Research

[Research] Research about mobile games and the use of space

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Adriana de Souza e Silva's work about space and place seems close to my interests!

My research deals with social/cultural effects of mobile technologies via media arts and pervasive games. Within this context, I'm especially interested in exploring how location-based mobile games (such as Swedish "Botfighters", and Japanese "Mogi") transform our experience of space and create new social and collaboration patterns. The connection between cell phones and location-awareness represents an important shift in the gaming environment from traditional videogames, which immerse the user in digital spaces, to pervasive games, which place the user in hybrid spaces. These types of games can also be successfully used in education and learning practices.

[Research] How to find mutual modeling acts?

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Mutual Modeling: representation of the partner cognitive state, namely inferences an individual make about his/her partner's goals, purposes, intents, understanding.

And I would call 'mutual modeling acts' the interactions that aims at understanding what the partners is up to, will do, aims at or get from the situation.

I would like to establish a typology of 'Mutual Modeling act' thanks to a qualitative analysis of the data collected from CatchBob (annotations written on the tablet PC screen + verbalisation during the group confrontation to the replay). I expect 2 kinds of acts, but it's hard to operate them as variables:

  1. explicit mutual modeling acts: it is easy because things can occur in dialogues or annotations; the easiest occurences would be like "I understood that you/he/she/they wanted to...", "I did not get that you/he/she/they", "you/he/she/they did not understand that...". There could also be some less clarified stuff.
  2. implicit mutual modeling acts: here the real challenge! Tracking this will be difficult but I will use specific indexes drawn from game events like 'spatial overlap': calculated by counting the number of rooms both partners searched.

Update: gosh I was certainly tired when I wrote the second part. I think I mistook 2 things here: the mutual modeling act (like the explicit acts described previously) and the outcome of a bad mutual modeling (path overlap for instance or actions redundancy) during the task. Then the question of the implicit acts of mutual modeling is left open... It might be all the actions carried out by an individual to express his/her goal and the future things he/she will undertook... mmmh I still have to find example to operate this in catchbob!

[Research] CatchBob experiment procedure

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  1. Game instructions (at craft). Players receive different instructions (tool + game objectives): 5’ Videotaped
  2. Strategy planning (at craft): Players talk about strategy and then they have to spread on the campus.We show them the map of EPFL with the WiFi network topology: 5’
  3. Game: 30’ Logfiles
  4. Post-game questionnaire: 5’ Paper questionnaire
  5. Group-confrontation to the replay, semi-structured questionnaire (open questions): 30’ Videotaped

[Research] A phd thesis close to my interest

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Fraser, M., (2000)Working with Objects in Collaborative Virtual Environments, PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. What I find interesting in this research is the continuous balance between technical and social sides. I would like to put this kind of flavor in my phd. I also like the emphasis put on the lack of study about how technology effectively support collaboration. The notion of ‘naturalistic’ data within ‘experimental’ situations is smart as well.

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are three-dimensional graphical worlds, which allow geographically distributed users to communicate using some combination of visual and auditory representations. As these technologies have emerged, the focus on their development has been mainly technical, such as incorporating ever-larger numbers of users into the environment. Surprisingly, however, there have been few investigations of whether and how these technologies might actually support collaborative work. This thesis draws on social scientific research to investigate the potential of CVEs to allow simple forms of collaboration. In particular, studies of workplaces have shown how objects (documents, models, visualisations etc.) in the environment are critical to achieving collaborative work. Such analyses reveal how the social organisation of such work is accomplished with and through objects, both in real environments and through communications technologies. These kinds of investigation are applied to explore the possibilities of ‘object-focused interaction’ in CVEs. What problems arise in distributed participants’ interaction as a result of assumptions of current CVE designs? Rather than adopting ever more complex hardware, what resources can be provided by currently widespread desktop technologies for interacting with and around features of mutual interest in virtual environments?

Peculiarities of object-focused CVE interaction are described, including difficulties in: peripheral monitoring and gaze direction; misleading user representations; organising actions for their visibility by others; ‘seeing what other users see’; and defining the structure of virtual environments prior to their use in situ. Interface techniques to address these features of CVE interaction are also introduced, including extending peripheral views with distorted ‘lenses’; extending visual representations of action onto virtual objects; navigating with respect to others’ virtual actions; sharing views of multi-user virtual environments; and displaying the intricacy and validity of object definitions in CVEs.

[Research] Position or place?

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Jeffrey Hightower, "From Position to Place," (.pdf) in Proceedings of The 2003 Workshop on Location-Aware Computing, pp. 10-12, Oct. 2003.

Emerging proactive applications want to reason about “place”, not coordinates. Existing systems rely on manually defining places which, while useful, does not scale to ubiquitous deployment. In this paper I define place and challenge the research community with learning and labeling places automatically.

[Space and Place] Programming for cities

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(via), Programming for cities: workshop about code and architecture/urban stuff in Amsterdam

"Programming for Cities" is a workshop that reinforces a long existing link between code and architecture. Many fine buildings can be reduced to a few lines of code, and a quick glance backward in time shows that is a consequence of architectural theory. This workshop will start with a short but broad overview of this longstanding connection between programming and architecture. After this the basic elements (about 6 of them) of programming will be discussed. The main part of the workshop will be consisting of a hand-on approach to design a city from code.

[Research] Conferences about CSCW, mobile HCI...

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The mobility Studio has an impressive list of conferences where we (well Mauro, Fab and myself) should submit papers. i spotted a few one for catchbob:

Interact 2005 - Tenth IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Deadline 31 January, 2005. Full papers, tutorials, workshops, doctoral consortium)

ECSCW 2005 - 9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work ( Deadline 2 March, 2005. Papers)

UBICOMP 2005 - 7th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Deadline 7 March, 2005. Papers, workshop)

MobileHCI 2005 - 7th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Deadline 11 March, 2005. Full papers, workshops)

[Research] Experimental psychology or ethnography in CSCW?

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Though a bit old (1993), the paper "Mixing oil and water? Ethnography versus Experimental Psychology in the study of computer-mediated communication" (by Monk, A., Nardi, B., Gilbert, N., Mantei, M., McCarthy, J.) still adresses a very relevant topic. It was actually a panel discussion during Interchi'93. The position of the ethnographer is confronted to the one of the experimentalists and a case study is discussed.

The study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has brought together investigators from very different research traditions. Investigators coming from Sociology and Anthropology have been trained in the tradition of ethnography, whereas investigators coming from Experimental Psychology and Human Factors think more in terms of the hypothetico-deductive tradition of experiment and quantitative measurement.

The position of this workshop is that these traditions can be seen as complementary rather than contradictory. Indeed it can be argued that there is already a merging of the two approaches when it comes to methods of data collection. The major differences are in the way data are interpreted.

[Locative Media] Phones predicting user's behavior

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A new mobile phone which learns people’s daily habits could be used to predict what someone is about to do and judge how close they are to their friends. The phone may also help track how diseases spread and societies form. Current models have a built-in calendar to remind users about special events, but this version is far smarter. It learns about the owner’s life by logging every call and message made and noting when applications like alarm clocks and cameras are used. It can then give advice or send reminders to do things. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed the system, which logs the ID code of every Bluetooth chip the phone passes, the location of every phone mast it contacts, every person phoned or texted and when applications are used. Data is then stored on a server which uses software to recognise any patterns in behaviour and predict what may happen next.

[Research] Methodology to analyze mobile activity

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Experience clip: Method for user participation and evaluation of mobile concepts by Isomursu M, Kuutti K & Väinämö S (2004) in Proc. Eigth Biennal Participatory Design Conference 2004, Toronto, Canada, 83-92.

This paper describes experiences from using a field testing technique for collecting user experience information for evaluating mobile applications used in everyday life. Our technique is based on the usage of mobile camera phones that are used for capturing video and audio during the use of the mobile application. The users helped researchers in collecting user experience material by shooting the video clips themselves. To our surprise they also started to participate actively by presenting "miniplays" in the clips to make their point clear. Our results show that with this technique we can get richer emotional material and more versatile usage situations than with traditional observation methods, and additionally there is clearly a yet unexplored potential to develop a more systematic design method around participation.

[Research] Location telling in mobile phone

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The topic of location telling in mobile phone conversation is always compelling and relevant for my research. I just found this paper called "Location: a socially dynamic property — a study of location telling in mobile phone calls" by Ilkka Arminen. It is basically a study of how people formulate their whereabouts and why. THe authors also intends to complement Eric Laurier's paper "why people say where they are during mobile phone calls".

The location of co-conversationalist is commonly relevant during mobile phone conversation. However, the location is not discussed and does not appear to be relevant in geographical terms. The location is done relevant by the activies parties are involved. Joint activities make relevant spatio-temporal location, such as distance in minutes from the meeting point via the vehicle used.

The precursor for any mutual communication is interactional availability, and the proximal location may have become relevant as a constraint, such as being on a dinner table or toilet. Extended discussions of location concern mainly its socio-emotional sense, such as biographical meaning, place where marriage proposal was done, etc. To put it other way round, the strict geographical location is relevant for mobile conversationalists only on few instances, such as instructing somebody on how to find place x (and even that may require further explanations). The design of location sensitive devices and applications should take into account that pure geographical location is rarely of users’ interest.

[Research] Locative Media testing

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At last! A study that aims at investigating how users names places using a location-based service (namely geonotes: Petra Fagerberg, Fredrik Espinoza, and Per Persson.What is a place? Allowing users to name and define places. In Proceedings of CHI 2003, April 2003.

From working with location-based information systems we know that positioning is problematic. A different approach was tested, where users themselves were allowed to name and define the places they wanted to use. The question was if they would do so, and if they would understand the notion of “place”. In a user study, 78 users created 84 place labels. The user study also gave us some unexpected input to the users’ perception of place: not only physical, but also virtual places were created.

[Locative Media] Multi-disciplinary research in location aware media

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Via the locative mailing list, herehttp://34n118w.net/UCHRI/ you can find

an open channel for the scientist/researcher quotient of the discussion participants, who may not have considered a creative application of mobile media and mapping in the context of their research. The identification of critical issues, spaces of common interest, and potential blind spots between disciplines is of particular interest. A bibliography will be compiled and made available at the conclusion of this discussion.

[Locative Media] A2B: geo-url like software

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A2B seems to be the new geo-url like tool to find websites by geographic position. It also allows mobile searching with free GPS software.

With A2B you can search for the websites nearest to any location on Earth. Any location on Earth? That's right. Every place on the Earth's surface has a latitude and longitude position associated with it. As long as we know the latitude and longitude of the place you want to search with, A2B will find the nearest websites.

Nearest websites? Indeed. Just like any other search engine, A2B returns the websites most relevant to your search. With A2B, the nearest website to the place you're searching comes up first, then the next-nearest, and so on. A2B tells you how far each website is away from where you're searching, and in what direction.

Can A2B tell me what's near where I am right now? Absolutely. If you have a GPS device, you can use our free GPS software, GPSCookie, and search automatically.  GPSCookie works on Windows machines and Pocket PC PDAs - it's great fun if you have a mobile internet connection. You can also search manually by typing in your position if you know your latitude and longitude - there are various ways of finding this out.

[Locative Media] iMap for mac os x

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iMap

iMap 3 is a data visualisation tool designed to map large amounts of latitude/longitude data (or US ZIPcodes). iMap imports data from databases or spreadsheets and maps it onto image or vector maps. Database queries can be used to map only a subset of the data or to filter the data for a certain criterion. iMap is extremely expandable: it offers a plugin format enabling anyone to extend its functionality. Maps can be exported as high quality PDF files for cross-platform viewing. Whether you are outlining marketing strategies, defining sales territories, tracking population trends, or visualizing ecological distributions, iMap offers a flexible and affordable solution.

[Locative Media] site-specific: a course on space/locative media

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site_specific:

SITEspecific is a class that will examine the notion of site as a space that is practiced or performed. Digital networks and wireless technologies are shifting the contemporary notion of urban place. As public and private, local and global are collapsed by the infiltration of portable electronics and the invisible boundaries of wireless connectivity, the mapping of the urban environment is increasingly complex. The class will examine the changing notions of urban space as an opportunity for intervention. (...) Each student will work toward a final project in which they create a research process designed to investigate the notion of “site.” Site can be defined broadly, for example, as a set of conditions contributing to an urban phenomena or a specific space in the city. It can also be defined as a blog, e-mail list, or video stream. The research process will develop a notational strategy used for tracking the dynamic of the chosen site. This mapping can be a video, web site, PDA application, database, algorithm, graphic, etc.

There is also a class blog.