conotea), wiki; benefits from bandwidth + large processing power. The weblog ranking system is very close to the peer-review process (less formal, more emergent and messy). What we currently lack is the critical mass. I am not sure whether the blog or another platform might be a relevant format for publishing research but there is something interesting here.

BESIDES, some people are working in that direction. Olivier reports that this paper (which form is really far from the old-school scientific paper format because of its open-source-ness maybe) features for instance a reference to a blogpost. Is blogging good for the career? also asks Alex Pang

Constraints-Based Architecture

Design is bound by constraints as we can see on this picture (seen in Greece where I've been last week):

The tree was there and then "they" built the wall (and the street consequently)

Tangible Flags: collaborative field trip for kids

A case study of Tangible Flags: A collaborative technology to enhance field trips by Gene Chipman, Allison Druin, Dianne Beer, Jerry Alan Fails, Mona Leigh Guha, Sante Simms, Paper that will be presented at IDC 2006. The paper describes the participatory design of a "Tangible Flags technology" to support children (grade K-4) in collaborative artifact creation during field trips:

We worked with two teams of children in developing Tangible Flags; a group of 6 children, age 6-10, who joined us in our lab after school twice a week and a class of kindergarteners at the Center for Young Children, University of Maryland’s on campus research pre-school. We made observations of the kindergarten classroom’s actual field trips, and both teams participated in mock field trips. We experimented with marking the environment using flags consisting of a pipe cleaner attached to a popsicle stick. We named these Tangible Flags because the children planted them like flags and used them as a mock tangible interface for accessing digital artifacts. Our goal was to see the impact of the Tangible Flags concept on children’s collaborative effort and ability to re-locate or elaborate on their findings. These initial flags were not computationally enhanced, so adult researchers helped the children correlate Tangible Flags with various media, such as notes taken or pictures drawn by the children, or audio and video recordings created by the children.

Why do I blog this? this is a relevant example of how the physical connection to digital information through tangible interactions. The activity study is very insightful with regards to children appropriation of the technology.

Street Interconnectivity

Google Cartography: Street Art in Your Neighborhood is a curious google hack by Richard Jones:

Google Cartography uses Google via the Google Search API [] to build a visual representation of the interconnectivity of streets in an area.

This application takes a starting street and finds streets that intersect with it. Traversing the streets in a breadth-first manner, the application discovers more and more intersections, eventually producing a graph that shows the interconnectivity of streets flowing from the starting street.

Figures and show maps generated for two of the world's great cities, New York and Melbourne, respectively.

Why do I blog this? because I am fascinated by interconnectivity.

Meaningful whereabouts/locative information while googleing your shoes

Reading Everyware and thinking about Bruce Sterling's talk at LIFT06 and ETECH, I was mumbling about the idea of googling objects to know where they are. What Bruce was saying:

“I have an Internet-of-Things with a search engine of things. So I no longer hunt anxiously for my missing shoes in the morning. I just Google them. As long as machines can crunch the complexities, their interfaces make my relationship to objects feel much simpler and more immediate. I am at ease in materiality in a way that people never were before.”

What I am interested in is how such a system tells the PROPER "locative assertion" (that is to say the name of the referred place). In the example above, my shoes can be "under my bed", "on the third shelves under a pile of old rubbishes in my parent's garage" and sometimes the scale is a lot bigger if you want the system to tell you that you threw your car keys in the pacific ocean.

From my perspective the challenge is to give "the users" a relevant indication of the whereabouts: sometimes it's the name of a room, sometimes it's geographical coordinates...

Of course, there is an interesting roundup/special case, especially when it comes to objects as described in "“Where Are the Christmas Decorations?”: A Memory Assistant for Storage Locations" by Lewis Creary, Michael VanHilst from HP Labs. The paper describes a storage location memory assistant that saves and retrieves information about the locations of stored objects in and around the user's house. Something that would do:

User: Where are the Christmas decorations? PDA: They're in the leftmost medium-sized white box under the wood table in the garage.

But of course, you would have to tell the system where the object is, which is not that convenient, especially when you LOOSE TRACK of things.

A telepresence garment

Skimming through Eduardo Kac's "Telepresence and Bio Art : Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots (Studies in Literature and Science)", I ran across his 10-years old project called The Telepresence Garment and found it of particular interest nowadays:

I first conceived the Telepresence Garment in 1995 to investigate the notion of the mediascape as an expanded cloth; i.e., to consider wireless networking as a new fabric that envelops the body. The Garment, which I finished in 1996, gives continuation to my development of telepresence art. This time, however, instead of a robot hosting a human, we find the roboticized human body itself converted into a host. The Garment was designed as an interactive piece to be worn by any local participant willing to allow his or her body to be engaged by others remotely.

A key issue I have been exploring in my work as a whole is the chasm between opticality and cognizance, i.e., the oscillation between the immediate perceptual field, dominated by the surrounding environment, and what is not physically present but nonetheless still directly affects us in many ways. The Telepresence Garment creates a situation in which the person wearing it is not in control of what is seen, because he or she cannot see anything through the completely opaque hood. The person wearing the Garment can make sounds, but can't produce intelligible speech because the hood is tied very tightly against the wearer's face. An elastic and synthetic dark material covers the nose, the only portion of flesh that otherwise would be exposed. Breathing is not easy. Walking is impossible, since a knot at the bottom of the Garment forces the wearer to be on all fours and to move sluggishly.

Why do I blog this? this nicely expresses how clothing is changing (will change), reshaped by emerging technologies such as ubiquitous/pervasive computing.

Visualization and Immersion of Life Sciences Data

Seeing is Believing is a very interesting article in The Scientist about information visualization. It tackles the fact that lift scientists have to deal with a huge amount of information. The challenge would be to develop relevant visual techniques.

Computers do a great job of finding patterns in data when they're programmed to look for them, notes Jim Thomas, who heads the National Visualization and Analytics Center at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., "but many times, you are discovering what questions to ask. Only the human mind has the ability to reason with what is seen, apply other human knowledge, and develop a hypothesis or question." High-end visualization tools have been long used in applications such as the study of jet turbulence and by security experts looking for "chatter" in reams of telephone calls and transmissions, but only now are such tools being used in the life sciences, says H. Steven Wiley, director of the Biomolecular Systems Initiative at PNNL.

What is also intriguing is this sentence: "Without them, more data won't necessarily translate into better science", a nice evocation of Latour's inscription theory.

For that matter, it seems that VR is still around:

A next generation of visualization software may strive not just to offer a view, but allow the viewer to enter the data. This total immersion concept is the idea behind Delaware Biotechnology Institute's "cave," a Visualization Studio that Silicon Graphics developed, which allows users to literally immerse themselves in the data, both visually and physically. (...) One of the great benefits of the immersive system, Steiner says, is that scientists can "walk around" the data and peer at it from every angle, and do so collaboratively, either remotely or from the same room. And that, Steiner adds, is the great benefit of visualization in general: It can foster interdisciplinary collaboration by helping scientists from a variety of backgrounds understand a problem in order to solve it in a more effective manner.

(image taken from the Delaware Biotechnology Institute)

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to see that VR is still relevant in data manipulation.

Telebeads: Social Network Mnemonics for Teenagers

I've recently read j-dash-bi latest paper and it's very nifty: Telebeads: Social Network Mnemonics for Teenagers by Jean-Baptiste Labrune and Wendy Mackay (IDC2006). It's actually a participatory design paper that describes how they designed a curious artifact:

This article presents the design of Telebeads, a conceptual exploration of mobile mnemonic artefacts. Developed together with five 10-14 year olds across two participatory design sessions, we address the problem of social network massification by allowing teenagers to link individuals or groups with wearable objects such as handmade jewelery. We propose different concepts and scenarios using mixed-reality mobile interactions to augment crafted artefacts and describe a working prototype of a bluetooth luminous ring. We also discuss what such communication appliances may offer in the future with respect to interperception, experience networks and creativity analysis.

The ring addresses two primary functions requested by the teens: providing a physical instantiation of a particular person in a wearable object and allowing direct communication with that person. (...) We have just completed an ejabberd server, running on Linux on a PDA, which will serve as a smaller, but more powerful telebead interface

See the bluetooth telebead ring and how to associate the ring and a contact image:

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of "mobile mnemonic artefacts" as part of a situated and cognition framework: that's an interesting instantiation of communicating objects. Besides, the paper is full of good references about such devices.

Every extension is more than an amputation

Reading "Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" by Adam Greenfield, I am trying to articulate the different "theses" with what I do in my research. One of the most relevant connection is the "Thesis 43" (p148): "Everyware produces a wide-belt of circumstances where human agency, judgement and will are progressively supplanted by compliance with external, frequently algorithmically-applied standards and norms". In this thesis, Adam exemplifies this by a quote by Marshall McLuhan I had also been amazed by: "every extension is [also] an amputation" (Understanding the Media, 1969).

This is exactly one of the conclusion of my PhD research that addresses collaboration in a pervasive game (which can be consider as a first step into an "everyware" world). In the context of my research, I found that automating location awareness information of others can be detrimental to how a small group behave (regarding the division of labor among them, the way they communicate, negotiate and infer others' intents). This is better described in a paper called The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game.

My point is that giving automatically information about others' location in space can undermine group collaboration. This had been showed by a field experiment we conducted last year. We compared different groups: some had this automatical awareness information and some had not. Groups with the automatical positions of others had a less rich collaboration: they less discussed, less negotiated the strategy, rather sticked to the plan they decided before the game and did not recall their partners' paths very efficiently.

It goes actually even further: I would say that here "every extension is more than an amputation". The user gain the spatial positions of others but loose some important value of letting people express this information by themselves. This is bound to the misconception that automatically sending my position is the same as letting me sending a message to my buddies about it: in the former it's sending and information whereas in the latter it's sending an information AND an intention that I sent something relevant to my addressee.

Why do I blog this? I am glad to see how concrete user experience of pervasive computing can be articulated with higher levels thoughts described by Adam in his book. It shows how a "user experience" angle is needed to better understand what is at stake when we are talking about "everyware". That's what we need in this academic CSCW project.

Today's terminology is weird

In terms of weird terminology, gtr consulting offers very curious concepts about the sociological impacts of emerging technologies. For instance, see their last report (see the pdf table of content):

• iJunkies - The world at the touch of a button
• Technomadism — Wireless life
• TechnoBling — Technology must look good in addition to working well
• Insulationships—How technology is mediating teens’ relationship with the world around them
• The Neighbornet—Teen world expanded on the net
• Ego Anglers—Looking for positive strokes on the net
• The Digital Disguise—Transforming identities on the net
• ACME Auteur—Creating, Producing & Directing on the net
• Life Caching—Memory replaced by knowing where to find it
• Brain Blur—Multi-tasking in 2006
• Dataddiction—Teens can’t live without the web
• The Chill-Challenged—Idle hands? Not today’s teens.

Of course, there is a lot of marketing frenzyness here, sort of having category to refer to subgroups, but the underlying rhetoric is interesting. Some trends appears: junkies+addiction / neighbornet+insulationships (creation of subgroups, do they talk to each other?) / disguise (ok maybe that's the way a person from one subgroup has to behave to take to another group / blur (the brain is blurred but what about the social bonds?) / eco anglers looking (the world is bad and they're looking for sth better?).

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to see how today's trends are reflected into language, with odd portmanteau concept.

Spotscout: a real time space exchange marketplace

Via SpringWise: Spotscout is a web2.0 + car park application:

SpotScout provides a system that creates and facilitates a real time space exchange marketplace. Formally established in 2004, SpotScout's aim has been to create the applications, develop the marketplace, and secure intellectual property rights to real time mobile to mobile space exchange.

SpotScout's mission is to be the world's first en-route space reservation mechanism for public, private and garage parking and to pioneer mobile commerce solutions and technologies placing SpotScout at the forefront of this exciting industry. SpotScout is an easy to use voice and web-enabled service that connects parking spaces with drivers searching for them.

SpotScout also allows users to post their personal parking spots (we call these people 'SpotCasters') for other motorists to use, thereby monetizing an increasingly scarce resource in our cities and towns.

The SpotScout community grows daily, and will continue to do so until every driver feels there is a mechanism that will reliably find them a parking space the moment they need one.

Why do I blog this? "a real time space exchange marketplace": what a concept! after trading virtual objects gathered in a city with the location-based game MogiMogi, you can now trade real space. One of the side-effect of the social web? What happens then, will we have game theory situations?

Using crossed self-confrontation to analyse intersubjectivity in a collaborative pervasive game

I am currently in the process of thinking about new field experiments using our pervasive game (CatchBob!). What I am interested in, is to improve my understanding of the intersubjective experience: how players infer others' activities and intents (what is called Mutual Modeling). For that matter, I am using qualitative methods, very common in the french culture of "ergonomie" or "psychologie ergonomique" known as self-confrontation. There is a good description of self-confrontation in the paper "Methodologies for evaluating the affective experience of a mediated interaction" by Cahour et al. (2005):

The general idea of self-confrontation is to provide a subject with traces of his/her activity (more frequently audio or video recording, but also writings, schemas, annotations,…) in order to collect verbal descriptions of what was going on by putting him/her in the context of the past setting. In the same time external traces enables the analyst to control the correspondence between the verbal report produced by the subject (first person data) and the traces of the activity being observed (third person data). We also use some techniques of the explicitation interview when stopping the video and asking the subjects about what they lived (affectively, cognitively, bodily) during the sequence watched.

I already used this method in the first field experiment we completed. Now, in order to move forward, there is another interesting add-on called "crossed self-confrontation" (developed by Yves Clot) which is very well described by Philippe De Leener in his paper "Self-analysis of professional activity as a tool for personal and organisational change":

The two workers who have experienced self-confrontation review the picture of their own activity but now through the eyes of their fellow-worker. The first worker comments on the activity of the second and vice versa. Again a dialogical activity is initiated about the activity, but this time the players principally confront their experiences. The discussions and exchanges of points of view about the same activity give them an opportunity to re-examine their respective real-life activity and to reveal what is not necessarily self-obvious. So workers, be they researchers or developers, are in a better position to talk about what they have actually lived or about what they actually live when working in a participatory way.

Why do I blog this? I want to apply this crossed self-confrontation method to our next CatchBob! experiment. This means that after playing the game, I will conduct an interview with one of the player, showing him/her traces of the gaming activity (with our replay tool) of a partner (so that player B puts players A's socks for instance). Then I'll do the interview of this player (player A in my example) so that I could cross the descriptions.

The benefit I am expecting is to get an insightful description of the activity, on which I could rely on to examine the player's intersubjectivity.

Hunaja: user study of a mobile social software

Three years ago, while scanning the literature+web about a PhD topic about location-awareness, I stumbled across Hunaja, avery pertinent mobile social software developed by some good finnish folk at Aula. I remember at that time being briefly in contact with Jyri.

Hunaja is an RFID access control system that enables users to remotely check who is logged in at a physical location by using the Web or a mobile phone. Hunaja was developed in 2001-2002 by Aula Cooperative, which is a non-profit organization based in Helsinki, Finland. In addition to controlling the doors of the Aula space, Hunaja has three unique features:

• Linkage to Aula's weblog - enabling online members to remotely see who is logged in at Aula's physical space
• SMS access - enabling members to check who's there with their mobile phones
• A speech synthesizer at the door - enabling online members to send greeting messages. The messages are announced by a computer voice when the recipient logs inat Aula's door

For three months (May-July, 2002), Aula issued a trial set of 50 RFID tags to its members. Of those 50 members, 9 members were selected for this user study. All of the participants were in the 20-35 year-old age group, and their use of the system was followed and recorded for two weeks during the month of July.

What is of particular interest for me is the fact that they conducted a very relevant user study. It was a focus group consisted of 9 people between the ages of 20-35, whose usage patterns were followed for two weeks in July, 2002.

was interested by the reason why people are scouting moves: Entertainment / Time-saving / Spying / Romance / Avoidance / Professional interests / Recruitment. Here is an extract I found relevant to my work:

For the observers, Hunaja provided three media of ”browsing” other people: Web, SMS, and the Aula space. Hunaja worked as a personal intelligence system that enabled the users to optimize their actions (scout useful next steps) and build a strategy for personal postitioning in the network.

Examples of observer behavior: A male user intends to meet a female user without wanting that person to know that he is looking for her A user does not want to meet a specific person and uses Hunaja to avoid meeting that person in Aula A user browses Aula member cards to recruit suitable people for a project For the observed, Hunaja provided a method to ”be noticed”. Motives linked to this included the desire to make new contacts, showing commitment to developing the user community, personal branding, and career-building.

Some users were motivated by the desire to belong to a close-knit group. Stephanie, the 29-year old French graduate student, for instance, had become a Hunaja user because she had a strong desire to establish herself in communities of like-minded people in Helsinki. She placed strong symbolic value on the RFID tag as a token of group membership. For her, appearing on Hunaja was a prerequisite for group membership, and she took care to establish herself as an active user in the eyes of others. In a similar vein, Lisa, a 26-year old manager at an e-learning company, used the term “addiction” to describe her relationship to Hunaja. In the interview she said: “I thought, do people thing that if I don’t show up on Hunaja or visit the weblog at least once a week, will they think that I want to keep up some kind of super privacy and that I’m fed up with Aula or something.” She felt a strong obligation to use Hunaja so as to “not give the wrong impression” of ignorance and passivity. Such instances describe situations where use of the technology becomes a prerequisite for group membership. You have to use the system in order to”exist” in the community. This may be a strong driver for adoption of future mass-market technologies geared for “small worlds” like Aula.

Why do I blog this? because my phd research work is about how location awareness of others impacts social and cognitive processes.

Interview of an iRbobot founder

An interesting interview of Helen Greiner, one of the founder of iRobot (the company which is doing the vaccum cleaner robot Roomba as well as tactical military robots used in Iraq).

Knowledge@Wharton: I don't think anyone would object to having a robot vacuum the floor, but do you find resistance to robots as a concept -- doing tasks that humans have been doing? Is there a science fiction element of this that makes people nervous?

Greiner: I don't really think so. When computers first came out, you had a lot of people worried that computers were going to obsolete humans and that they were going to take over everything. So you had everything from [the movie] The Colossus Project to Hal in 2001. I think it's a way for society to work through their fears. Once people have a computer on their desk and they see what it's good at doing and, more especially, what it's not good at doing, they don't have the same fear anymore. It's the same with robots. Once people have a Roomba in their home and it's doing the sweeping and vacuuming for them, but they see the things it can't do yet, they really don't fear robots taking over the world.

"Naming" the object seems to be one interesting behavior that popped up:

The only thing in their experience that has acted that way has been a pet. So people actually start to name it. You don't see anyone name their toasters but a lot of people tell me they have named their Roomba.

I would just ponder this by saying that I've seen some friends (few years ago, while living alltogether in a big condo) calling their old-school vacuum cleaner "Daisy". Was it already a trend to call certain kind of home artifacts?

It's also refreshing to hear what she says about how people tinker:

Knowledge@Wharton: Have you heard stories of what people have done with this?

Greiner: Well, a few stories. One [involved] making a webcam on wheels so you can control your robot through the Internet and see what the robot sees and hear what the robot hears as you drive it around. Somebody made a robotic plant-moving system, so plants can always be in the sun. Someone was talking about making a swimming pool-skimming robot. And most recently, just this past week, some hackers did a physical instantiation of the video game Frogger. Now we don't condone this type of activity [laughs], but it shows you just where creativity can go when you make a system open.

The openness of the system is indeed FUNDAMENTAL if you want creative things to happen.

Why do I blog this? robots are an interesting domain where innovation starts to appear, leaving the anthropomorphic paradigm to become closer to the pervasive computing world in which objects are interconnected and open (so that people can modify them).

Underground Trend Watching

To go beyond trend-spotting, underground watchers should pay attention to Brainsushi:

Avant-garde technologies, social mutations and cultural turmoil... New York vampyres, Mexican freaks, Silicon Valley nerds, Guatemalan gangsters, London fetishists or Japanese otakus, the Brainsushi agency is specialized in documenting contemporary phenomena that foresee the world of tomorrow.

Through its exclusive reports and documentation, brought together by a team of press and TV professionals who tirelessly travel the world and the digital networks for novelty, Brainsushi brings you to these ill-known territories where our of our societies’ future is brewing.

Documentary films, photographic reports or in-depth articles, our work is both meant for the most demanding connoisseurs and a mainstream audience. Beyond our portfolio, the member zone of this website (accessible on request), will allow you to appreciate the quality of our written and audio-visual productions.

Our main fields of expertise: Pop culture and counter culture / New technologies / Digital and outsider art / New body practices / Urban tribes and lifestyles / Extreme sports / Information society / Alternative sexualitiesWhy do I blog this? I found interesting and curious this kind of underground trend watching consultancy.