New sort of places: googleplexes

It's always curious to read about new sort of places created by networked technologies. The NYT has a good piece about the next to be Googleplex (a portmanteau of Google and complex — in the architectural sense) that will be located surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border (a big operational infrastructure).

On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing (...) The complex, sprawling like an information-age factory, heralds a substantial expansion of a worldwide computing network handling billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services. (...) But Google Earth, the satellite mapping service, like its rivals, so far shows the 30-acre parcel here quite undeveloped.

(Picture by Melanie Conner for The New York Time)

Look at the characteristics of such a place:

Behind the curtain of secrecy, the two buildings here — and a third that Google has a permit to build — will probably house tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks, held together with Velcro tape in a Google practice that makes for easy swapping of components. The cooling plants are essential because of the searing heat produced by so much computing power.

The complex will tap into the region's large surplus of fiber optic networking, a legacy of the dot-com boom.

Why do I blog this? from my standpoint, it's interesting to see that such a landmark IS actually one the node that AFFORDS our practices (searching, navigating in data/information).

Gestural behavior in virtual reality and physical space

With the now overlapping on-line persona and our presence in the physical world, lots of questions concerning the connections between both worlds remains unanswered. This is the research issue addressed by the Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory at Stanford University. Devsource has a good overview about it (via the Presence mailing list), starting with the questionable motto: "How does the world change when you have five arms?".

that researchers have learned that, when we build digital versions of one another, people tend to behave the same in virtual reality (VR) as they do in physical space, at least on a gestural level. His team has studied online communities and avatar-based games, analyzing patterns of interaction and comparing how they relate to the social world. With avatars, he says, the norms of conversation and nonverbal behavior are modeled on how people behave in physical space. But there's one interesting exception: "In games, taller and more beautiful avatars actually perform better."

Why do I blog this? Since I am interested in the relationships between spatial features and behavior, this is relevant; see for instance what Philip wrote about how proxemics is still pertinent in virtual space: Jeffrey, P.and Mark, G. (1998). Constructing Social Spaces in Virtual Environments: A Study of Navigation and Interaction. In: Höök, K.; Munro, A.; Benyon, D. (ed.): Workshop on Personalised and Social Navigation in Information Space, March 16-17, 1998, Stockholm (SICS Technical Report T98:02) 1998) , Stockholm: Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), S. 24-38.

But there is more:

Bailenson [the lab director] offers one bit of practical advice for software developers who build "social" user interfaces. Anytime you have a UI that guides a person, especially with a human face, people tend to make the agent look more realistic than it behaves. And that, he says, causes problems in user expectations.

Innovation and R&D practices

Hamilton and INSEAD recently released a report of their study about innovation and R&D practices. They surveyed R&D leaders in 186 companies in 19 nations in 2005. According to Strategy Business:

The survey results, and our own experience, suggest one central truth: Organizations benefit when they configure their innovation networks for cost and manage them for value. (...) the primary R&D challenges: assessing the value of new knowledge, encouraging cross-site and cross-functional collaboration, managing the complexity of global projects, and optimizing innovation footprints. They also emphasized that having a well-managed R&D network is becoming particularly advantageous as companies expand R&D beyond their home turf. Between 1975 and 2005, the survey found, the share of R&D sites located outside the markets of their corporate headquarters has risen from 45 percent to 66 percent. That share is likely to increase, with 77 percent of the R&D sites planned over the next three years slated for China or India.

Why do I blog this? since research and R&D more and more rely on networks, I find valuable to know more about how those networks are managed (internally in companies but also with external actors in other copmanies, public institutions or NGOs)

IBM to become a R&D consultancy

According to this article, it seems that IBM is changing its business model from being world's biggest computer services provider to selling its experience running research programs to other companies.

The business will help companies run their research units but won't provide the research itself, IBM said. (...) "This is the trend you are going to see from IBM," said Navi Radjou, a vice president at Forrester Research who studies research and development management. "They are going beyond areas that have to do with information technology. They're looking for areas where they can take internal learnings and then recast them as external knowledge."

Why do I blog this? from the foresight point of view, it's interesting to see how a company called "International Business Machines" is reshaping its core business.

Berlusconi and neuropsychology

How Berlusconi keeps his face: a neuropsychological study in a case of a semantic dementia by Sara Mondini and Carlo Semenza, Cortex, 3, pp. 332-335, 2006.

Abstract: A patient (V.Z.) is described as being affected by progressive bilateral atrophy of the mesial temporal lobes resulting in semantic dementia. Vis-à -vis virtually nil recognition of even the most familiar faces (including those of her closest relatives) as well as of objects and animals, V.Z. could nevertheless consistently recognize and name the face of Silvio Berlusconi, the mass media tycoon and current Italian Prime Minister. The experimental investigation led to the conclusion that Mr Berlusconi’s face was seen as an icon rather than as a face. This telling effect of Mr Berlusconi’s pervasive propaganda constitutes an unprecedented case in the neuropsychological literature.

(thanks gaelle!)

Spectators for video games?

NS about the notion of spectator in gaming:

he US professional computer gaming league has just signed a TV rights deal with cable company USA Network. Maybe it could be on the way to becoming as popular a specator sport as football and basketball in the US.

Why do I blog this? this is connected to my interest towards user experience of video games: there is really a trend that gaming is more than just interacting with a box: now with replay (in sport games for instance: you can replay your own game) and here with this trend it's more than that: showing to others people's game. I'd be interested to know more about who watch this, what they do out of it... and the practices related to that.

RFID TAG reader

Seen at the EPFL today, this RFID tag reader which has been recently installed (maybe to recently):

Why do I blog this? this is a nice example of a transition from the previous "ubiquitous" platform: from a barcode reader to a RFID tag reader. The tangibility of the reader makes the architecture more difficult to be changed.

Awareness and Accountability in MMORPG

A very good read yesterday in the train: Moore, Robert J., Nicolas Ducheneaut, and Eric Nickell. (2006): "Doing Virtually Nothing: Awareness and Accountability in Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds." Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 1573-7551

The paper acknowledge the fact that "despite their ever-increasing visual realism, today’s virtual game worlds are much less advanced in terms of their interactional sophistication". Through diverse investigations of MMORPG using video-based conversation analysis (grounded in virtual ethnography), they look at the social interaction systems in massively multiplayer virtual worlds and then propose guidelines for increasing their effectiveness.

Starting from the face-2-face metaphor (the richest situation in terms of social interaction, as opposed to geographically dispersed settings), they state that participants are able to access to certain observational information about what others are doing in order to interpret others’ actions and design appropriate responses. This lead to coordination (I personally used different framework to talk about that, for instance Herbert Clark's theory of coordination). In a face to face context, three important types of cues are available: "(1) the real-time unfolding of turns-at-talk; (2) the observability of embodied activities; and (3) the direction of eye gaze for the purpose of gesturing".

They then build their investigations around those three kind of cues that are less available in virtual worlds. This can be connected to the work of Toni Manninen like The Hunt for Collaborative War Gaming - CASE: Battlefield 1942). It also makes me thing about one of the seminal paper by Clark and Brennan about how different media modifies the grounding process (the establishment of a share understanding of the situation).

Clark, H. H., and Brennan, S. A. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L.B. Resnick, J.M. Levine, & S.D. Teasley (Eds.). Perspectives on socially shared cognition . Washington: APA Books.

Why do I blog this? I still have to go further in the details of each of these investigations but I was very interested in their work because: - the methodology is complementary with what I am doing in CatchBob to investigate mutual awareness and players' anticipation of their partners' actions. The interactionist approach here could be very valuable to apply in my context. I am thinking about deepening the analysis of the messages exchanged by players (the map annotations) to see how accountability is conveyed through the players drawings. - they do translate results from empirical studies intro concrete and relevant design recommendations (for instance: other game companies should probably follow There’s lead and implement word-by-word (or even character-by-character) posting of chat messages. Such systems produce a turn-taking system that is more like that in face-to-face, and they better facilitate the coordination of turns-at-chat with each other and with other joint game activities.)

Video game controller reconfigurability

In The VoodooIO Gaming Kit: A real-time adaptable gaming controller by Nicolas Villar, Kiel Mark Gilleade, Devina Ramduny-Ellis, Hans Gellersen (Proceedings of ACE 2006), the authors propose an interesting idea for innovating about game controllers:

Existing gaming controllers are limited in their end-user configurability. As a complement to current game control technology, we present the VoodooIO Gaming Kit, a real-time adaptable gaming controller. We introduce the concept of appropriable gaming devices, which allow players to define and actively reconfigure their gaming space, making it appropriate to their personal preference and gaming needs. (...) Ad hoc controller adaptation during game-play is the pinnacle of physical configuration in game controllers. Not only can the game controller be configured to suit a particular task for a given user but it can also be reconfigured while the user is still playing to meet any changes in task demand. (...) VooodooIO is a malleable platform for physical interaction, which allows users to construct and actively adapt the composition of their physical interface. Rather than being an interface construction kit for users, the platform is concerned with enabling and exploring the ability of the physical interface to be customized and reconfigured after its deployment into use.

A pertinent affordance for real-time modification of the game controller is that controls can be arranged to depict the intended use-sequence:

Why do I blog this? this is a very innovative idea for expanding on the idea of game controllers that would be more user-centered. Besides, the paper is very complete and shows a proof of concept using World of Warcraft; the usage study is also welcome! I like this idea of DIY gamepad, it's really part of the trend (DIY games, players' participation in the design process...)

Technosocial Revolution?

Re-reading Is it OK to be a luddite by Thomas Pynchon (The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41) made me wonder about technosocial revolution:

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage in a long evolution. The phrase was first popularized a hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and has had its share of revisionist attention, lately in the July 1984 Scientific American. Here, in "Medieval Roots of the Industrial Revolution," Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the steam engine (1765) may have been overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages. (...) In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and "in a fit of insane rage" destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. (...) it's important to remember that the target even of the original assault of l779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589

Why do I blog this? when it comes to observing the influence of technologies, I am not a great believer in technosocial revolution, that's why I find this facts interesting.

HCI research about awareness of others in nightclubs

"DJs' Perspectives on Interaction and Awareness in Nightclubs" is a paper by Carrie Gates (University of Saskatchewan), Sriram Subramanian (University of Saskatchewan), Carl Gutwin (University of Saskatchewan) at DIS2006. This is the account of their project which aims at investigating DJ-Audience Interaction in Nightclubs.

We are examining the ways in which DJs and audiences gain awareness of each other in nightclub environments in order to make a set of design principles for developing new technologies for nightclubs. We expect to discover opportunites to enhance communication and feedback mechanisms between DJs and audiences, and to discover opportunities for developing novel audience-audience communications in order to create more meaningful interactions between crowd members, more playful environments, and a new dimension of awareness in nightclubs. We also expect that these design principles could be explored later within other audience-presenter situations, such as in classrooms or theatres.

Why do I blog this? though a bit curious, this is very relevant from the HCI point of view: the question related to awareness of others are important in that context.

It reminds me of an article by Beatrice Cahour and Barbara Pentimalli about the awareness of waiter in café (in french: Awareness and cooperative work in a café-restaurant). They show how awareness is linked to the attention mechanisms of the participants and how their level of awareness is constantly varying.

Urban post-it in Geneva

I saw this in Geneva today, a sticker on a wall that invite people to "Drop a note: tick here":

Why do I blog this? a curious action in the urban practice. What happened here? I am looking forward to get back their and see if someone ticked and put more annotations. This sort of message is more than just a sticker or a graph, I like this invitation to participate.

Ethnographic studies of ubiquitous computing

Supporting Ethnographic Studies of Ubiquitous Computing in the Wild by Crabtree,M. Benford,S. Greenhalgh,C. Tennent,P. Chalmers,M., in Proc. ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2006). In this paper, the authors draw upon four recent studies to show how ethnographers are replaying system recordings of interaction alongside existing resources such as video recordings to understand interactions and eventually assemble coherent understandings of the social character and purchase of ubiquitous computing systems. Doing this, they aim at identifying key challenges that need to be met to support ethnographic study of ubiquitous computing in the wild.

One of the issue there is the fact that ubicomp leads to distribute interactions in a wide range of applications, devices and artifacts. This foster the need for ethnographers to develop a coherent understanding of the traces of the activity: both external (audio and video recordings of action and talk) and internal (logfiles, digital messages...). Additional problems for ethnographers are: the fact that users of ubiquitous systems are often mobile, often interact with small displays, and with invisible sensing systems (e.g. GPS) and the interaction is often distributed across different applications and devices. The difficulty then lays in the reconciliation of fragments to describe the accountable interactional character of ubiquitous applications

I like that quote because it expresses the innovation here: the articulation between known methods and what they propose:

"Ubiquitous computing goes beyond logging machine states and events however, to record elements of social interaction and collaboration conducted and achieved through the use of ubiquitous applications as well. (...) System recordings make a range of digital media used in and effecting interaction available as resources for the ethnographer to exploit and understand the distinctive elements of ubiquitous computing and their impact on interaction. The challenge, then, is one of combining external resources gathered by the ethnographer with a burgeoning array of internal resources to support thick description of the accountable character of interaction in complex digital environments. "

The article also describes requirements for future tools but I won't discuss that here, maybe in another post, reflecting our own experience drawn from Catchbob. Anyway, I share one of the most important concern they have:

The ‘usability’ of the matter recognizes that ethnographic data, like all social science data, is an active construct. Data is not simply contained in system recordings but produced through their manipulation: through the identification of salient conversational threads in texts logs, for example, through the extraction of those threads, through the thickening up of those threads by synchronizing and integrating them with the contents of audio logs and video recordings, and through the act of thickening creating a description that represents interaction in coherent detail and makes it available to analysis

Why do I blog this? This paper describes a relevant framework of methods that I use even though I would argue that my work is a bit more quantitative, using mixed methods (ethnographical and quantitative) with the same array of data (internal and external). It's full of relevant ideas and insights about that and how effective tools could be designed to achieve this goal.

What is weird is that they do not spend too much time on one of the most powerful usage of the replay tool: using it as a source for post-activity interview with participants. This is a good way to have external traces to foster richer discussion. In CatchBob! this proved to be very efficient to gather information from the users' perspective (even though it's clearly a re-construction a posteriori). This method is called "self-confrontation" and is very common in the french tradition of ergonomics (the work of Yves Clot or Jacques Theureau, mostly in french).

Besides, there are some good connection with what we did and the problems we had ("the positions recorded on the server for a player are often dramatically different from the position recorded by the GPS on the handled computer.") or:

the use of Replayer also relies on technical knowledge of, e.g., the formats of system events and their internal names, and typically requires one of the system developers to be present during replay and analysis. This raises issues of how we might develop tools to more directly enable social science researchers to use record and replay tools themselves and it is towards addressing these and related issues that we now turn.

Geotagthings

Julian Bleecker and Will Carter recently released geotagthings, a simple piece of software that allows to assign geographic meta data to arbitrary web resources.

otagthings, a new web service designed to quickly and easily assign any web resource — anything with a URL — a location in the normal, human physical world. Using Yahoo! Maps' interface and API, Geotagthings makes short work out of a previously complicated process, while providing an open feed-based mechanic for retrieving geotagged resources and displaying them in your favorite news aggregator. (description taken from their Where2.0 presentation

How it works?

Anything with a URL can be given a latitude/longitude by simply clicking a bookmarklet, picking the spot it should be assigned using a map interface, adding a little note and that's that. The URL and note get shoved into a data store where it can be accessed through an RSS feed. Anyone can get a feed for a locale simply by going to the feed generator, picking where you'd like to get a feed from, determining a range around that spot and grabbing the URL from one of the feed badges, and dropping it into your favorite news aggregator, like NetNewsWire.

Registration can be done here

Why do I blog this? because I think it's an interesting service; the why question behind that is pertinent: they ask "why" in their description and answerrfs "the network needs geographic semantics to make data resources relevant to meaningful, useful location-nased services".

Katamari Damacy affordances

Angel Inokon has a good blogpost about the affordances of Katamary Damacy (the PS2 game in which you have to roll a ball to collect items located everywhere):

Three Design Principles Katamari Damacy gets right: - Affordances – affordances enable designers to create gameplay that leverages the natural limitations and features of an object. One of the clear affordances of a ball is that it rolls. Everyone, regardless of age, recognizes a ball and can easily conceive it’s primary function. (...) Users can quickly get immersed because the rolling action is consistent with the simple affordances of a ball. - Visibility – gamers need awareness of the mechanics of gameplay through visuals and audio feedback. Two feedback mechanisms built in the game include a progress icon and sounds. The player is given a simple icon on the corner of her screen that shows the size of the katamari. (...) Gamers need lots of information. Integrating visibility principles allows designers to keep pumping the right information when they need it. - Constraints – constraints prevent gamers from making errors that could decrease enjoyment of the game. Katamari Damacy centers around a single rule – players can’t roll up something that is bigger than their ball. If the player got lost in an area with many big objects, she could get frustrated. So the game blocks the paths to larger objects until her Katamari is large enough to roll over the barrier. It makes the game easier to explore and less overwhelming by essentially modularizing the levels (174). Failure is a critical aspect of gameplay, however good designers know how to constrain the environment so players stay immersed in the game.

Why do I blog this? because I like Katamari and agree with that principles which connects human-computer interaction a la Don Norman to an efficient video game design.

Pick up color readings and transmits them into the viewer's eyes

Monochromeye is a project carried out at the Smart Studio. Part of a more general project, it's actually a portable device with a fingerholder that picks up color readings and transmits them into the viewer's eyes:

Monochomeye is one of several optical machines that were built in an art driven research project about light and perception called Occular Witness. The project attempts to stake out the limits of human vision and it examines how information is malleable and how meaning is formed through image in a time when information is abundant and our culture is saturated with layers of processed imagery. (...) Monochromeye is a portable device that enhances low resolution vision. A fingerholder contains one red, one green and one blue lightsensor that read the environment as you point at it. It feeds back the color information to two tricolored (RGB) light diodes that emit two beams of light straight into the viewers eyes. At such a low resolution, the viewer can only get color readings. They do not contain any information beyond the color that is registered at the point in space where the viewer points his finger.

Why do I blog this? because this project is appealing to me; from the user experience point of view, I like this idea of enhancing resolution vision. Besides the design is nice.

Locative technologies, Where2.0

There is very soon the Where2.0 conference in San José, CA. Lots of promising stuff are going there. Judging from the description, Mike Liebhold's presentation seems to nicely wrap-up what going on so far in the field of "locative technologies/services":

Beyond a growing commercial interest in mobile GIS and location services, there's deep geek fascination with web mapping and location hacking. After several years of early experiments by a first generation of geohackers, locative media artists, and psychogeographers, a second, larger wave of hackers are demonstrating some amazing tricks with Google Maps, Flickr, and del.icio.us. Meanwhile, a growing international cadre of open source digital geographers and frontier semantic hackers have been building first-generation working versions of powerful new open source web mapping service tools. (...) Out of this teeming ecosystem we can see the beginning shapes of a true geospatial web, inhabited by spatially tagged hypermedia as well as digital map geodata. Invisible cartographic attributes and user annotations will eventually be layered on every centimeter of a place and attached to every physical thing, visible and useful, in context, on low-cost, easy-to-use mobile devices.

Lots of pertinent applications will be presented.

Also, some talks seems to discuss relevant issues that has already been brought up by some academics; such as It's Place, Not Space (by Nikolaj Nyholm, Imity, Claus Dahl, Imity):

Location is not about geography. The most important thing isn't the space you're in -- the coordinates -- but the place you're in -- the people, ideas, and interactions between them. Indeed, space is just a gateway to place: we need the coordinates to compare to other coordinates, but what we care about is proximity. The good news is that while for now the coordinate technologies like GPS are mainly available in mapping devices, there's already a great proximity technology out there, deployed in literally hundreds of millions of cell phones: Bluetooth.

And of course, some of the challenge will be described, for instance in Map Spam 2008: A Sanity Check by Michael Bauer:

The Utopian view of a world where social networking, geo-location, and mobility converge to deliver a rich, multimedia database of micro-local content is debunked. All in the spirit of fun, this presentation will apply a dose of reality to a ubiquitous mobile world. The realities of spam, tag abuse, and predictive following apps are profiled, to highlight the issues we ignore at our peril.

Why do I blog this? because my research is directed toward the understanding of such technology usage (from the socio-cognitive point of view). I think these talks efficiently describes the characteristics of the locative technology scene in 2006. What is interesting is that it addresses not only location issues but also its context: software that should support social practices (social software :( ), a real world in which things can fail and where spam exist...

There seems to be still lots of project about location-based annotations and friend-finder. I am wondering about 1) whether they are effectively used 2) how they are used 3) whether there could be innovative scenarios and usage. It seems that both are now the most commons examples, the "intelligent fridge" of the locative community.

The context of a display ecology

In Displays in the Wild: Understanding the Dynamics andEvolution of a Display Ecology, Elaine M. Huang, Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Jay P. Trimble is an in-depth field evaluation of large interactive displays; it exemplifies the "context of a display ecology".

It's a study about large interactive displays within a multi-display work environment used in the NASA Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions, used in a complex and ecologically valid setting. What is interesting, is the lessons learned from this experiment:

the “success” of a large interactive display within a display ecology cannot be measured by whether a steady state of use is reached. Because people appropriate these tools as necessary when tasks and collaborations require them, there may be a natural ebb and flow of use that does not correspond to success or failure, but rather to the dynamic nature of collaborative work processes. Success is therefore better evaluated by examining the ease and extent of support that such displays provide when tasks call for a shared visual display or interactive work surface. (...) Another important lesson regarding the value of large displays in work environments came from our observation of the interplay between interactive use and ambient information display. In the realm of large interactive display research, a decrease in interactivity is often viewed as a failure of the system to support workgroup practices. We observed a migration from interactive use to ambient information display, and through our interviews discovered how valuable this ambient information was. (...) in the greater context of a display ecology, it is misleading to evaluate the isolated use of a single system; the existence of other displays in the environment means that it is important to understand how the ecology functions as a whole, not just how individual displays are used.

Why do I blog this? I found this paper interesting because it describes how people made use of such a display; the highlights researchers brought forward also show pertinent issues in the domain of ambient/interactive furnitures, which could be helpful for some of our projects at the lab.

Navigating numerically in London

(Via Le Courrier International) In this New Statesman article, journalist Dollan Cannell explains how chinese immigrants manage to navigate through london without knowing how to speak english (and hence being unable to memorize english street/landmark names):

here is a new class of Londoners, however, who navigate numerically. They live at 419 and work at 36. They meet friends at the end of 2, or lovers by 77. London's unofficial new geography derives from its buses. (...) Chinese immigrants brought to London by people smugglers, and they all use this method to find their way around. (...) Buses are their northern star: they need only identify which Mandarin characters correspond to 0 to 9 and the message displayed above the bus driver begins to make sense. When a new arrival is first taken by a contact to the flat he will share with a dozen others he is told the number of the nearest bus route. One thing he must be careful about is the direction a bus is travelling in, and for this his best guide can be trial and error. If he travels for a long time without seeing things he knows, he must alight and try the other direction. In this way most new immigrants build up a repertoire of routes.

When they talked to us, many identified locations that could easily be given names using a bus map and an A-Z.

Why do I blog this? because of my interest towards spatiality and cognition (my research), this story is a relevant anecdote about how human beings use tricks to navigate in space.

Quote from JPod

"So you're like the Internet then - except you're a real person"Douglas Coupland (inJPod).