Research

Places and activities

Thank you anne for the reference on your blog about space and place by Andy Crabtree. A place is portion of space within which specific social activities of various kinds occur. According to Goffman (1961), space and places are institutionalised and, as such, constrain and shape ACTION.

Seen from this interactionist point of view, a place hence "consist of intelligible or meaningful material arrangements which are tied to the performance of particular activities". The author takes the example of libraries in which the accomplishment of searching is tied to the mundane arrangements of the building.

Crabtree describes the intelligible character of spatial arrangements as made up of four components : - visibility/readibility - built for their visibility - public or commonly known - paired with interactional competences for their use.

alphaworld cityscape

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE AlphaWorld is a large virtual world with hundreds of thousands of users and tens of millions of objects. Users can navigate the world via the 3D Active Worlds browser, which lets them walk, talk, fly and teleport from place to place as humanoid avatars. But when the world is 655 kilometers across, and when users can see no more than 120 meters in any direction, finding things even on the scale of a square kilometer can be difficult. Hence the need for a map.

They also have a monorail !!!!

ideas lab in grenoble

At Minatec, Ideas Lab (nteractive Devices for Emerging Applications and Services), coordinated by Michael Ida, is the result of thinking by the various bodies backing Minatec and the National Centre for Technology Research in Grenoble (CNRTG) which specializes in micro and nanotechnology and smart devices. Research carried out at the laboratory will serve as the basis for new projects and steer R&D work by local firms. It will bring together partners from very different horizons - industry, research, trade, education and the arts. Major international firms, already operating in Grenoble, will rub shoulders with scientists from university research labs, engineering school graduates and academics. This pluridisciplinary organization, the first of its kind in Europe, will pool input from designers and artists, experts from the humanities, in particular sociologists and anthropologists, specialists in fields such as software, microelectronics and microsystems, not to mention telecommunications operators, industry and the future users of smart devices. In many cases the right combination of product and service has yet to be found for tomorrow's applications. Research will focus, for instance, on how best to combine new devices - peripherals, portable computers, phones and battery-powered sensors - with innovative services, such as electronic trading, automated navigation, communicating clothing, 3D graphics, virtual clones or measurement of physiological parameters.

abour roomware (2)

Roomware needs : wirless connections and stand-alone power supply. What's in a building : - people - rooms - furnitures (chairs, table, sofa...) - walls (see-through ?), glass+ information - artefacts (each can have a url) - plants ! - robots/ agents ? - - sensors, tags

Roomware

I read N. A. Streitz, S. Konomi, H.-J. Burkhardt (Eds.), Cooperative Buildings – Integrating Information, Organization and Architecture. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings (CoBuild’98), Darmstadt, Germany, February 25-26, 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1370. Springer: Heidelberg. pp. 4-21. Cooperative building : a flexible and dynamic environment that provides cooperative workspaces supporting and augmenting human communication and collaboration Functions : the building does not only provides facilities but it can also (re)act "on its own" after having identified certain conditions. It will diagnose problems, provide information, establish connections between people, and offer 'help'. It will adapt to changing situations and provide context-sensitive information according to knowledge about past and current states or actions, if available, about plans of the people.

A cooperative building originates in the physical architectural space but it is complemented by components realized as objects and structures in virtual information spaces. BUT a cooperative building is not restricted to one physical location ! There are also distributed settings.

Affordance of space presented in the paper : "Our day-to-day living and working environment is highly determined by the physical, architectural space around us constituted by buildings with walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, etc. They constitute also rich information spaces due to the inherent affordances either as direct information sources (e.g., calendars, maps, charts hanging on the walls, books and memos lying on the desks), or by providing ambient peripheral information (e.g., sounds of people passing by)."

->The world around us is the interface to information

+ notion of cooperation landscapes

Roomware: computer augmented things resulting from the integration of elements (e.g. wall, doors, furnitures like table, chairs...) with computer-based information devices. The resulting roomware components are interactive. They provide support for the creation, editing and presentation of information. They are networked and therefore have access to worldwide information. The chairs and the table are also mobile due to wireless networks and stand-alone power supply.

They proposes different scenario : - Scenario One: A meeting in the hallway. Meeting a colleague by chance in the hallway and starting a discussion might result in the intention to explain something by drawing a sketch on the wall and annotate it by scribbles. When the two are finished, the result of the work should disappear from the wall but still be accessible at any other place in and also outside the building. - Scenario Two : Dynamic team rooms. to provide ways for subgroups to split up during the meeting in the same room, do their work, rejoin and then immediately merge the results. - Scenario Three: The room that knows you and your team. The “room senses” the members of the team, the room configures itself restoring the state of the last meeting including the set of documents they were working on before.

locative media lab

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE the locative media lab "explores the possibility that next generation, mobile, location aware devices can transform social, economic and informational relations at the local community level. The Lab: - Develops locative media tools, infratructure and theory to support its workshop and installation teams. - Deploys localised community and artist led locative media infrastructure, community tools and art installations. - Organises active, local community focused, locative media workshops."

tejp !

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE This tejp (swedish word for 'tape') project explores various possibilities for overlaying personal traces and information on public spaces through different mediums and behavior patterns. It is our hope that Tejp will transform spectators into players and encourage playful ways to personalize territory in the public realm. We also hope to connect local communities by providing a space and sounding board for existing social relationships.

2 prototypes : - audio tags : left at hidden places in public spaces. Personal messages that have been previously recorded are whispered to by-passers as they lean towards it. Someone who wants to share personal messages anonymously (or not) records it into the small box by talking, singing, playing music etc.. to it while holding a button. He/she sticks it on a wall somewhere. One should stand at a distance of about 20 centimeters from the microphone when recording, in order to avoid distortion. Passers-by notice/recognise the sticker because of its particular yet discrete design, leans/reaches towards it and hears the content of the tag. Others happen to pass by the device without seeing it, and hear its content by accident. Playback of audio file is triggered by a proximity sensor (used as a switch) when someone is closer than 25 cm to the device. - glitch : An array of speakers are hidden in public places. The speakers loudly broadcasts interference glitches caused when passersby receive incoming messages and phone calls. The prototype draws attention to the amount of personal communication taking place in a given space and will be used to analyze behaviors in response to its presence in the public realm. When passing by the project site, people receiving sms or incoming calls involuntarily cause loud transient glitch noises to be heard along their path. The nature and origin of the noises are familiar and easily identifiable but the speakers are hidden. Because of the linear disposition of the speaker array along a usual pedestrian path, the glitches stalk the person during the whole phase of mobile communication initiation.

What do you mean by "location" ?

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE From COGNITIVE AND CARTOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS : TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH (Colette Cauvin). The location expresses the absolute address, that is to say, the position of a place or of a set of places related to a reference, expressed in geographical coordinates. In this context, space is considered as a conatainer, an entity in itself.

In urban studies, a location correspond to the knowledge of an address, whatever it may be : coordinates, text... The knowledge of the location corresponds to what is called the "route knowledge" and then to a procedural model, which can be modified, evolve towards a configurational model, when all the elements (nodes, paths, networks...) of each place are known.

Any identified place can have a location, but often, it is groups f lcoation that are more interesting because they express positions of each place in relation to one another. Short distance between location expres the association of places considered to be close to each other, which can have different interpretations. "

Features of physical rooms

Via : Greenberg S. and Roseman, M. (2003). Using a Room Metaphor to Ease Transitions in Groupware. In M. Ackerman, V. Pipek, V. Wulf (Eds) Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management, 203-256, January, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. A room metaphor is a particular type of spatial model whose features afford a natural way to provide people with good collaborative opportunities. The functions they present are a bit different from the one I presented in my report.

Bounded space : Partitioning : Rooms are collections of bounded spaces, separated by walls.

Containment : Rooms can contain people, tools, and artifacts.

Permeability : People can enter and leave rooms, look inside them through doors and windows, and bring things in and out of them.

Container : Persistence : Objects left in a room persist over time in the same spatial location.

Customization : People can customize a room by bringing in their own artifacts and arranging them in the space.

Privacy and ownership : The way rooms are customized often indicates its ownership and who is allowed in them.

Spatial location : Spatial relations : Objects can be organized within a room when a person spatially relates them to one another.

Proximity and action : Collaborators can interpret each other’s actions by how close they are to one another and to the objects in the space.

Common reference and orientation : People see and reference the room, its objects, and its inhabitants from a similar orientation.

Reciprocity : Collaborators know that others can see their actions and objects in the same way.

Research Meeting

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Notion of virtual landmark : adding information (asynchronous awareness) to a place. "I've been here". We have to find a task in which objects are tracked on a field... Mine ?

Participants should need the information in context (just in time, just in place).The coordination must not be planified (unlike planified coordination in which for instance people decide to water plants on one zone on monday and in another zone on friday).

Users will be flaneur/explorator who perceives traces of previous explorator.

Type of information : about the object (its state, modifications...), people who passed by, directions...

A community that leaves spatial messages. You pass by a place and then you receive a message "come and drink at my place" :) A message linked to a zone (link with Mauro's project). Messages left by a participant could be sorted : we can told them to sens a SMS to different numbers : 8526 : synchronous : to people who are in the same zone at the time. 7845 : asynchronous : to people who come in the zone later.

Two applications : - mobile learning : urban sociology, architecteure, geography, geology... - megawatch project : self-organization, let them using the tool, territory appropriation...

Work to check

People like me interested in space and wireless applications should check the work of Steve Benford. In particular, a series of experience projects engage with different user communities to develop new combinations of physical and digital worlds and how explore these may be exploit enhance the quality of everyday life. Different environments with -> 802-11b (WIFI on PALM PDA) + GPS or PDAs combined with GPS receivers and WiFi networking to access a virtual world when moving through the physical world. - Uncle Roy : Uncle Roy exploited a technique called self-reported positioning in which street players would report their won position, either explicitly by declaring their position to Uncle Roy or implicitly by their PDA sending information about which area of the map they were looking at to remote online players. Our analysis of this technique shows they humans may generate and interpret positional data in subtle ways that go beyond understanding exactly where someone is and that raise implications for the use of automated positioning systems such as GPS.

- Can you see me ? Studies drawing on ethnographic observation, feedback from players and analysis of system, identified four different strategies for dealing with the uncertainties in GPS and Wifi: removing them, hiding them, revealing them and exploiting them.

Location-based services

Navigation Technology provides these functionalities :- address search - optimal route genration (fastest, shortest) - preview of entire route - history (saves previously visited cities and streets) - nearest point of interest (POI) search based on current location - self-location - voice and written driving instructions - maps display during instructions - off-route and return to route notification - real-time traffic update supports - accurate display of junctions - display of estimated time of arrival and distance to destination

The Role of Place in Shaping Virtual Community

The Role of Place in Shaping Virtual Community : a workshop organized by Quentin Jones (New Jersey Institute of Technology) and Christine Halverson (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center) in 2002 and 2003 I should check the 2004 edition !!

This workshop aims to explore the myriad of ways that: 1. the design of virtual or hybrid spaces / places directly provides common ground for user interactions; and 2. communities use public interactions in virtual spaces to create shared meaning.

"These places where virtual community members interact are referred to by a wide variety of labels including chat rooms, cyber-inns, virtual settlements, commons, and conferences. The provision of such labels highlights the role of virtual places in providing context for discourse. Of course, the context of place both affects, and is affected by associated user interactions and the nature and form of the client technologies used by members to interact." That reminds me this quote from Rem Koolhas, the famous architect who claimes that words that are dying in the real world (wall, room) rebirth in the virtual world (firewall, chatroom).

Foo Camp : Geo Stuff

I saw on starhill a wide bunch of new spatial service ideas. The action took place at Foo Camp (FOO standing for "Friends of O'Reilly"), a hackers offsite hosted by Tim O'Reilly and his associates in the orchard behind their offices in Sebastapol, California."First a highly interactive white board architectural jam, which I facilitated, and therefore have no real notes. Rich Gibson may also have taken notes(?) We discussed grass roots geo apps in progress, geocoding address schemes, spatial search semantics, location sensing networks, and ended up drilling down, discussing embedding WFS, (Web Feature Server) encoded layers within an RDF description. Dan Greening talked briefly about the OMA ( Open Mobility Alliance) then Johsua Schacter showed his gps maps of new york as a preview of his nyc.lopedia, and briefly described a new RESTful service extension to geourl. Anselm Hook talked about Thingster a wish-fulfillment engine, a community web service based on on precise geographical location, and showed his 3D globe map of the blogosphere. showed of a bit of Mikel Maron's worldKit . Anslem reminds me that Jason Harlan showed of his widely regarded, cool blogmapper, And then Dirk-Willem van Gulik, president of the apache server foundation gave us a tour through the underpinnings of maps he develped with asemantics.com. (Dirk is also author of the original WFS specification)"

I would like to participate to this kind of event. Via starhill : Ideas for Location games

- Stalking suggest some good game ideas - Carriers worried about stalkers ( a topic known among telco committees as the the 'stalker.com' problem) - Flash mobs also offer possibilites - ' A former CIA guy' had game idea: Tier one countrys like iraq covered by intelligence analysis., but Tier 3 counties like Somalia could be set up as game target to acquire game info (intelligence) - Fort Irwin California is the national simulation laboratory for military location games - There's a book on military simulation games - Social Games primitives: - capture the flag - scavenger hunts - geocaching - Segmentation essential Success will depend on audiences, eg. Ispy for kids, airport game for a bored air traveler - What about acquisition games - like mobile Pokemon card trading - Game designs for adolescent girls - who like sms ( simple message services) - Game as an event based on 'flash mobs - Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy Bowfinger film as a stalker game - Educational scavening hut for kids like Apple Tucson Sabino canyon event - What about a 'paint ball' like game witha gps camera. You 'die' if you are photographed. - Game destinations: to go to the library for clues. go to a restaurant... - Super waves in stadiums - Rock concert sms for sound requests - Games as a real learning events - for learning things, empowering - Wayback historical time machine location games - Create a future in place - Virtual objects become real - real game objects- mailed by player to himself - Game objects - high value like - harry potter, star wars collectibles - How about an game palyers end real object editing kit e.g. for ' a swords, and shields' - For stalking games, Players must sign up agreeing to volunteer to be suprised by a game event. - Location games marry physical excitement of outdor sports with fantasy from computer games

telecom bof

Telecom 2003 is not really interesting. Four years ago, there was a kind-of too optimistic wave and today... what really counts is "how can we earn more and moren money with stupid services". I saw things like "ubquitous home, clothes..." with which users could switch on their light at home or change tv channels ! Vow with FOMA (Japanes 3G) ! It really sucks since we already have remote controls or domotic systems ! The fact that Telco COmpanies wants us to use their networks is just because the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is less and less important

-> new services = new way to earn money.

I also saw multiplayer games that use networks instead of using bluetooth or wifi. The only added value is to play mariokart-like game in two different places far from more than 100meters...

Space and Activity

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE I should list all jobs in which space is meaningful considering collaboration : - firemen - army (platoon...) - rescue - logistics, imports/export. - field studies (archology, geology, sedimentology...) - ...

and list their problems related to space... ... build a model about space use (place, synchronous and asychronous awareness...)

Locative Media/Collaborative Cartography

Interesting conference :" The democratization of mapping technologies has given amateurs the means to produce their own cartographic data, which, with arrival of wireless networking technologies will make it possible for subjective mental maps to be made objective. Sharing these "headmaps" will enable the development of a non-proprietary data pool of human geography. Unlike State maps, annotated with "official" point of interest, (City Hall, McDonalds, etc), these portable immersive maps will permit users to inscribe space with their individual and collective desire.

This panel discussion will bring together noted researchers in the emerging field of collaborative cartography, all of whom work outside of the traditional GIS sector. Motivated by a common interest in hybridizing geography with computer science and social theory, the participants share the belief that they are creating tactical tools that will help facilitate new, socially beneficial forms of organization. "