Playdocam: games with your webcam

Via internet actu, the Playdocam seems to be an interesting device:

PlaydoCAM™ transforms your ordinary web camera into a motion-tracking gaming device and places you at the centre of a unique online gaming experience. Many PlaydoCAM™ games are under development for both single and multiplayer action.

For the widest audience possible PlaydoCAM™ is based on standard Flash and Shockwave technology and can be played directly in your web browser without the need of extra plug-ins or installations. playdoCAM™ is available for custom made entertainment and can also be used offline for a high quality fullscreen experience suitable for exhibitions, display window advertising and more.

Eyekanoid and Playdojam are pertinent examples of new game interactions (a la eye-toy).

Why do I blog this? I find interesting that the innovation in the video game industry is now more and more than just games. Using web-based/like applications (shockwave/flash, it's easier and cheaper than buying a development kit; distributing on the web is way cheaper than having an editor...). And the focus on tangible interaction is more and more present.

Social communication "eyeball" robot

Via News.3yen, this incredible Muusocia developed by ATR and Systec Akazawa. Described by news.3yen as a "social communication robot":

The website claims that its “purpose is to make the existence consciousness of the person reconfirm who touches the Muu” …whatever the hell that means. The eyeball robot is aimed for RESIDENTS in nursing facilities and the like. The Muu has a general-purpose design which can be used as a receptionist or companion to the autistic using its ability to recognize person’s faces and voices and answer questions. (...) “Muu Socia has voice recognition, voice synthesis, speech processing and face recognition capabilities. And it starts bouncing around when something obstructs its view

A video about it here (.WMV, 5Mb).

Why do I blog this? yet another curious non-anthromorphic robot-like device a la nabaztag. Occurences of such artifacts are interesting to me because it shows the convergence between pervasive computing and robots. What about the user experience of such devices?

Content-less places in virtual and physical realms

Via aeiou, Internet Soul Portraits is a project by Mark Callahan:

Internet Soul Portraits (I.S.P.), net art project

I.S.P. is a tongue-in-cheek treatment of web design as pure representation. In this project, familiar images are altered by the application of essentialist, reductive approaches from a painterly tradition. The images are derived from the home pages of some of the most popular sites on the Web: Yahoo, Google, MSN, Amazon, CNN, eBay, The Weather Channel, MapQuest, Best Buy, and MySpace.

Removing the content of this virtual place, it reminds me some art projects such as "Floating Logos" by Matt Siber (on the left) or Christoph Steinbrener et Rainer Dempf's "Delete!" project or Cedric Bernadotte's "A town without writings" (below):

Why do I blog this? I like the parallel between virtual and real place.

FT on wearable computing

The FT has a piece about wearable computing: The shirt that checks your heart, the hat that checks your brain (By Alan Cane). Even though it's very geeky, there is an interesting metaphor:

Professor Sandy Pentland of MIT’s prestigious Media Lab, one of the world’s leading experts on the topic, says that for “wearable computer” read “mobile phone”.

He argues: “The mobile phone is the first truly pervasive computing platform. The question is not: ‘is the wearable computer a gimmick?’ but whether it will be people’s primary computing platform and push all others decisively aside.”

He backs this view with a commercial rather than social argument: “With telecoms operators’ revenues from voice services dropping quickly, everyone is looking for digital data services to stoke growth. The model of a wearable computer is exactly that... and it is working. “Google maps for handhelds, push e-mail and digital cameras are all computer applications migrating to the mobile. Even the physical aspect of the mobile is being designed around wearability. Look at the Moto line, the Oakley Bluetooth glasses and Bluetooth headsets.”

Then they discuss the use of various technologies in medicine/health (using body sensors and "intelligent clothing conversing with chips inside the body to monitor well-being").

Why do I blog this? this also connects to the workshop at Nordichi about the "near-field interactions". However, I am quite dubious about direct transfer of desktop applications to cell phone. Using google maps on my cell phone is not always easy and pertinent for example.

A locomotion interface using a group of movable tiles

CirculaFloor, a project led by Prof. Iwata (presented at SIGGRAPH 2004):

CirculaFloor is a locomotion interface using a group of movable tiles. The movable tiles employ holonomic mechanism that achieves omni-directional motion. Circulation of the tiles enables the user to walk in virtual environment while his/her position is maintained. The user can walk in arbitrary direction in virtual environment. This project is a joint research with ATR Media Information Science Labs.

A video here (22Mb).

Why do I blog this? because I am curious of various tangible interfaces (+ gaming potential).

Some references for the PhD dissertation

Some resources I used:

I organized the resources I want to use to build my theoretical framework, which would be mostly about coordination in joint activities:

- Big picture = "socially distributed cognitive system": Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

- Big picture = importance of context in cognition. Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge University Press

- of course there are some other references about framework like Activity Theory, Situated Cognition but I mainly focus on the one quoted above

- Big picture = computing trends + awareness: Dourish, P. (2005). Where The Action Is? The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press: Cambridge.

- More specific references about mutual intelligibility/mutual awareness/common ground/coordination

Clark, H. (1996) Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Clark, H. H., & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, R. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.). Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 127-149). Washington, DC: APA.

Grice, H. P. 1975. "Logic and conversation." In Cole, P. and Morgan 1975 41–58.

Malone, T.W. / Crowston, K. (1994). The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 26 (1), pp. 87-119.

Smith, N. (1982) Mutual Knowledge, Academic Press.

Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. 1986/95: Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Salembier, P. & Zouinar, M. (2004) Intelligibilité mutuelle et contexte partagé. Inspirations conceptuelles et réductions technologiques, @CTIVITES, n°2, Vol. 1

(among others) (more later about awareness)

Weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used

In "Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology" by Du, H.S, Wagner C., explore weblog success from a technology perspective (weblog-building technology or blogging tool).

Based on an examination of 126 highly successful weblogs tracked over a period of 3 months, we categorized weblogs in terms of popularity rank and growth, and evaluated the relationship between weblog success (in terms of popularity) and technology use. Our analysis indicates that weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used. We argue that technology characteristics affect the presentation and organization of weblog content, as well as the social interaction between bloggers, and in turn, affect weblog success or popularity improvement. (...) weblog-building technology has a direct impact on blog content. Since blogging technology is designed for authors to reduce web publication and communication effort (Du and Wagner, 2005), authors can focus on writing while the technology takes care of publishing, storage, link creation, and so forth. The less time and effort authors have to spend on these ancillary tasks, the more time they should be able to devote to content, thus resulting eventually in better content. A similar argument can be made for social value. Blogging technology that automates link creation, that identifies recent visitors (possibly with clickable back links, such as in ModBlog), or maintains subscriber lists and syndicates their content, will help create and maintain the social circle of bloggers, by significantly lowering the effort to link to and visit other sites. Here, technology’s enabling character is reflected through its usability and sociability of supporting weblog success at both content and social levels.

Du, HS, Wagner C. (2006) Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 64, No. 9. (September 2006), pp. 789-798.

How architects imagine the way people move in buildings that do not yet exist

In his paper "Imagination as Joint Activity: The Case of Architectural Interaction", Keith M. Murphy examines how "imagining can emerge from a group ofinteractants who use many semiotic media,including talk, gestures, and drawings, to imagine something together". He actually shows how architects imagine the way people move in buildings that do not yet exist. He explains, for that matter, the role of imagination is constituted as a social and face-to-face interaction. An excerpt that I found interesting:

What we have then is all three architects visualizing and enacting the space as if it were a“ real” loading dock to clarify its use and orient the other architects to their understanding of the design.

This has a utilitarian purpose in that when designing large buildings it is extremely important that everyone on the team is on the same page interms of where the design is at any given moment and where it is heading. But it also has more cognitive implications. For the architects, designing a building often requires taking on the perspective of a future user experiencing the building to work out potential design kinks. By talking about a design in groups, an empathetic viewpoint is constructed through the interactive give-and-take flow of the conversation. Talk, gestures, and the drawing under discussion all in combination serve to structure the kinds of things the group can imagine as if they were the users, and this group imagining facilitates getting the job of being an architect done.

Why do I blog this? because it's another pertinent example of the socio-cognitive processes at stake during a group activity showing that imagination can be more than a solely individualistic cognitive activity.

Murphy, K.M. (2004). Imagination as Joint Activity: The Case of Architectural Interaction, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 11 (4), 267-278.

Ink printings SL

Recursive Instruments has superb pictures of what they call "Ink printing the primitive Metaverse" (prints from their current show at the Aho Museum in Second Life):

Entitled Recusions, the works depict situations you will find every day in Second Life, from play to punishment. The trappings of technology are both removed and exploited to examine the evolution of media’s effect on the evolution of self. Snapshots from Second Life are digitally altered to allow a Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) mill to sculpt their contours. The result is a woodblock used for traditional ink printing

Management of innovation, internet and deviance

Just received this abstract: "Hacking Business Model, Hackers impact on innovation, how to deal with them", a thesis July 2006 Doctorate Business Of Administration (Newcastle Upon Tyne) by yannick chatelain which seems to be quite intriguing.

Hacking Business model MANAGEMENT OF INNOVATION, INTERNET AND DEVIANCE A typology for the integration of hacker logic by companies

This thesis thus offers an empirical analysis of the impact and the management of deviance in the so-called “new economy”. It analyzes the hand of game-players when faced with a certain type of deviance that occurs beyond corporate limits: “hacking” or “hackerdom” : a practice which has a deep impact on the entire economy in general, but to which certain sectors are more exposed than others. This thesis therefore pursues current research in innovation theory by further investigating methods for managing “externalized” deviance in a framework that has undergone considerable change owing to the evolution of its status during the 1990s. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the affirmation of a theoretical trend that opted for a more direct approach to understanding and modeling collective creation processes. A vocabulary shift earmarked this evolution - “innovation management” became “project management” and “design”: terms that no longer qualified the result – innovation – but the collective activity that produces it – the project and the design process. This evolution was marked by a shift in vocabulary, switching from “innovation management” to “project management” and “design”: thus no longer qualifying the result – innovation – but the collective activity that produces it – the project and the design process. Moreover, deviance played a significant role within the collective innovation activity. Indeed, a number of authors highlighted deviance as an intrinsic component of the corporate innovation process in traditional, pre-internet organizations (Alter, 1990).

Why do I blog this? I'd be happy to read the thesis! I am interested in the relationship between hacking/modding and innovation (for some foresight purposes).

Collectic: collect access points and combine them in a puzzle

Thanks Cyril for pointing me on Collectic: developed by Jonas Hielscher as a part of a graduation project for the Masters program Media Technology at Leiden University in 2006. I met Jonas in Utrecht few months ago (are you in Basel now? stil in game stuff as I see) and I am always intrigued by what this guy is doing.

he game is developed for the Sony PSP and uses the standard features of the console, especially scanning for wireless access points to the Internet.

CollecTic can be played anywhere, where WLAN access points can be found by a PSP. The objective of the game is to search for different access points, to collect them and to combine them in a puzzle in order to get points. In the game, the player has to move around in her/his local surrounding, using her/his PSP as a sensor device in order to find access points. By doing this, the player is able to discover the hidden infrastructure of wireless network coverage through auditive and visual feedback.The game is designed as a single player game, but it can be easily played competitive after each other or at the same time with two PSPs.

A video here.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of a game played with regular console features enhanced by some software components. Besides, the game concept is quite simple and funny and discovering network infrastructure that way seems to be a cool experience. I am looking forward to test this!

tabulaTouch

tabulaTouch, an interactive table project by Stefano Baraldi carried out at Natural Interaction. Slightly similar to Jeff Han's work, it's mostly because this kind of interface is trendy lately; so it's another occurence of such concept.

tabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape and size, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.The first case of study has beel tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach; we are planning to integrate it with GIS products.

We are also researching interesting media-handling templates that will bring the platform in public spaces, as well as ad-hoc environments, while iO Agency is engineering the hardware.

There is also a video on YouTube

Japanese hand calendar

Taken from MAKING MEANING FROM A CLOCK: MATERIAL ARTIFACTS AND CONCEPTUAL BLENDING IN TIME-TELLING INSTRUCTION, a thesis by Robert Frederick Williams. Japanese hand calendar, which uses the structure of the hand to support naming the day of the week that corresponds to a given date;

This is an example of how things are cognitive artifacts:

Cognitive artifacts as material anchors for conceptual blends In recent work (Hutchins in press), Hutchins uses conceptual integration theory to analyze cognitive artifacts whose spatial configurations support reasoning about temporal relations. (...) Hutchins argues that the material structure, here the configuration of bodies in space, anchors the conceptual blend, stabilizing and maintaining the set of conceptual relations during subsequent reasoning or computation

Why do I blog this because it's a nice and visual example of cognitive properties of artifacts and embodiment.

The cognitive life of things

In the following paper, Edwin Hutchins (proponent of the Distributed Cognition approach/framework) discuss what he calls "the cognitive life of things", attempting to place this in the context of rich multimodal interactions. Hutchins, E. (2006) Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things, presented at the symposium:"The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the boundaries of Mind" organized by Colin Renfrew and Lambros Malafouris at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, UK 7-9 April, 2006.

Hutchins's claim (which he developed in his book Cognition in the Wild) is that cognitive science was fundamentally flawed since its focus was to put cognitive properties inside the person and not in the social and material world. His book had been criticized about the very fact that he almost said nothing about the embodied practice of human in his examples (navigation). This paper tries to make distributed cognition less disembodied by showing how interaction are richly multimodal creating emergent cognitive effects. In this paper, the author also describes ths "cognitive ecology" concept:

By cognitive ecology I mean that all of the elements and relations potentially interact with one another and that each is part of the environment for all of the others (...) This rich cognitive ecology gives rise to some powerful cognitive processes. The embodied interaction with things creates mechanisms for reasoning, imagination, “Aha!” insight, and abstraction. Cultural things provide the mediational means to domesticate the embodied imagination.

Why do I blog this? this kind of argument is interesting to me especially when I think back about what I learn from my early cognitive psychology courses which were definitely disembodied (un-embodied at all I would say). I also like the development around the idea "Using the body to imagine the dynamics of things", this connects to the things I've read about the affordance of space in socio-sognition.

Jesus2.0

Via Ektopia, this art project Jesus2.0

Email and blood pressure

For those who're wondering about email and potential physiological consequences... TAYLOR Howard, FIELDMAN George et LAHLOU Saadi, "The impact of a threatening e-mail reprimand on the recipient's blood pressure", Journal of Managerial Psychology, January 2005, vol. 20, n°. 1, p. 43-50.

Purpose - This article aims to describe the effects of the communication style of the message sender (threatening or neutral), status of the sender (equal to or higher than the recipient) and the power relationship between sender and recipient (from the same department or not) on the blood pressure of the recipient of an e-mail message

Design/methodology/approach - The study was conducted under controlled laboratory conditions. The experiment was a mixed design, using both within and between subjects variables. The independent variable for the within subjects factor was the task that participants performed. There were three tasks: answering a questionnaire, reading a non-threateningly worded e-mail reprimand, and reading a threateningly worded e-mail reprimand. Although the study used students as participants, the messages they received were from real people in a University College. Discusses the implications in the area of occupational health.

Findings - Diastolic blood pressure was significantly higher when recipients were reading the threateningly worded reprimand compared to reading a non-threateningly worded reprimand. The effect of status on blood pressure was significant but only for recipients in the same department as the message sender. Originality/value

The results add to the evidence that communication style and status can have a direct impact on the recipient's physiological response.

Google Space in Metropolis

In the july issue of Metropolis, Clive Wilkinson Architects diagrammed 13 work settings for the Googleplex. These can be considered as pattern meant to afford specific behavior (nomadic work, chance encounters, focused concentration...) mixed with a certain flexibility.

Tech for kids tracking/surveillance

(Via Dr.Fish), SF gate has an article about tech toys/gadgets for kids tracking/surveillance; there's a good list of artifacts that can send information about kids' behavior (it's very often LBS):

CarChip, made by Davis Instruments: About the size of a 9-volt battery, the device plugs in beneath a car's dashboard and records driving behavior. The data it collects can be downloaded to a computer, and the device can sound an alarm when the car speeds or accelerates too fast. (...) Teen Arrive Alive, a Florida company, offers Global Positioning System-enabled cell phones that allow parents to go online to check the location and speed of a car their child is driving or riding in. (...) Alltrack USA, offers a service that e-mails or calls parents if the car they're monitoring exceeds a certain speed or leaves a defined geographic area. DriveCam, which now installs cameras in fleet vehicles, plans to offer a monthly service to parents and teens next year that will let them watch video clips of their driving and receive coaching from driving experts. (...) Another way parents are doing that is with GPS-enabled cell phones. Sprint's Family Locator service allows parents to map the location of their children's cell phones online. Verizon's similar Chaperone service, introduced last month, can send parents text messages if their child leaves a predetermined zone. (...) SmartWear Technologies in San Diego plans to take GPS monitoring to another level in the fall, offering radio-frequency tags for children's clothing

The articles also discuss the motivation, the control parents can (or can't) then exert, the dilemna they face when having such information and other issues:

"This is about parents being given tools to better protect their kids. That's not Big Brother. That's parenting," said company spokesman Jack Church (...) "The dilemma is, it's like peeking into your kid's diary or journal. The question is: What do you do with that information?"

Why do I blog this? because this relates to our lab research about location-based services (we're investigating things at a finer grain and it's less about privacy and control though) and how mutual location-awareness foster inferences.

GE Healthcare 3D mouse

Via, this news: GE Healthcare 3D mouse (a General Electric company):

The 3D Mouse is a user-interface device for sterile surgical settings that allows the physician to more easily view real-time 3D images during surgical procedures. The 3D Mouse combines the control of six distinct, complex user movements (X, Y, Z rotations and X, Y, Z translations) into a single liquid-proof joystick, while providing the functionality of a standard 2D mouse for interaction with GUI functions. Design details map key control locations, providing positive tactile feedback that allow physicians to work without taking their eyes off the patient.

Why do I blog this? yet another curious interfaces with some tangible implications, I like the tactile feedback idea as well. Where can we try that?

Mario Soup by Ben Fry

Mario Soup is an information visualization project by Ben Fry that aims at "revealing a beautiful soup of the thousands of individual elements that make up the game screen. It used the "the unpacking of a Nintendo game cartridge, decoding the program as a four-color image, revealing a beautiful soup of the thousands of individual elements that make up the game screen".

Any piece of executable code is also commingled with data, ranging from simple sentences of text for error messages to entire sets of graphics for the application. In older cartridge-based console games, the images for each of the small on-screen images (the "sprites") were often stored as raw data embedded after the actual program's instructions. (...) The images are a long series of 8x8 pixel "tiles". Looking at the cartridge memory directly (with a black pixel for an "on" bit, and a white pixel for an "off") reveals the sequence of black and white (one bit) 8x8 images. Each pair of images is mixed together to produce a two bit (four-color) image. The blue represents the first sequence of image data, the red layer is the second set of data that is read, and seeing them together produces the proper mixed-color image depicting the actual image data

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of "soup" and intertwined individual elements that eventually constitute a game screen: destructuring the game display.