User experience of Community Displays

"Understanding and Designing for the Voluntary Adoption of Community Displays" by Harry Brignull is a very relevant thesis that deals with large digital wall display system for the support of informal social interaction in communal spaces.

One of the contributions of this thesis is a critical analysis of research studies revealing two distinct categories of Community Display settings: ‘one shot’ usage settings and ‘on-going’ usage settings. ‘One shot’ usage settings include one-off social events, conferences (McCarthy, 2003) and festivals (Agamanolis, 2003). (...) ‘On-going’ settings, on the other hand include common rooms (Houde et al, 1998), cafés (Churchill et al, 2003), and relaxation areas (Grasso, 2003), and are used regularly by an established community over a period of months or years.

Findings show that that the spatial distribution of interaction around a Community Display is of crucial importance to understanding its usage and adoption. The concept of ‘flow’ is introduced to describe the manner in which users move through space; and the concept of a ‘honey pot’ is introduced to describe the public interaction space around a community display which users are attracted to and congregate in because of the resources it offers. The public availability of interaction with a Community Display is found to be important in that it allows others to ‘oversee’ interaction while going about other things (Heath and Luff, 1991), creating opportunities for them to join in, and thus facilitating spontaneous social congregations. This overseeing is also found to be crucial to the learning process - studies carried out show that people predominantly learned about Community Displays by observing others using them, i.e. vicariously.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in how interaction could be spatially distributed and how potential users could apprehend such artefacts because it relates with my research about the impacts of technologies on space and place.

Death of video games and the renaissance of "play"

Cyril has an interesting post about the "death of video-games". IMO video games creativity is not dead. What is dead is the video game development model which suck and is so publisher-driven that it kills innovation. Garage studios are no longer viable, in-house studios are following the headquarters order and cut innovation; and even when it comes to outsourcing, there is nothing good out of it. Of course there are still some good and innovative studios (blizzard) but they're less and less. I think Water Cooler also addresses that issue. To me, what is interesting is that the most important innovation with regards to video games are

• not games but rather platforms, environment to do something together: I am thinking about WoW (even though has of course a RPG component) or Habbo Hotel (or even Flickr which started as a game platform).
• not classical platforms such as consoles but rather on the Web, which is the most open innovation platform for developing things.
• not game content but DYI game platforms (DYI MMORPG or at least 3D environment tools), artifacts (like game controllers as for the Nintendo Wii or the Sony augmented reality card game), machinimas or tools like Xfire (a very relevant tool to when your friends are online, what game they're playing, and what server they're on, join in on their games with one click and see what the friends of your friends are playing).

And this is interesting because video/computer games are now starting not only a tiny platforms but they're is now an ecology of artifacts connected to them which eventually are targeted at engaging people in playful activities such as developing DYI games, creating or watching machinimas, playing games with tangible interactions...

Why do I blog this? I am interested in foresight issues related to this sort of activities and how games is evolving from a very precise activity to a culture with fuzzier boundaries.

Neverending drawing

(Via), this Neverending Drawing project (by Oskar Karlin) is very neat:

Never ending drawing is a project I started in Stockholm five years ago. Inspired by Douglas Coupland’s book Microserfs, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and some drawings made by my sister I started mapping my movements in the city. I downloaded a map over Stockholm and pasted it into Illustrator and drew my movents in separate layers each day. After two years I moved to Berlin and then London and continued the project there. Earlier this year during a trip I also mapped my movements in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

My limitations are a defined area around the central parts of the city I am in. So if I go outside the “borders” I don’t map it out. You could call it vacation. Since all the data is stored in vector format it is easy to work with.

An example: on the left is is Stockholm, Berlin and London on top of each other, and on the right, it's basically the same as but instead of outlinesKarlin have filled each day with a color with low transparency(Stockholm is green, Berlin is red and London is blue).

Why do I blog this? I like this sort of visualization/city mapping; the chaos created is intriguing and quite situationist. Overlaps are pertinent, maybe this is an instantiation of the Global City.

No buttons to press, just gesture

Time has an article about Nintendo's strategy. There is a relevant point there:

Nintendo can reinvent gaming and in the process turn nongamers into gamers. (...) "Why do people who don't play video games not play them?" Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard (...) The learning curve is steep.

That presents a problem of what engineers call interface design: How do you make it easier for players to tell the machine what they want it to do? "During the past five years, we were always telling them we have to do something new, something very different," Miyamoto says (like Iwata, he speaks through an interpreter). "And the game interface has to be the key. Without changing the interface we could not attract nongamers." So they changed it. (...) Of course, hardware is only half the picture. The other half is the games themselves. "We created a task force internally at Nintendo," Iwata says, "whose objective was to come up with games that would attract people who don't play games."

And this seems to attract game designers:

John Schappert, a senior vice president at Electronic Arts, is overseeing a version of the venerable Madden football series for Nintendo's new hardware. He sees the controller from the auteur's perspective, as an opportunity but also a huge challenge. "Our engineers now have to decipher what the user is doing," he says. "'Is that a throw gesture? Is it a juke? A stiff arm?' Everyone knows how to make a throwing motion, but we all have our own unique way of throwing." But consider the upside: you're basically playing football in your living room.

"No buttons to press, just gesture": the essence of tangible interactions!

In addition, in terms of innovation, the article highlights few important concerns:

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don't listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal--they blog a lot--but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. (...) Cutting-edge design has become more important than cutting-edge technology. There is a persistent belief among engineers that consumers want more power and more features. That is incorrect. (...) intendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and it's betting its future on the same wisdom. The race is not to him who hulas fastest, it's to him who looks hottest doing it.

Why do I blog this? My interest for this console (and hence this article) is threefold: (1) I am curious to try it out (2) it's a good step towards the use of tangible computing metaphors (3) the innovation model of Nintendo is interesting.

Blutooth locative media

BlueWay is a project carried out at the ITP by Myra Einstein, David Yates, Robert Faludi, Arly Caryn Ross, Leif Mangelsen:

BlueWay at the Spring Show provides personalized guidance to friends, business contacts, locations, projects, and services by taking advantage of technology already carried by most users.

Visitors at a BlueWay kiosk can have have their picture taken and linked to their Bluetooth-enabled device. As they move through the space, BlueWay senses the visitor’s presence using their Bluetooth ID and displays their location. Participants receive pertinent wayfinding information when and where they need it. Their presence is depicted on master display maps, so other people can also quickly find them. These signs even benefit guests who do not register with the system, because the useful information they provide is visible to everyone.

Why do I blog this? yet another location-based application using bluetooth that aims at providing guidance/wayfinding information. IMO what is more interesting here is to use the bluetooth ID as presence/community indicator.

Account from the Metaverse Summit

News.com has a great account of the Metaverse Summit, which was about how video game design, geospatial engineering, high-tech research, software development, social networking, telecommunications would reshape the virtual world (or the overlap between the physical and the real world). The outcome they highlight is that "agreement about the metaverse of 2016 was hard to find", which is of course interesting to me. Here are some trends they discuss:

"I thought we were going to focus a bit more on virtual worlds because when I hear the term metaverse, I hear 3D virtual worlds. And we ended up talking about virtual worlds as well as augmented reality, which to me is kind of separate technology in its vision," Moore said [PARC] (...) One of the questions asked most frequently throughout the event was whether an overriding metaverse of 2016 will be commercially owned or open source. There was little agreement about that, but it was clear that the companies seen as most likely to provide the tools for a single metaverse upon which many 3D, social applications could be built are Microsoft and Google.

In part, Google was seen as more likely because of its development of Google Earth and its recent purchase of the maker of the 3D modeling software, Sketchup. (...) In addition, there was a general consensus that--as mobile devices become more sophisticated--the 3D Web would become much more the province of such devices and far less of the kinds of desktop or laptop computers we know today.

A public document that would wrap up this will be published by the end of the summer. Why do I blog this? I am interested (from my research perspective) about how technology reshape spatial practices.

Meeting with PhD advisor

Today I had a meeting with my PhD advisor about the thesis outline - which is actually more than that since we discussed the research rationale (le fil rouge of the dissertation) as well as the expected contribution. As Chris Johnson puts it, the work should be articulated around three dimensions: a contribution to a field of research (in my case the effects of location awareness on collaboration which is an investigation of the behavioral issues related to this technology), a proper grounding in experimental techniques (the description of the field experiments I conducted and my concern about taking advantage of both qualitative and quantitative data; even though it's quantitative dominant) and finally a contribution to the design and implementation of interactive systems (which would be made through guidelines, recommendation and why not a method to analyze mobile collaboration).

The diss will hence address all of these issues with regards to location-awareness and collaborative processes such as group performance, comunication, mutual modeling, negotiation of a group strategy. For that matter, I will present the results from Spaceminers (virtual world on the left below) and those from CatchBob! (pervasive game, on the right below). This would eventually lead me to a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of location-awareness in both a virtual world and a pervasive environment.

WiFi Rabbit Opera -Flash Mob

Regine pointed me on this cool event: a opera for nabaztag at the Web Flash Festival on May 27th. It's a kind of flash mob with communicating artifacts: 100 Nabzatags (Wifi rabbits) brought by their owners will play an opera created by Antoine Schmitt et Jean-Jacques Birgé at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Why do I blog this? a flash mob of objects is surely a 2006 technosocial situation.

What about the beta mindset in pervasive computing

cph127 has a good point about what they call "the rise of beta": the very fact that . everything is launched as beta and everything happens to be unfinished. They wrote a beta-manifesto, here are some excerpts:

• being in beta is a natural state of life. Everything aroundus is either evolving or dying.
• beta is playing. Experimenting. Trying.
• beta is constant learning.
• beta is profiting in the true nature of the word “profit”. Making progress.
• beta is never perfect. Never completely without fault. Just like any human being. Everything can be made better. Allways. Achieving temporary perfection is better than aspiring for the ultimate perfection that is never reached.
• beta is release as soon as it is safe. But never sooner. Only daredevils flies planes in beta or takes unfinished medicine.
• beta is a natural state of things. Your body is in perpetual beta until you die (maybe..)
• beta is evolution. Many small gradual changes. Suddenly they may seem like giant leaps.
• beta is revolution. Not completely in control. Just like the real world.
• beta is open. Ready for dialogue. Open for change. Positive for co-creation.
• beta stands for things that changes. Change with consistancy.
• beta creates feedback loops for companies, individuals and products.
• beta is honest. Not superficial.

Why do I blog this? First I think the "beta" phenomenon is interesting as a shift in our society from all-set product to constantly evolving "stuff"; the assumptions behind this are both important (product can be improve and are opened) and intriguing (everything needs to change change change...). Second, what will be curious IMO is whether this beta mindset will also reach the pervasive computing world: we would then have unfinished objects and services. After the blue-screen of death for your bathroom, there would then be uncompleted features that you might not be able to use with a "beta-meter" close to the flusher...

Attention span research in media industry

Researchers in LA are trying to help world's biggest media companies and their high-profile clients understanding the divided consumer's attention span (source: NYT):

The Emerging Media Lab is run by Interpublic, a holding company for media- buying firms like Universal McCann and Initiative. Since February, clients like Sony, L'Oréal and Microsoft have been using the lab to try to figure out how to reach consumers who seem to be doing so many things simultaneously. (...) Market researchers as a whole are struggling to understand the realities of what often is called "concurrent media usage." (...) For advertisers, the challenge is getting the message across in one medium while the consumer is simultaneously active in several media. (...) In the Emerging Media Lab, advertisers can observe "engagement." Using cameras that feed back into an observation room, advertisers watch consumers use old technologies or try new ones.

But it does seem that a consumer who is multitasking is not devoting an equal amount of interest to all those activities. "Terms like multitasking imply equal attention," said Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. "But cognitive science tells us this isn't possible. You have to give priority to one in order to absorb the messages."

Research or market research? It's clear that they are facing a real challenge but I tend to be quite pessimistic towards the advertisement world, which is actually not so much of a problem to me...

Repetition in new media art

Regine has been interviewed by fine art Trendbeheer. One of the topic they discussed is very relevant to me:

Trendbeheer: Art is all about hypes and media art more then that: there are so much sponsored/government subsidised events these days - at least in Holland - that there are more conferences then artists. There is a danger of disillusion for a new audience.

Regine: I see a proliferation of new media art festivals all around europe. And there’s a lot of repetition, not always in favour of the best works.

On the one hand it’s great for new media artists, on the other hand the audience is not growing as quickly as the number of festivals.

Why do I blog this? I fully agree with this statement about repetition: it seems that as in engineering, media artists are sometimes not aware of other projects related to theirs (hence they reinvent the wheel on a regular basis). This is no an attack targetting artists but rather a phenomenon that I noticed both with engineering students and media artists which IMO is rather about the way they work than their intrinsical behavior. And of course, as a person working in the academic world, I have a strong bias towards an overamphasis on checking earlier work of others.

"Extreme Users"

Lars Erik Holmquist defines what he means by "extreme users" in his paper: User-driven innovation in the future applications lab:

users that have very particular and perhaps peculiar requirements. We believe such specialized groups are more likely to put our technology in a new light, thus giving rise to interesting ideas. We can think of them as “extreme users”, an analogue to the concept of “extreme characters”, which are persona that are created to generate ideas in interaction design. As with extreme characters, the purpose is to inspire novel ideas that can be generalized for a larger audience. In several instances we have seen how the insights gained from working with specialized users has pushed the original technology and concepts much further than would otherwise have been the case.

Why do I blog this? I like to think in terms of extreme users and extreme "usage".

Locomotion interface: Powered Shoes

I recently ran across this (I don't know where, maybe at WMMNA): Powered Shoes, a project carried out by Hiroo Iwata. It's basically a "wearable locomotion interface that enables omni-directional walking while maintaining the user's position"

A locomotion interface using roller skates actuated by two motors with flexible shafts. The device enables users to walk in arbitrary directions in virtual environments while maintaining their positions.

Enhanced Life It has often been suggested that the best locomotion mechanism for virtual worlds would be walking, and it is well known that the sense of distance or orientation while walking is much better than while riding in a vehicle. However, the proprioceptive feedback of walking is not provided in most virtual environments. Powered Shoes is a revolutionary advance for entertainment and simulation applications, because it provides this proprioceptive feedback.

Why do I blog this? It reminds me of something discussed with julian about a walking-based interface. Lots of interesting mixed reality application could be used using this sort of device: not in the proper "mixed" system that actually exists (including virtual world features in the real world through glasses) but rather by allowing tangible interactions to control stuff that would happen in the virtual worlds.

The importance of the "body" (the why of tangible computing?)

I am sure this paper is interested for Adam Greenfield's next book ("The city is here for you to use"):How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design by Scott R. Klemmer, Bjoern Hartmann, and Leila Takayama For DIS2006:

It discusses how "our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world", drawing on various theories of embodiment in the field of psychology, sociology and philosophy.

What is interesting is that articles presents some relevant arguments and examples that shows the importance of the body. It put the emphasis on the embodiment for (among others), I picked up those I was interested in:

• Learning through doin: physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development (Piaget, Montessori)
• Gesture is important in terms of cognition and fully linguistic communication for adults (to conceptually plan speech production and to communicate thoughts that are not easily verbalized)
• Epistermic actions: manipulating artifacts to better understand the task’s context
• Thinking through prototyping
• Tangibility of representations: The representation of a task can radically affect our reasoning abilities and performance.
• The tacit knowledge that many physical situations afford play an important role in expert behavior.
• hands, as they are simultaneously a means for complex expression and sensation: they allow for complicated movement
• kinesthetic memory is important to know how to interact with objects (ride a bicycle, how to swim)
• Reflective reasoning is too slow to stay in the loop
• Learning is situated in space
• Visibility Facilitates Coordination
• Physical Action is characterized by Risk: bodies can suffer harm if one chooses the wrong course of action
• Personal responsibility: Making the consequences of decisions more directly visible to people alters the outcome of the decision-making process.

Why do I blog this? This echoes with the literature review I did about how space/place affords socio-cognitive interactions. Embodiment is certainly one of the most interesting component of this relationship.

I also think one of the most important dimension is the inherent risk of physical actions, nobody gets physically hurt in virtual worlds but what happened while playing augmented reality quake?

Of course this is meant to support the "why" question of tangible computing?

Veejaying: a new form of dubbing

The Christian Science Monitor has a piece about this curious socio-cultural practice in Uganda: veejaying: the act of translating in real-time foreign movies for the audience:

"Veejaying" is now a central form of local entertainment. But the art involves much more than translation. Part sports announcer, part street preacher, part comedian, a veejay must fill in cultural gaps and keep the audience engaged, which - for many veejays - often means taking considerable creative license.

The video jockey is an offshoot of the distinctly home-grown phenomenon of the video hall. Makeshift shacks commonly made of plywood and tin sheeting, they function as the main form of cinema for the Ugandan masses, most of whom cannot afford theater tickets or rentals of pirated DVDs. (...) The festival features a "Veejay slam," in which some of the country's best-known video jockeys display different styles and compete for the best audience response.

Why do I blog this? it's curious to see that this practice goes further than just translating, and it eventually lead to new forms of entertainment in the forms of slam competitions or DVD editions.

A new form of tinkering cultural content.

Ubiquitous versus Pervasive Computing

Visualizing the usage of these two terms with the new Google Trends tool:

I don't know to what extent the tool is reliable but the search volume is decreasing over time and there are some variations where ubiquitous is more searched than pervasive and vice versa.

Why do I blog this? just wanted to try Google Trends comparing two keywords which I am familiar with.

Distorted maps, check the royalties/fee one!

Worldmapper offers some exquisite "anamorphosis" (maps where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest). What is great is that their data are also available. Some of the distorted map are utterly crazy, look at this one: Royalties And License Fees Exports:

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net exports of royalties and license fees (in US$) that come from there. Net exports are exports minus imports. When imports are larger than exports the territory is not shown.

Only 18 (out of 200) territories are net exporters of license fees and royalties. This means that a few people living in less than a tenth of the territories in the world between them receive the US$30 billion of net export earnings for these services.

The International Monetary Fund explained that royalties and license fees include "international payments and receipts for the authorised use of intangible, non-produced, non-financial assets and proprietary rights ... and with the use, through licensing agreements, of produced originals or prototypes ...". Thus these export earnings are payments for past ideas.

“Ideas shape our world. They are the raw materials on which our future prosperity and heritage depend.” Kamil Idris, 2006

Sensecam, Collaborative Reflection and Passive Image Capture

This afternoon at COOP2006, I enjoyed a short paper by "Supporting Collaborative Reflection with Passive Image Capture" by Rowanne Flec and Geraldine Fitzpatrick. Her PhD research is about how the a technology such as Microsoft's Sensecam can support reflective thoughts in different situations (teacher's practices, everyday reflections... learning from experience).

The SenseCam is a digital camera that has a light sensor and a temperature sensor (allows to trigger images to be taken)... a passive images capture tool. Then you can get a storyboard of the pictures taken.

She ran an expriment in which students when to an arcade to play games with the SenseCam. They played the game and then went back to their HCI class in which they had to discuss some HCI questions. Some groups had the images, some others not (two experimental conditions). She looked at the "goodness" of answers and the number of issues raised in discussion.

Results: - discussion-led use of images: to ground the conversation (referential communication), as an objective record, to talk about something missed by partner or "just in case" - image-led discussion: trigger memory, confirm/disconfirm memory, reveal something missed at time ("it's quite useful for getting a look at what you're actually because we did not use those buttons in the game".

Why do I blog this? I am actually interested both by the study and the tool. I would be super happy to have this sort of tool for my research project about location-based applications and about video games. It would be a nice way to get some traces of the activity that I'd be able to use to get back to the users and discuss them. Here is how it's described by MS:

SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into 128Mbyte FLASH memory. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded every second.

Sensors trigger a new recording. For example, each time the person walks into a new room, this light change transition is detected and the room image is captured with an ultra wide angle or fish-eye lens. (...) The sensor data (motion, light, temperature, and near infrared images) is recorded for later correlation with other user data, for example in the MyLifeBits system. (...)MyLifeBits will allow the large number of images generated daily to be easily searched and accessed. Future SenseCams will also capture audio and possibly heart rate or other physiological data.

Paper presentation at COOP2006

Today, I presented my PhD research at COOP2006. It as called "The Underwhelming Effects of Location-Awareness of Others on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game" (Nicolas NOVA, Fabien GIRARDIN, Gaëlle MOLINARI and Pierre DILLENBOURG).

Abstract. In this paper we seek to empirically study the use of location-awareness of others in the context of mobile collaboration. We report on a field experiment carried out using a pervasive game we developed called CatchBob!. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we show the underwhelming effects of automating location-awareness. Our results indeed shows that automating this process does not necessarily improve the task performance and that it can be detrimental to socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration such as communication or the modeling of partners’ intents. The paper concludes with some potential impacts for location-based application practitioners.

Keywords: location-awareness, socio-cognitive processes, pervasive game, cscw, field experiment.

This paper can be downloaded here. Some interesting comments had been made about new possible conditions to be tested (having one player who has the location-awareness tool and not the two others; having a crossed repartition of the subjects for example). Of course, I still have some people who are unhappy by the fact that I controlled my sample, having only people who know each others and who know the campus but that's life... I understand that they don't like experimental research but hey... Some have pointed out the fact that the study shows how communication is important and how it's very different from broadcasting information. There was also a good discussion about the neverending debate concerning "awareness": is it knowledge? information? is it about being conscious of a phenomenon or just being aware of it (even though the word "awareness" is based on the english word, sometimes it's not taken as such by some scholars). Finally, I was encouraged to keep looking at the qualitative data, in terms of coordination information, which is actually what I am heading towards in the next month.

The "cluster effect"

According to the Wikipedia:

The cluster effect is the effect of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service congregating in a certain place and hence inducing other buyers and sellers to relocate there as well.

For example in the mid- to late 1990s, several successful computer technology related companies emerged in Silicon Valley in California. This led anyone who wished to create a startup company to do so in Silicon Valley. The surge in the number of Silicon Valley startups led to a number of venture capital firms relocating to or expanding their Valley offices. This in turn encouraged more entrepreneurs to locate their startups there.

Why do I blog this? I was not familiar with this name referring to this concept of emergent/self-organization.