Bruce Sterling at Ubicomp

It seems that Bruce Sterling will give the keynote presentation at Ubicomp 2006. It's always good to have a science-fiction writer giving some fresh air in a scientific conference.

Ubicomp: Reifying the Fantastic: Suppose a world really occurs where ubiquitous computing is as common as electricity and radio are today. What would that look and feel like and how would we describe it? Bruce Sterling has been working on a science fiction novel with exactly this topic, and has some thoughts to share on all things physical, fabbable, ambient, findable, and pervasive.

This is somehow what Sterling said he was working on when he gave his talk at LIFT06: how would it be like when everyware will be everywhere. We'll see what he will say about it.

Interaction Analysis research foci

Reading again methodological paper is a good way to learn. That's what I did with B. Jordan and A. Henderson. Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice, The Journal of the Learning Sciences, Volume 4, Number 1, pages 39-103, 1995. This paper is a seminal article about this specific research method:

Interaction Analysis as we describe it here is an interdisciplinary method for the empirical investigation of the interaction of human beings with each other and with objects in their environment. It investigates human activities such as talk, nonverbal interaction, and the use of artifacts and technologies, identifying routine practices and problems and the resources for their solution

The whole thing is awesome but the part that interested me most is about the "foci for analysis", meaning the ways of looking data:

The structure of events: In the course of analysis, smaller units of coherent interaction within events are identified... such easily identifiable behavioral units "ethnographic chunks." Identifying ethnographic chunks is a possible first step towards analysis and may often overlap with content logging... Events of any duration are always segmented in some way. Frequently, there are "official" beginnings and endings....They have an internal structure that is recognized and maintained by participants... spatial orientation serves as a means of negotiating transitions from one segment to a next... Analytically, transitions from one segment of an event to another are often indicated by shifts in activity, heralded by changes in personnel, movement of participants in space, or the introduction and manipulation of new objects (...) The temporal organization of activity: (...) Interaction Analysis examines the temporal organization of moment-to-moment, real-time interaction... In a given environment, when there is a string of "same" activities, questions that arise include: In what sense are the repetitive segments identical? How much variability is allowed before a sequence is no longer "the same" and becomes something else for participants? How is such segmentation achieved? (...) Turn Taking: an Interaction-Analytic turn-taking system has to take into account more than talk: it encompasses the whole range of behaviors through which people can "take a turn," that is, participate in an interactional exchange system. Not only "turns at talk" must be considered, but also "turns with bodies" and "turns with artifacts." (...) Participation structures: the extent to which co-present individuals share a common task orientation and attentional focus. Mutual availability and alignment become visible in "participation frameworks (...) Trouble and Repair: the occurrence of "trouble" in a particular activity sphere (...) we need to take into account not only the verbal aspects of repair, but also the ways in which participants draw on their bodily, artifactual, spatial and social resources to mend infractions of projected sequences. (...) The Spatial Organization of Activity: many variations are possible and different social groups have developed particular ways of being in each others' presence (...) Artifacts and Documents: One of our central interests lies in understanding what kinds of activities and interactions particular material objects engender and support and how these change as different artifacts and technologies are introduced. (...) it is important to track where people's eyes are, when and how gaze moves between objects, from persons to objects, and back again, sustaining or shifting the focus of attention as the salience of particular objects or displays changes.

Why do I blog this? I may use interaction analysis technique to better understand how players interpreted mutual location-awareness in a virtual reality game and in a pervasive game (namely catchbob). In my case, the interesting thing is to look at certain of the issues mentioned previously with regards to how knowing partners' location in space is used, interpreted and mean.

Tap dance performance

Tap-N-Bass by Lalya Gaye, Valerie Bugmann and Alexander Berman. It is basically an improvised tap dance performance where the sounds of wired-up tap shoes are picked-up by piezo contact microphones and remixed live, resulting in drum-n-bass-inspired music.

Drum-n-bass is one of the most exhilarating music styles that have emerge during the last few years. Noticing pattern similarities between certain rhythms in drum-n-bass and in tap dancing, we decided to see what would happen if we crossed these two genres. In Tap-n-bass, we aimed at making a tap dance performance that would produce booming bass and fast syncopated rhythms reminiscent of drum-n-bass, while staying true to the genre of tradition of tap dancing and its characteristic sound. The music is produced live by sounds picked-up by contact microphones attached on the shoes. The sounds are filtered and remixed live through a mixer board and custom-made program run on a laptop. The Tap-n-bass performance is improvised and collaborative, in terms of the dialogue established between the laptop remixer and the tap dancers.

NYT on serious games

In the NYT, there is a good article by Clive Thompson about serious games or the inherent potential of games to be learning platform. Some excerpts:

Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change. (...) “What everyone’s realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations,” said Suzanne Seggerman (...) Henry Jenkins, an M.I.T. professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it. “The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate,” he added. “If games are going to be a mature medium, they’re going to serve a variety of functions. It’s like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff.” (...) This is the central conceit behind all these efforts: that games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work. (...) But do these games actually work? Even proponents admit that it’s still difficult to say. “These things are just at the prototype level,” Professor Jenkins said. “We’ve just got one classroom here, one classroom there, where we’ve documented some benefits.” And without more studies documenting the effectiveness of the games, he said, “oxygen’s going to be sucked out of this.” (...) “Ultimately, a video game is just another medium for artistic expression,” he concluded. “Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games, why not learn something important in the process?”

The article is also full of examples of this types of games.

Passively multiplayer gaming

A recent column on Gamasutra is an account of the Mobile Game Conference. There is an intriguing summary of what Justin Hall said and I was interested in this:

His term for the idea is “passively multiplayer gaming” and it basically involves making a persistent MMORPG out of the mundane events of your life. (...) According to Hall, we already spend a healthy chunk of time in contact with our friends and contacts over electronic media: there’s e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, World of Warcraft, and so on. Location-based mobile technology can already tell you where you are.

Now, companies like Finland-based Jaiku are melding the two together, so it’s possible to know where everyone in your social network is at any given time. Throw in some AI, and pretty soon your phone will be taking location-based contextual guesses at their activities--for example, if someone stays in the vicinity of a movie theater for two hours, the system will be pretty sure that they’re watching a movie.

The other piece of Hall’s puzzle is user permission. If you join a passively multiplayer gaming group, you’ll presumably be willing to yield some of your privacy and tell your buddies what you’re up to at any given time, just as we sometimes do in an instant messenger client. After a while, the system will learn your patterns of everyday behavior and become more adept at guessing your activities. So, if you were to tell the system that you’re a smoker, it’ll start to guess that you’re smoking a cigarette when you take a brief trip outside.

At that point, turning your life into one of Hall’s passively multiplayer games is simply a matter of adding game logic. All of your friends will turn into NPC allies, ready to come to your aid in an imaginary game world that parallels your own. Hall’s example at MGC was a simple one--defusing a loose nuke would require timely responses from friends with a certain number of ‘skill points’ in physics--but the possibilities are actually even more endless than they are in real life. Your ‘character’ could gain levels and skill points by checking e-mail, going to saxophone lessons, or writing a column for Gamasutra. Spam e-mails could be turned into enemy fire. Heck, the aforementioned cigarette break could help your friend poison a horde of aliens with toxic chemicals, if you wanted it to!

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to see that refreshing new ideas are finally discussed during those mobile game conference. Besides, I really like this idea of “passively multiplayer gaming”. More about it here. The main point is to use the data trails left by our technology usage and feed that back into video games.

IFTF report about context-aware gaming

The Institute For The Future recently released a report about context-aware gaming, as part of their Technology Horizons program (which aims at a understanding technology and societal forces to identify and evaluate discontinuities and innovations in the next 3 to 10 years). It's called "All the World's a Game: The Future of Context-Aware Gaming" and the executive summary is on-line here.

This report defines context-aware gaming, describes the technological enablers for it, presents four future scenarios for what context-aware gaming might look like in coming decade and insights for those futures, and suggests opportunities that will emerge for organizations. A context-aware game uses physical and digital information about the current status of the player to shape how the game is played. The integration of physical and digital context moves the experience beyond what we've come to expect of games played in either the digital or physical worlds alone. While the contextual elements of today's context-aware games cover a fairly broad spectrum-from location to heart rate and other people's ideas-there are some fundamental similarities among games that integrate elements of the physical and digital world, all pointing to a new era of gaming that builds on the rich spaces and interactions of daily life. This shift will offer new channels for communication and marketing, build valuable skills in future workers, and pose challenges and opportunities for products, services, and brands when anything can and likely will be part of a game.

LEO on Locative Media

The special issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac on "Locative Media" (Vol. 14, Issue 3) has been released. It's a very well-documented compilation of articles about location-based technologies with contribution of none other than Anne Galloway and Matt Ward, Julian Bleecker and Jeff Knowlton, Lalya Gaye and Lars Erik Holmquist, Malcolm McCullough, Michele Chang and Elizabeth Goodman and so forth. What is also good is the bibliography they put together with good resources on the topic. More about that here when I get enough time to parse the papers.Why do I blog this? it gives a context to my research on mutual-location awareness in real space.

Cardboard mouse pad

Just ran across this nice mouse pad in a shop in Lausanne:

Why do I blog this? I quite like cardboards and "cardboard hacking culture", this one is an example of how people reshuffled an old piece of cardboard to another purpose.

Early version of a dinosaur spime

I just had fun with this early version of a spime in the form of a dinosaur model. The recipe is quite simple (does not require some hardcore DYI capabilities), and I confront it to the spimes characteristics (from the Wikipedia). 1. Go to : Download a Dinosaur, select one of them, print it out. (one of the characteristic of a spime is "5. Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into real ones.” and I expect that "4. Tools to virtually construct nearly any kind of object; computer-aided design" has been used to design those dinosaurs).

2. Go to Kaywa QR code generator, create a QR code like the following one, print it out and stick it to the paper dinosaur (this is 1. Small, inexpensive means of remotely and uniquely identifying objects over short ranges;, ok normally it would be arphids, the canonical identificator but QR codes are cheaper and paper-based ). It will be the identity of my raptor ("Johnny Raptor"):

Here's the final version:

(It also has another Qrcode on the other side that points to the url of the Wikipedia definition of spimes)

And yes it's a cradle-to-cradle object, I only used recycled paper than can be recycled. What I only miss is "A mechanism to precisely locate something on Earth, such as a global-positioning system." and "A way to mine large amounts of data for things that match some given criteria, like internet search engines"

3. Take a cell phone, install kaywa reader and check what the raptor says when you pass it close to it.

Why do I blog this? summer fun, this is just a quick funny thing done during lunch time because it was too HOT here. And not this is not a spime.

Digital but physical surrogates

Ambient information such as Monkey Business, Nabaztag or Availabot are related to the idea of embedding awareness with in a tangible artifact. This has been addressed by Kuzuoka, H. and Greenberg, S. in 1999 in their paper "Mediating Awareness and Communication through Digital but Physical Surrogates". ACM CHI'99 Video Proceedings and Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI '99 Conference Extended Abstracts. There is a video here. Some excerpts:

Digital but physical surrogates are tangible representations of remote people positioned within an office and under digital control. Surrogates selectively collect and present awareness information about the people they represent. (...) Because these devices are located in the physical world, they attract one's attention through natural environmental cues (sounds, movement, etc.), are easily and naturally manipulated, and can serve as dedicated and responsive communication conduits.

Then they present examples of such surrogates:

The first class of our surrogates illustrates how activities of a remote person can be embodied within a physical surrogate located in a local office. (...) The next class of surrogates illustrates how a person can explicitly express different degrees of interest in others by manipulating a surrogate. (...) The final class of surrogates illustrates how they can be used to mediate communication.

And the authors points to relevant issues related to awareness surrogates:

First, awareness surrogates are caricatures with only limited ability to express information. Consequently, surrogates are best suited for portraying only limited notions of availability that abstracts one's activity: while still providing a general sense of availability, this lessen the risk of intrusion (...) Second, surrogates are a natural way to control video and audio quality [8], which in tum preserves privacy and minimizes distraction. (...) Third, surrogates can express different levels of salience, and thus can mitigate distraction.

Why do I blog this? it's intriguing to see how this trend emerged, evolved and now is closer to mass market. I am interested in how this would enhance gaming experience.

Large displays and spatial cognition

Larges displays and how they are perceived, experienced and used by people is an interesting topic, especially when it comes to the gaming experience. A paper I ran across lately about this issue: Tan, D.S., Gergle, D., Scupelli, P., Pausch, R. (2006): Physically Large Displays Improve Performance on Spatial Tasks, In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 13 (1), 71 - 99 .

The paper describes a series of experiments comparing the performance of users working on a large projected wall display to that of users working on a standard desktop monitor. Results suggest that physically large displays, even at identical visual angles as small displays, increase performance on spatial tasks such as 3D navigation as well as mental map formation and memory.

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to see how display features can impact cognitive processes for the users.

CSCW workshop about mobile multiplayer games

A workshop at CSCW 2006 that seems appealing to my research:

W3: Mobile Multiplayer Games: Designs, Studies and Reflections Back to Top

Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow Steve Benford, University of Nottingham

A number of researchers have used mobile multiplayer games either as a topic of study in itself or as a vehicle for more general investigations in computing, collaboration and information. Set within the context of increasing commercial significance of both games in general and mobile games in particular, this research has used the energy and ingenuity of players to test interfaces, infrastructure and design concepts, and to drive new technological developments. Commercial games are appearing that take advantage of commodity mobile phones’ burgeoning capabilities for interaction, awareness and collaboration. In-depth studies of mobile multiplayer games are also beginning to appear in greater numbers, and growing experience of design and use opens up new possibilities for conceptual work on the mixture of media, people and environments that constitute such games. This workshop’s aim is a broad view of this young research area, spanning and connecting system design, user studies and theoretical reflections.

Why do I blog this? because that's right on sport of what I doing: using video-games to inform CSCW research questions.

Posters for Ubicomp 2006

Good news, my poster “Investigating How Automatic Disclosure of Partners’ Location Influences Mobile Coordination” (Nova, N., Girardin, F., Dillenbourg, P.) has been accepted for Ubicomp 2006 in Orange County, CA. Fabien's poster too “Towards Design Strategies to Deal with Spatial Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems” (Girardin, F., Nova, N., Blat, J.) .

Both are connected to the Catchbob project. The first one is a mixed-method analysis of socio-cognitive processes deployed in mobile coordination, and the influence of automatic disclosure of partners' location on them. The second is an account of the lessons learned and insights about how players reacted to technological uncertainties in the game.

In my paper, utomatic location awareness had detrimental effect on players' communication and strategy negotiation. But the game performance was not affected. One of the reviewer interestingly pointed me on this. I actually mention the fact that the location awareness of others can undermine collaboration.

The main comment I have on this work is the conclusion that automatic location awareness had detrimental effect on communication. That's interesting---isn't the objective of awareness technology exactly that of reducing the amount of explicit communcation? Why is it detrimental? Did participants perform more poorley in the game? Did they bond socially less? Did they incur in more misunderstandings? Please, specify.

Perhaps I should better discuss this issue, that already popped up here and there; participants did not perform more poorly but the coordination effectiveness was not the same.

Tablet tennis for 3

Expected to be at the open sessions at Ubicomp 2006: Table Tennis for Three by Floyd Mueller, Martin R. Gibbs, Bo Kampmann Walther and Matt Adcock:

Table tennis provides a healthy exercise and is also a social past-time for play-ers of all ages across the world. However, players have to be co-located in order to play, and only 2 or 4 players can play at the same time. We are presenting a design concept of a table tennis game playable by three players who are in three different locations, connected with a videoconference augmented with a novel game-play. It is aimed at achieving similar benefits known from co-located table tennis such as providing a health benefit and bringing people together to socialize.

Accelerometers and wearable systems

Knight J.F., Bristow, H. W., Anastopoulou, S., Baber, C., Schwirtz, A., & Arvanitis, T. N. (2006). “Uses of Accelerometer Data Collected from a Wearable System.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing”. The paper address the use of accelerometers in wearable systems for diverse applications.

It discusses and demonstrates how body mounted accelerometers can be used in context aware computing systems and for measuring aspects of human performance, which may be used for teaching and demonstrating skill acquisition, coaching sporting activities, sports and human movement research, and teaching subjects such as physics and physical education. (...) In particular, systems for the detection of activity status (including ambulatory mode), assessment of performance (such as match or technique analysis and studying skilled performance)

Why do I blog this? this sort of data might be interesting to use a new category of inputs in video games (to raise your farming activity in MMORPG?).

A battleship on a real world grid

As attested by this Battleship:GoogleEarth , it seems that Julian is moving towards his "near future laboratory experiments". His idea was to start thinking about "how Google Earth could become a platform for realtime mobile gaming". An instantiation of this was then to transfr the simple game mechanic based on the old Milton Bradley Battleship game to a Google Earth platform.

The mechanic I'm experimenting with is simpler. One person places their ships using Google Earth and the other person goes out in the normal world with a mobile phone, a GPS connected to the mobile phone. The phone has a small Python script on it that reads the GPS and sends the data to the game engine, which then updates the Google Earth KML model showing the current state of the game grid. When the player who's trying to sink the ships wants to try for a hit, they call into the game engine and say "drop". The game reads back the coordinates at which the "peg" was dropped and shortly thereafter, the other player will see the peg appear at the coordinate it was dropped. If the peg hits one of the ships, it's a Hit, otherwise it's a miss.

Why do I blog this? it's very relevant and way beyond current google map games.

On gestural interactions with games

An interview on Gamasutra of Katherine Isbister and Nicole Lazzaro about Intimate Relations in video games. Some excerpts I liked (but the whole interview is interesting)

G: What are your hopes for the gestural input, particularly with the Nintendo DS and the Wii remote?

KI: (...) I think the trick is to get designers thinking in new ways to take advantage of that tactile interface, and that means understanding the social component of what’s going on gesturally between people. (...) Our lab just got a grant for a motion capture system to study interpersonal gestural dynamics and I’m really hoping we can feed that back into these sort of designs. I’ve got a lot of NSF grants going towards that kind of research. Once motion capture gets to an affordable level we’re hoping we can have these dynamics boiled down to a computable level and literally create gestural interfaces. (...) NI: And I think Katherine, there’s more you could say about the psychology of touch.

KI: Well it depends on what the touch is, holding hands can mean different things in different cultures, that’s a really sensitive issue. We saw that in our workshop, we told everyone that a $100 bill was hidden on someone and people were afraid to touch each other because of the boundary we typically have between other people. It turned out it was in my back pocket. I think everyone has that hesitation, but if you can get people to do something a little risky they automatically bond and their intimacy level goes up.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of thinking about the social aspects of gesturing, this is so important in terms of how the bodies occupy space (proxemics....), how can we use this to design new interactions? can interpersonal gestural dynamics provide a good rationale for design? Those are intriguing questions. Besides, the touch issue is also interesting (right Timo!) Their conclusion "Constraint is design" also rings a bell.

Two examples of objects/MMO cross-over

reports on this interesting cross-over: LEGO Mindstorms (the line of robotics components that let you build interactive objects) will have a new line called "NXT that is going to be previewed in Second Life. Also, the insightful Amy-Jo Kim pointed to this article: Habbo China to Match Real and Virtual Purchases:

Habbo Hotel in China , developed by Sulake and apparently operated by Netease, is now allowing online purchases of virtual items that are paired with real-world sales. Flowers, clothes, and movie tickets can be purchased online through Habbochina and the matching real items will be delivered to the purchaser the next day.

Why do I blog this? in terms of video games foresight, this is interesting because it shows (1) video games are so more than video games (social platform, shot to demonstrate a new thing...) and (2) the way old media and new media are more and more intertwined, building a new ecosystem of playful objects (virtual or not).

Jaiku: real-time presence/location awareness on a mobile phone

Today's release in the world of presence/location-based mobile applications: Jaiku. It's basically a phone book that displays the real-time presence and location of your contacts.

We invented the term ‘rich presence’ to describe the many relevant things a phone knows about you. Rich presence on Jaiku includes an IM-style away line, your phone profile (ring volume, vibrate), location (country, city/region, neigborhood), Bluetooth devices around, upcoming calendar events, and the duration how long your phone has been idle.

You can view your contacts’ rich presence on jaiku.com, and once you have signed up, you can download a free client application for Nokia Series 60 Second Edition phones. We’ve also created some badges that let you display your rich presence on your blog.

Why do I blog this? because it's done by finnish friend Jyri Engestrom and his colleagues and also because it's quite relevant to my research about how mutual-location awareness impact group collaboration, from a socio-cognitive point of view. I am really intrigued by trying it out (mmh still have to find a nokia series 60 from their list) + seeing the potential connections with what I've studied.

Good Job Jyri!

RFID tag + ahstray

Seen in Geneva: an arphid ashtray

Why do I blog this? it seems that RFID tags (arphids) are everywhere lately.... the pervasiveness of technology in everyday objects? it's rather someone who bought a CD or something, removed the tag and left it here.