Tech

Mobile phones, spirituality and ghosts

in

There seems to be some people who connect personal mobile tech into spiritual practices around the world (genevieve bell at Intel as claimed by matt jones and smart mobs). Spirituality and mobile phone is a nice topic but there is something weirder: It reminds me this news from 2004:

A Wirral paranormal investigator has rubbished claims that mobile phones are chasing away ghosts. Tony Cornell, of the Society for Psychical Research, says the number of spooky sightings started to decline with the introduction of mobiles 15 years ago. (…) He reckons it’s all down to a lack of TV programmes like The X-Files rather than mobile phone microwaves in the atmosphere. He said: ‘In the run-up to the year 2000 there was loads of stuff on the telly about the paranormal and that made the public more aware. ‘But now people may have an experience and not realise that it’s of a paranormal nature. And, anyway, we use lots of hi-tech equipment in our research and that has no effect. Good solid reliable ghosts are there and they are as hard as ever to catch.’

Some RSS side uses

in

I am wondering lately about uses of RSS different than just news/blogfeed aggregation. I use RSS for:

  • checking my agenda: I export a RSS file from my calendar.
  • listing my research bibliography (exported from bibDesk)
  • get weather forecast (taken from anti-mega)
  • check technorati watchlists
  • keep serious to-do lists

It's not that much. I tried to gather some RSS tricks and fell across this:

  • Chris Heathcote provided his blog readers with a html formular that pushesthe message into his RSS reader.
  • Danny O'Brien interviewed by Life Hacker talked about an RSS feed generator; "It’s tricky, but not impossible, to create an easy-to-use UI that would let you mark bits of a web page, and have those turn into the titles and items of an RSS feed. When new items appear, the app would attempt to spot them and fit them into the same template. It might get it wrong, but with more training it would get to the point where the RSS feed would work correctly (until someone redesigned the original Webpage). I picked this out as something important, because RSS readers are turning into the place where people keep broadcast announcements. Sysadmins don’t send out log messages any more, and people are running fewer announce-only mailing lists. You stick it in your RSS feed. (...) but what’s important here is that people shouldn’t have to depend on vendors for RSS feeds. You should be able to turn anything into an RSS feed - and share that template with the world."

Electronic Plastic (Büro Destruct)

in ,

The reason why I am into electronic games lately is that I bought this nice book called "Electronic Plastic" by Büro Destruct.

Electronic Plastic turns time back to the Stone Age of computer games in the early 80s, long before Gameboy and Playstation existed. Designer Jaro Gielens collected more than 380 originally wrapped, battery-powered oldschool computer games. The finest and craziest ones are presented and commented on in Electronic Plastic. The layout is by Lopetz from "Büro Destruct", a latent computer game addict himself, and author Uwe Schütte putsus in the mood through his atmospheric introduction about the period end of the 70s - early 80s. From a cultural point of view, Electronic Plastic documents a bygone era of consumer electronics.Computer games like Blockbuster, Pinball and Race`n´Chase ruled. Today, the "Handhelds" and "Tabletops" fascinate through the wonderful retrodesign of the game shells, packages, logos. Anyone enthusiastic about design, typography and/or computertrash will even just enjoy the boxes and the typefaces used and will acknowledge how consistently the game shells and the packaging perfectly match the games´ concept. Besides that, the manufac-turers - with fine names like Bandai, Bambino, Epoch and Gakken - also managed to develop highly entertaining games with very simple means: a miniscreen and a few small buttons. The "oldschool" computer gadgets were superseded by exchangeable cartridge systems in the middle of the 80s. Handhelds and tabletops disappeared from department stores. Today they are rare collector items which one usually only still gets to see in dusty attics, or in Electronic Plastic.

A nice resource, with great pictures attesting the diversity of interfaces at that time!

Tabletop head-to-head electronic game

in

Tabletop handheld is an old type of electronic game of the past that I still find of interest since they provide users with a very simple way to interact. There are no useless buttons, nor hardrive crash. Here are two examples. The first one is Gakken's paint roller: The second is Kenner's Star Wars Electronic Laser Beam: What is nice in these 2 examples is that there used to be simple interface (with a screen in example 1 and without in example 2) to support tabletop head-to-head game. Now everybody is struggling to find ultra hype interfaces (tangible or not), with crazy interactive tables/walls/carpets/bathrooms/put whatever you want here/chairs... I am a bit nostalgic of the diversity/creativity of electronic games at that time: so many companies, so many interfaces, so many colors/forms...

And the best is when there is no screen! It's great to see how designers manage to create nice products without any display (or just 2-3 LEDs, well at that time...). I like the idea of leaving the screen aside. What I would like to claim here is that now that technology could be integrated, it's maybe time to think about interactive stuff not based on the desktop computer paradigm. The point of designing interactive tables for instance is not to support the same processes as those implemented in computers, it's more to support activities...

An internet table

in

Intelligent Vibrations provides an "internet table" specially designed for bars and Internet Cafés :

The whole surface of the table is an interactive TapScreen: clients Interact by tapping with their fingernail, pen, fork or spoon... Customers can place orders for food or drink directly from their seats, choose items to view on the computer, or...go on-line. Water, grease, food and scratches do not disturb the functioning of the TapScreen. It works even when objects are placed on it. Interactive zones on the table can display menus, advertise local businesses or present other information

Picture found on craowiki: What's interesting here is the technology they use which is based on the detection of Bulk Acoustic Waves. It's then a kind of communicating glass.

TViews2: another interactive table

in

Ali Mazalek's interactive table is nice: tviews1 and tviews2. Made at Media Fabrics Group (MIT Media Laboratory)

TViews is an integrated display and interaction platform designed for collaborative and social exploration of multimedia applications in the home or classroom environment. It can support a variety of interactive applications, including spatial and multi-viewpoint storytelling systems, narrative simulation games, and media content browsing.

An interesting application is the Tangible Viewpoints project which xplores how physical objects and augmented surfaces can be used as tangible embodiments of different character perspectives in a multiple point-of-view interactive narrative.

After NFC, there is RedTacton: sending data over the surface of the skin

in

NFC (Near Field Communication) was already a protocol for very close communication:

It enables the user to exchange all kinds of information, in security, simply by bringing two devices close together. Its short-range interaction over a few centimeters greatly simplifies the whole issue of identification, as there is less confusion when devices can only "hear" their immediate neighbors.

Now there is RedTacton, which according to Taipei Time/The Guardian allows to send data over the surface of the skin at speeds of up to 2Mbps. The backbone could now be used as a broadband personal network.

Using RedTacton-enabled devices, music from an MP3 player in your pocket would pass through your clothing and shoot over your body to headphones in your ears. Instead of fiddling around with a cable to connect your digital camera to your computer, you could transfer pictures just by touching the PC while the camera is around your neck. And since data can pass from one body to another, you could also exchange electronic business cards by shaking hands, trade music files by dancing cheek to cheek, or swap phone numbers just by kissing. (...) It doesn't need transmitters to be in direct contact with the skin -- they can be built into gadgets, carried in pockets or bags, and will work within about 20cm of your body. RedTacton doesn't introduce an electric current into the body -- instead, it makes use of the minute electric field that occurs naturally on the surface of every human body. A transmitter attached to a device, such as an MP3 player, uses this field to send data by modulating the field minutely in the same way that a radio carrier wave is modulated to carry information. (...) An intriguing possibility is that the technology will be used as a sort of secondary nervous system to link large numbers of tiny implanted components placed beneath the skin to create powerful onboard -- or in-body -- computers.

Why do I blog this? vow that's the future, cyberpunk scifi is very close!

RFID tag implanted in one\'s hand

in ,

Some crazy folk implanted a RFID chip in his hand as depicted in this Flickr picture: Here is explained the point of this.

FAQ (frequently asked questions) Q: can't they track you?! A: no. the read range is only 2 inches max. even with a high powered reader, the chip itself does not have the capability to transmit farther than a couple inches tops. this makes it very difficult to scan my RFID chip without me noticing, and it's definitely not possible to scan it just by me walking by a sensor or something. It has to be pretty deliberate.

Q: why the hand, and your left hand to boot? A: well, I reach for my car door handle with my left hand, and I can get used to opening my front door with my left as well. plus, being right handed, my left hand is far less likely to get crushed, mutilated, or otherwise damaged... and I'm sure granules of crushed glass, silicon, and other metals could cause health complications, aside from having a crushed hand.

Q: did you do it yourself? A: hell no. a client of mine is a doctor and we traded services.

Well, it's crazy :( Some odd experiment...

Interactive Table Blog

in

Thanks regine for pointing me on this nice blog about interactive table design! It's about the new incarnation of the dialog table

Like a regular table, Dialog is designed for social interactions, but it utilizes digital technologies and an innovative interface to facilitate learning more about the arts. Gesture recognition and video-tracking software allow multiple users to interact simultaneously with a variety of information appearing on the screen. Using metaphors of water, players can choose artworks by selecting, enlarging, and dragging images from an available "pool" of content to individual "puddles." Connections, represented as threads, are made between artworks, creating links among various pieces and users. Additional information can be obtained about the artwork, including related audio and video clips. Another function allows users to print postcards of favorite works.

This prototype was commissioned by the Walker Art Center through an international design competition in 2002.

Moving foward dogster: social woofing and SNIF

in

Social software for dogs is moving forward. After dogster (and its hamster variant), there is now SNIF: Social Networking in Fur which seems way better. Dogster was based on sharing stuff about your puppy (pics...). SNIF is ahead: it's a system that allows pet owners to interact through their pets' social networks. The point is to network through dogs: dogs serve as a very strong social catalyzer. This paper by Noah Fields, Jonathan Gips, Philip Liang and Arnaud Pilpré offers an interesting description of the project as well as some potential scenarios. What's next?

Lightspace Wall and Floor application

in

(via), a Wall and Floor application made by Lightspace:It's intended to "promotes healthy social interaction among children, integrates physical activity and electronic entertainment". According to them, "the Lightspace system provides a way to reap the benefits of this trend toward interactive games without having to invest in new real estate".

Lightspace is a revolutionary entertainment system that combines the latest lighting and interactive technologies to produce a recreational experience that will provide hours of fun to children and adults of all ages. The system is capable of storing and running a potentially limitless variety of interactive programs and can be used by any number of participants simultaneously. Lightspace creates an engaging experience that will draw young children, teenagers and adults. Lightspace provides significant return on investment by generating the repeat-customer business so critical for family entertainment center growth and profitability.

Military hardware

in

Last week, in a post about the PS2 pad used to send missiles I said " military material is normally way ahead video games ". This statement seemed to raise eyebrowses. Some said that it was the opposite. Maybe I was misunderstood, the point is that I perceived military hardware or material to be ahead, and not the usage. Militaries have indeed money to try different stuff, sometimes it works (gps, networks...) and sometimes not (4bit processors in radar systems,punch cards? ). Armies (mostly in the US have money to try out lots of projects then... the usage is a different topic. And here comes the video game developers who hack the technologies and turn then into something new. And what is interesting here is that the army is more and more paying attention to the bleeding edge: video games. It seems that it's less difficult for the army to develop hardware and devices (they do have to deal with so much marketing issues if it's public, they throw prototypes and... “The street finds its own uses for things” (william gibson)

.dot.dot.dot

in

.dot.dot.dot:

.dot.dot.dot is a wearable display that connects to your mobile phone and is triggered by your communication. by designing different animations for your closest relationships (best friends, parents, boy/girlfriends) and saving them on .dot.dot.dot you can express to the people around you who you're talking to. if it's your girlfriend, design an animation for a beating heart. when she calls or texts you, .dot.dot.dot will light up with your animation. .dot.dot.dot also has a joystick so you can play games with friends over sms.

Tangible Computing (but not at eTech)

in

And now it's Timo's turn to talk about tangible interaction. His presentation is here. It synthetise all the different periods of interaction design and new tangible computing systems that are now... emerged. Nice pictures and good reference at the end. There seems to be a burst about this topic lately, which is good because we are eager to use those devices (at last!).

Using PS2 pads to control missiles

in

According to Michael Macedonia (CTO of the government-owned U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation), games gains more and more respect for training armed forces. A short column in Gamasutra deals with this issue. My favorite part is the following:

Currently in use is a missile system interface, the design of which is based on the PlayStation 2 controller. According to Macedonia, senior officials polled a group of soldiers about what would be their ideal method of control for missile guidance, and that design was resultant. He maintains that it is important, on both the hardware and software side, to make the technology fit the user, not force the user to fit the technology.

Why do I blog this? Actually, military material is normally way ahead video games (as well as other innovation factors like sex/cybersex) in terms of innovative interface, but here it seems that video games offered the most interesting solution first. It's nice to see that now specific products are based on a standard derived from video games. From an interaction design point of view, this kind of fact is great. I would like to know more about the development process. Well, they certainly did some focus groups and studied how people control things, with.. video games (with all thise buzz lately about serious games and military training, that's for sure). And this raises new questions like how will tomorrow's technology developers/interaction designers take into account today's use of technology. As a matter of fact, if we rely on the idea that today's styles of interaction styles is based on yesterday's way of interactings (knobs, pad...) we can assume that... in the near future... militaries will use gestural/embodied/situated/location-triggered interfaces?????????? Well let's see.

A Faraday cage for your cell phones

in

(via), a tool to prevent yourself from being tracked:

The mobile phone pouches "Silver" and "Copper" act as Faraday cages, completely shielding the phone and preventing it from sending or receiving signals. (...) The pouch prevents the user being located or having their movements followed. Even turning off the phone cannot always guarantee this. In the possession of this personal radio blocker, a mobile phone owner can decide whether they would like to be in a spatial data model or not.A simple piece of fabric in the form of a pouch turns off a highly intergrated and technically complex appliance.The constant space-related data exchange becomes identifiable by being interrupted.

RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM

in

If like me you ever wondered about the differences between those different types of standard (usually employed for webfeeds), here is a definition by Ben Hammersley taken from his slides at ETeach 2005.

RSS 2.0 RSS 1.0 Atom
Simple, adhoc, temporary, loosely defined data, very loosely defined standard, many many uses Fantastic for machine readable lists. Useless for anything else Complex, strict, preplanned, strongly defined data, strongly defined standard, burdened with evil buzzword. Fantastic for complex document mining. A nightmare for tiny ad-hoc apps. Simple, strictly defined data, strictly defined standard, with extra architectural loving

Check his tutorial slides (pdf), it's definetely worth reading!