Brainwave detection in a Darth Vader outfit

The SFgate gives a quick overview of how Neurosky aims at building brain wave-reading toys and video games (use of EEG). Nothing really new compared to other announcement we read about this company but I was intrigued by the way the interface itself. The journalists describes it as a "crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb":

"A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber. But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology. Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark. (...)"

(Associated Press photo by Paul Sakuma)

Why do I blog this? given the difficulties to use EEG (number of electrodes, calibration, use of gel), I found intriguing the use of this outfit. Besides, the convergence between toys/games industries with ubicomp technologies is fascinating.

Smart houses that are not so smart and then should be smart in another way

Reconfigurable House is a stimulating project by Adam Somlai-Fischer, Usman Haque et al.:

"The Reconfigurable House is an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be "rewired" by visitors. The project is a critique of ubiquitous computing "smart homes", which are based on the idea that technology should be invisible to prevent DIY. Smart homes actually aren't very smart simply because they are pre-wired according to algorithms and decisions made by designers of the systems, rather than the people who occupy the houses.

In contrast to such homes, which are not able to adapt structurally over time, the many sensors and actuators of Reconfigurable House can be reconnected endlessly as people change their minds so that the House can take on completely new behaviours. (...) And if the House is left alone for too long, it gets bored, daydreams and reconfigures itself.... "

Why do I blog this? because I like both the project and the underlying ideas that support it. The concept of intelligent "smart environments" often gave me the creeps for various reasons, maybe because of my background in psychology.

Lots of material on the website + videos.

Hacking the wiimote

The WSJ has an article about how people re-engineer the Nintendo Wii controller to do all sort of things. This is done through downloading free software on the Web and tweak the code to re-assign the control/movements to specific commands. See wiihacks.blogspot.com and WiiLi.org. Some excerpts I found interesting:

"what has most captivated hackers is a mechanism inside the Wii-mote called an accelerometer that can detect its speed and direction of motion. It is the accelerometer, made by Analog Devices Inc., in Norwood, Mass., that allows Wii players to use their remotes to act out whatever game they're playing, whether it's casting with a fishing rod or swinging a tennis racket. (...) Nintendo says it is surprised by efforts to reprogram the Wii-mote and discourages the practice. "The Wii Remote was created to play on the Wii system only," says Anka Dolecki, spokeswoman for Nintendo. But all the interest in the Wii-mote could have an upside for the company. The dozens of free games on the Web that incorporate the Wii-mote have helped add to the buzz surrounding the console. (...) Some companies see possible business applications with the Wii-mote. Rick Bullotta, vice-president of SAP Research, an arm of the German software giant SAP AG, is looking at ways to integrate the Wii-mote into their clients' manufacturing operations. He envisions factory and warehouse employees walking through facilities pointing and waving Wii-motes to monitor and control machines."

Why do I blog this? the wii hacks are more and more documented, it's interesting to see how this innovation from the gaming area can lead to change in other area.

Path to the future

A timely and relevant definition of foresight (by Bill Cockayne):

"Foresight is the practice of exploring the long-term future. The goal of foresight is to help individuals and organizations to better prepare for long-term opportunities or problems. Unlike forecasting methods, foresight does not attempt to define specific events or trends in the future. Instead, foresight methods and tools support the development and exploration of a multiple possible futures, none of which is expected to exist. Foresight, like thought (Gendanken) experiments performed by physicists and philosophers, help the practitioner to design and analyze a hypothetical experiment that, while possible, is not likely to be pursued."

(The picture has been taken by myself at my school, though it was appropriate in this context)

Wireless plush toys

The latest issue of Metropolis has a piece about interactive toys by Ricci Shryock. It presents some innovative examples, based on a context-aware model ("wireless plush toy design"):

"My Beating Heart. The plush, $120 toy uses microchip technology to mimic a human heartbeat. Gitman says users feel as if they are hugging a pet or a loved one when they hug the toy, and it soothes their heartbeats to a meditative state. (...) the Needies plush doll as a great example of the interactive trend. The “Needies” are large plush dolls that can sense when another doll is getting some love. The unattended doll will then sing and call out for the attention it craves."

(Picture is: the My Beating Heart project and a Needie, courtesy of Metropolis Mag.)

But what is interesting is:

"Gitman believes designer toys have oversaturated the market and are ready for updates that add interactive features to spice up the consumer’s options. (...) But Blum adds the trick is to develop the function of the toy along the same lines as the toy’s artistic appearance— “To market it as a whole, we have to present these as pieces of art rather than just toys, and these functions should be the kind of thing that can develop tangential with that design.”"

Why do I blog this? interactive toys is an intriguing field to watch with regards to ubiquitous computing. It's somehow not connected in the general discourse but there are some good relations plus chances that some toys would be more interesting than intelligent fridges. Besides, toys can be seen a trojan horse for certain technologies.

interactive cities

Anomos and Hyx recently edited an interesting book called "interactive cities" about the ways in which the digital domain impacts the contemporary cities.

"In the field of urban planning, there has been much debate about the information and intelligence society and its flourishing potential. Discussion is gradually veering away from the idea of modeling all the components involved in a given project, as a means of managing the complexity of sustainable development. Instead, current initiatives call on continuous, distributed and dynamic methods to ensure consistency among the environmental, economic and social dimensions.

Interactive Cities contributes to this debate with over a dozen articles by various recognized authors. Researchers, urban planners and historians present their approaches to understanding interactive cities, endowed with invisible digital infrastructures and thriving at accelerated metabolic rates. Dominique Rouillard, Denise Pumain, Laurent Perrin, Carlo Ratti and Daniel Berry, David Gerber, Gerhard Schmitt, Jeffrey Huang and Muriel Waldvogel, Ted Ngai and Philippe Morel"

Why do I blog this? curiosity towards a book I've to find.

How discourse about cybernetic pervaded other fields

Having just read last night "L'Empire cybernétique : Des machines à penser à la pensée machine" by Céline Lafontaine. In this essay, the author aims at showing how the "cybernetic" paradigm (Wiener) as well as the vision it promoted, has influenced the scientific and intellectual worlds. Starting from Norbert Wiener's work and Macy conferences, she describes how these notions and visions pervaded psychology (Bateson, Palo-Alto group), Systems Theory, french structuralism, postmodernism (okay: Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault), neo-liberal economic theories and eventually the general discourse about cyberspace (Kevin Kelly, Pierre Levy who use reference to Pierre Theilard de Chardin). For the latter, it's funny that she stopped to this references and not pay attention to more recent developments about this issue (in which Levy has been slightly forgotten, even tough the ideas proposed are still the same). The book is also a critical overview of how this influence has anti-humanist underpinnings: by advocating for a "sujet informationnel" ("informational subject") and an inescapable progress, a reductionist vision of the world is at stake and lead to a very determinist view of society.

Why do I blog this? enjoy reading this kind of book, easy to read and some criticisms are fair as as important to keep in mind. Although it's a good read, I am quite skeptical about some aspects such as the methodology and/or a somewhat over-focus on surface traits of the theories influenced by cybernetics. As a matter of fact it's a very theoretical discussion, rather philosophical than empirical (in terms of content analysis I mean). I would have liked to see more elements about the "humanist" arguments (sorry for my ignorance) and some more conclusive statement at the end of the book about how to get back to a more humanist paradigm in science and technology (how would this look like?). Anyway, perhaps proposing solutions is not the point of this sort of books.

Some critics in french here and there.

The Economist on ubicomp

"When everything connects" is the latest special edition of The Economist... a survey of the telecom industry that deals with ubiquitous computing and the so-called "wireless revolution". There is a ten or so articles on that topic, which are good read if you're interested in this area. When everything connects is a good overview of the current situation and what can be expected in terms of domains (motoring), problems (standards!), regulation (government?), privacy concerns. The author concludes with the following statement:

"Wireless technology will become a part of objects in the next 50 years rather as electric motors appeared in everything from eggbeaters to elevators in the first half of the 20th century and computers colonised all kinds of machinery from cars to coffee machines in the second half. Occasionally, the results will be frightening; more often, they will be amazingly useful."

What is interesting in the survey introduction is the warning "Still, the general direction is clear (...) This survey will explain how this will come about, and why it will not be easy."

Bioscope: materialize the sketches made by gestures

Bioscope is a project by intrepid friend Jean-Baptiste Labrune:

"a device that materialize the sketches made by gesture while talking to somebody or being in a creative or expressive process. The goal is to be build a creativity research tool that manifest visually the evolution of concepts and ideas. The idea is to bring another perspective on the creative process, like in the amazing movie of Henri George Clouzot called “le mystère Picasso”. In this film, Picasso’s sketches unfolds through time since to an innovative shutter camera system developped especially by Clouzot. The temporal aspect of the artefacts is the focus and not the spatial aspects. The concern about immateriality has been pushed to the point that the only artefact remaining of this period is the film, all the other productions by Picasso have been destroyed…"

" Traditionnally, the methods to do this involve either slow-motion photography, animation, film, video or compositing. I have decided to use a 3 axis IMU to capture gestures and then recompose it in a 3D scene. This picture shows 30 sec of movements while talking about a videogame concept. The accelerometer records position in space but is also used to edit video in a 3D environement according to the gestures of the user that act as metadata. Browsing and exploring the video footage is done by the 3 axis data manipulation."

Why do I blog this? the idea of visualizing the activities involved in a creative process and represent it in a way that can inform the design itself is very curious and pertinent. Besides, this is of interest to me because of some thoughts regarding the user experience of gestural interactions. Would it be possible to use such a device to help the design of gestures for certain game design for instance?

Different levels of interactivity in user-generated content

Working on a presentation about user-generated content and video-games, I found interesting how Jef's talk addressed the different levels of granularity when thinking about "open design". Depending on the interactivity given to the end-user, this white paper from Think Studio discriminates:

"- Passive consumption: The user is getting products or services with no real interaction and no real choice. He or she has to take whatever is available. - Self Service: The user is given the ability to choose between various products or services. - DIY: Do It Yourself: The user starts getting involved in the value chain. - Co-design: The user starts adding value by customizing the product and therefore defining his or her needs himself (as opposed to buying a product defined by the product management team). - Co-creation: The user is involved in the design of the product or service itself."

Why do I blog this? Player-generated content is an interesting issue for the video-game industry. Although I could not make it to the GDC, Amy Jo Kim's slides are quite revealing for that matter.

What the categories above show is that there is a different granularity of participation that could be turned into game mechanics. It would be good to discriminate them in a more comprehensive or applicable way.

On a different note, I am quite skeptical of the "content" term in "user generated content" because it implies that what is created by people is strictly content, which is wrong. Imagine that people can also produce rules, algorithms, problems. For example, designing a Counterstrike level is not just a matter of producing content, it's also creating a problem that people will be engaged in, with specific constraints (okay my example is maybe wrong because in this case the problem created is a by-product of the level designed).

The picture is taken from Dave Gray's drawings made at LIFT07, it shows Sampo Karjalainen from Sulake (Habbo Hotel) who was talking about this topic.

Spatial gestures challenges

Some quick elements about the challenges regarding 3D spatial gestures to control digital information are described in "Gameplay issues in the design of spatial 3D gestures for video games" (by Payne et al. 2006):

" The seemingly natural and intuitive ease with which gestures could replace command menu structures and cumbersome or intrusive controller mechanisms was seen to empower users with increased control over their intent. However the effective implementation of gestures is complicated. Issues related to human spatial motion awareness, user performance differences, cognitive/semiotic confusion and user feedback all complicate the implementation of spatial gestures in videogamessuch as a fireball or hurricane kick. (...) spatial gestures present their own problems in relation to: how to present 3D gesture feedback, user performance differences, how to instruct/learn user gestures, what are familiar semiotics for 3D gestures."

Why do I blog this? scanning the literature about this topic.

Googie architecture

Googie architecture, according to the Wikipedia:

"Googie, also known as populuxe or doo-wop, is a subdivision of expressionist, or futurist architecture influenced by car culture and the Space Age and Atomic Age, originating from southern California in the late 1940s and continuing approximately into the mid-1960s. With upswept roofs and, often, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon, it decorated many a motel, coffee house and bowling alley in the 1950s and 1960s. It epitomizes the spirit a generation demanded, looking excitedly towards a bright, technological and futuristic age. (...) Cantilevered structures, acute angles, illuminated plastic panelling, freeform boomerang and artist's palette shapes and cutouts, and tailfins on buildings marked Googie architecture (...) Roofs sloping at an upward angle - This is the one particular element in which architects were really showing off, and also creating a unique structure. Starbursts - Starbursts are an ornament that goes hand in hand with the Googie style, showing its Space Age and whimsical influences "

(Images taken from spaceage city) Why do I blog this? curiosity

Empathy and innovation

In a speculative blogpost about what can be recommended to foster innovation, Steve Portigal gave different answers. One of them is a very pragmatic and relevant answer that I I fully agree with:

"I would introduce empathy processes into government, especially departments that interact with the public or with businesses. Everyone - EVERYONE - will go through the process that their “clients” go through, on a regular basis (say, once per year). (...) The neat trick with empathy is that it leads to understanding, and then leads to problem solving."

Why do I blog this? I quite like this idea of promoting empathy (i.e. the ability to put oneself in other's shoes) as a user-centered design practice.

Ironies of automation

Some excerpts I like from Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge:

"The classic aim of automation is to replace human manual control, planning and problem solving by automatic devices and computers. However, as Bibby and colleagues (1975) point out : "even highly automated systems. such as electric power networks, need human beings for supervision, adjustment, maintenance, expansion and improvement. Therefore one can draw the paradoxical conclusion that automated systems still are man-machine systems, for which both technical and human factors are important." This paper suggests that the increased interest in human factors among engineers reflects the irony that the more advanced a control system is, so the more crucial may be the contribution of the human operator. (...) We know from many 'vigilance' studies (Mackworth. 1950) that it is impossible for even a highly motivated human being to maintain effective visual attention towards a source of information on which very little happens, for more than about half an hour. This means that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities, which therefore has to be done by an automatic alarm system connected to sound signals. (...) This raises the question of who notices when the alarm system is not working properly. "

Why do I blog this? there is a lot more to draw from this paper but I was interested in these two parts because it raises intriguing problems. Automating something (i.e. delegating a function to an artifact, the rationale of design) is not simple and can foster incredible situations.

The intricate nature of city components

An excerpt from Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities":

"Intricate mingling of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order. (...) Let us first consider that diversity looks ugly. (...) But this belief implies something else. It implies that city diversity of uses is inherently messy in appearance; and it also implies that places stamped with homogeneity of uses looks better. (...) If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is - sameness - it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction."

The picture above has been taken in a familiar area of Geneva. While it does not really depict a "mixture of use" as described by Jane Jacobs, I found it was a good candidate to represent heterogeneity in a city. The two building it shows are different and the junction between them is not seamless.

Why do I blog this? this is space in itself, a sort of heterogeneous continuum with seams (I also mentioned holes a while ago). The quote from Jacobs is interesting because it explains the advantage of diversity: it creates an identity that eventually enable people to find their way in cities (and memorize places).

What does that mean in terms of design and ubiquitous computing? Well, first of all, this situation ought to be taken into account in the design itself: certain systems or artifacts may work differently depending on the space people are located. Second, seams, flaws, holes and stuff can be taken into account, this is called "seamful design". People interested in this might have a look at Chalmers, M. & Galani, A. (2004): Seamful Interweaving: heterogeneity in the theory and design of interactive systems. In: Proceedings of ACM conference on designing interactive systems DIS 2004. ACM, New York, pp 243–252.

Electronic urbanism and open design

Today at the urban sociology department, the "Penser l'espace", Jef Huang (LDM) gave a talk about "Electronic urbanism: future of space and role of authorship". It's very close to his talk at LIFT06. Raw notes below: Even though the title is "electronism urbanism", Jef's work rather focused on smaller dimension such as architecture or virtual worlds but it might lead to electronic urbanism at some point. The premises of his research is a strong belief that the massive proliferation of communication networks and devices will change some of our most basic social activities (work, learn, shop). This shift has economic drivers and there are several dying species coming from the industrial ages. Amazon as an epitome of the shift form the physical to the virtual.

So what will happen in 5-10years? will we still need physical space? Yes, and there are examples of new forms of space which are twofold: one the one hand, mega fulflillment center: huge new building with distribution centers, back-end of Amazon google data center, underground server farms. ON the other end, some are also the front-end, new typologies such as the yahoo! store, the google store, m*zone (samsung chain of physical store: a virtual company creating space so that clients can meet each others), information kiosks

What is interesting is that when these buildings choose their sites, there are new rules: access to highways, topographies, there is a new invisible layer that comes on top of the landscape, for instance, the map of fiber routes in NYC, that affects housing prices (because people want to have accesses). This affects the morphologies of future cities

the phenomenon: learn: classroom - e-learning environment work: office - virtual office shop: physical retail store - virtual shop play: playground - game environment ... But it's an "either-or" phenomenon, there is nothing in between, Jef's work is about studying what can be in-between. To what extent could virtual activities have a physical component? TO what extent can physical architecture/elements (furnitures) act as an interface between emerging virtual worlds and physical realities.

One of the elements about this is open design: the involvement of the user in the design process, that can be trace back form Duchamps (Rotating Glass Plates, 1930) or Oulipo (raymond queneau 100,000,000,000,000 poems combinatorial poetics, 1961). Back to urbanism, a question is then "is open architecture desirable in architecture or urban design?" The problem: "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" (I miss some elements here)

Another question is "what is the role of the designer in an open design piece?" The common misconception is that not, the designer's role is not less important. Only the design is not longer in the final form but the rules of the game have to be designed. What is needed for design of openness: basic rules, algorithm, speed of interaction, consent, transparency of authorship.

The new design paradigm: from designing forms and artifacts to designing rules and parameters for forms and artifacts to emerge.

Open plan legibility and infoviz

Revisiting the Open Plan: Ceilings and Furniture as Display Surfaces for Building Information is a paper written by my colleague Mark Meagher, Jeffrey Huang and David Gerber for a conference called BuiltViz. The paper argues that one the flaws of the "open plan" in architecture is the lack of legibility, that created an "undifferentiated, homogeneous settings that failed to realize the original intentions of this architectural idea":

"The open plan would be highly disorienting if it were not possible to define boundaries between spaces, to set limits, to indicate zones of circulation, and otherwise to articulate in the plan an anticipated range of activities. For all their clear disadvantages, vertical space-defining elements such as walls clearly provide a sense of orientation and identity, and in their absence it was necessary for the early proponents of the open plan to invent new techniques for spatial definition and differentiation. "

A possible solution to go solve this problem, as suggested in the paper, is to use information visualization techniques. The authors then present two projects: one about an augmented ceiling, and another about interactie shelves.

"Embedded information technology offers an opportunity to support the differentiation and legibility of the open plan by sensing and displaying aspects of the building’s environmental conditions and patterns of use. We introduce two ongoing projects as examples of building interfaces that enhance the transparency of information in the building, using surfaces embedded in the building to reveal invisible attributes of the interior that can be used by inhabitants to better understand their environment."

Why do I blog this? even though the project has not been implemented yet, I found interesting the articulation between architectural theories and human-computer interaction research.

Seamlessness and duct tape

Read in "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" (Adam Greenfield):

"The infrastructure supporting the user's experience is deeply heterogeneous, and, at least in contemporary, real-world systems, frequently enough held together by the digital equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. (...) any attempt to provide the user with a continuous experience must somehow paper over these circumstances"

This discussion of flaws about seamlessness in technological development is of considerable importance. Beyond Gilles Deleuze notion of "espace strié" (striated space), the assumption in ubicomp that infrastructure are and will be seamless often leave aside failing infrastructures, the accumulation of different norms, the tweaking people do on tech and stuff like that. The picture has been taken in Nice, France and shows how a traffic light has been fixed with duct tape so that the wiring does not fall apart (and eventually not get wet by possible rain or trashed by some wandering moron).

Sticked objects

Sticking objects on street premises seem to be a new trend as one can see with this floppy disk above or the lego blocks hereafter:

After tags (and painted walls in cave), stickers, striped glasses, now it's about sticking objects. The first picture has been taken in Lausanne and the second in Geneva, Switzerland.

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the way objects populates street. Even though these examples are really uncommon, they are intriguing in the sense that they're part of a trend that leans towards reconfiguring physical artifacts in a spatial environment.

Modalities of access

An extraordinary layering of different modalities to access that building, either using humans (pressing a button, asking a human individual to open up the door) or non-humans (inserting a key, swiping a card vertically or inserting a card horizontally). But why? are there different level of access? different institutions behind that door? Out-of-order systems?