User Experience

ambx: augment game immersion with environmental perceptions

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ambx (pronounced am-bee-ex) is a technology to be released by Philips in May 2006 that aims at improving the user immersion in games.

amBX-enabled games will provide gamers with the ability to use light, colour, sound, heat and even airflow in the real world during gameplay.

Imagine the room of the future, where all electronic devices are amBX-enabled. The treacherous road to Saigon will turn your room jungle green, swimming with dolphins will splash it deep blue, ‘Halo’ jumps will turn your fans on full, lightning storms will strobe your white lighting, and attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion will blast on your heaters.

Incorporating a scripting language, software engine and architecture, amBX has been designed to deliver all-new player experiences through enabled devices such as LED colour-controlled lights, active furniture, fans, heaters, audio and video, which are all placed in the user’s room. amBX goes even further to provide the support framework for peripheral manufacturers to develop these enabled products, empowering both developers and publishers to amBX-enable and enhance their games. In the future, game players may even be able to author and share their own personal amBX experiences online.

The networked home is rapidly becoming a reality for many, through the introduction of low cost wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and BlueTooth. amBX has embraced this changing future by allowing content authors a language in which to describe and recreate experiences in an Ambient Intelligent Environment. Within a location the devices controlled by the amBX language act as parts of a browser. Together they render the experience and the player’s room, in effect, becomes the browser

Why do I blog this? It's a relevant idea since the game experience is not only a matter of putting a DVD in a box connected to a TV, the context/environmental experience is also worthwile. I don't know whether it's a good way to implement it but it's a good step towards it.

De Certeau on how people modify artifacts

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Lucie Giard describes how Michel de Certeau sees people's link with artifact in the following terms:

Certeau’s originality lay in his refusal to endorse the old opposition of high culture versus popular culture, translated into the dichotomy of creative art versus mass production. On the contrary, he moved his attention from the objects (movies, comic books, rock bands records, and the like) to what he called "operations" that people perform with these objects. What was at stake for him was the way people use some readymade objects, the way they organize their private space, their office, or their working-place, the way they "practice" their environment and all public space available to them (shopping malls, town streets, airports and railway stations, movie theatres, and the like). By so doing, Certeau focused his reflection on the ordinary "practices" of every man and woman in his/her everyday life. Thus he substituted the assumption of a large-scale anonymous creativity of ordinary people for the all-too-common presupposition about a passive mass consumption of objects and products. Every man or woman could be regarded as the "producer" of his/her own lifestyle through the true "art" of recycling objects, adapting and transforming readymade products.

Michel de Certeau's social philosophy was based on the notion of détournement and collage, whose techniques allow “weak” people to subvert the social constraints built by “strong” people, even when the weaker apparently comply with their rulers’ injunctions

This approach is so close to what we see today in terms of DIY activities related to technology/life hacking... To get more about De Certeau, read The Practice of Everyday Life.

Encouraging basic social interaction of children with autism skills using robots

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Aude Billard, a researcher at our school, worked with others on a neat project that aims at encouraging basic social interaction of children with autism skills using a humanoid robot. One of the experiment she ran is well described in this paper.

our current approach of repeated trails over a long period of time allowed the children time to explore the interaction space of robot-human, as well as human-human interaction. In some cases the children started to use the robot as a mediator, an object of shared attention, for their interaction with their teachers. Furthermore, once they have got accustomed to the robot, in their own time and on their own initiative, they all opened themselves up to include the investigator in their world, interacting with him, and actively seeking to share their experience with him as well as with their carer. We believe that this is an important aspect of the work, since this human contact gives significance and (emotional, intersubjective) meaning to the experiences with the robot.

This work is part of a project called Aurora, which investigates the possible use of robots in therapy and education of children with autism (Aurora 2003), based on findings that people with autism enjoy interacting with computers.

Why do I blog this? designing technology for special needs like this is definitely intriguing and the results they get are interesting both from the interaction designer point of view and the psychologist perspective. In addition, I believe that such interdisciplinary projects are worthwile.

Garment-Augmented Technology: Cell phones and Shoulder Pad

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A Shoulder Pad Insert Vibrotactile Display by Aaron Toney, Lucy Dunne, Bruce H. Thomas, Susan P. Ashdown describes a project that aims at integrate a vibrotatcitle display and support electronics into a standard clothing insert, the shoulder pad.

The shoulder pad in particular was chosen as a highly useful garment insert because of its common integration into the standard business suit, one of the most culturally pervasive garments in western society. (...) The objective for this project was to develop a tactile display contained within a standard shoulder pad that could present a stimulus to the user. More specifically, the display needed to be capable of presenting several distinct stimuli in multiple locations at once, and it needed to maintain the the functions of a shoulder pad: shape, stability, and flexibility.

The pad is meant to display to mimic social conventions such as tapping on the shoulder area for alerts or guidance. One of the authors, Bruce Thomas, reports that:

"As one example, we are working on a set of pager motors integrated into a shoulder pad for a business suit," Thomas said. One idea is to have silent vibration patterns -- similar to custom ring tones -- coded to incoming phone numbers. "This way, when you are in a meeting you have a better idea of who is trying to contact you and you are not always pulling your phone out to see who is calling,"

...

Babies, Toddlers, Preschoolers and 'new media'

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The Kaiser Family Foundation recently aired a new report about New Report on Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers. Some of the conclusions:

Many child development experts believe that the qualities inherent in some media – such as interactivity, repetition, and the ability to customize content – have tremendous potential as learning tools. Some argue that for children who come from disadvantaged homes, or who lack access to quality child care or preschool, “toys” like educational video games or DvDs could play an especially important role in literacy, numeracy, and overall cognitive development. And certainly many schools already use media-based curricula for older children in the classroom.

But others point out that, as a rule, products for the home market tend to be less strictly curriculum-based than those developed for schools. And while products for the classroom may go through a formal review and approval process, the main tool many parents have to assess the quality of products for in-home use is the product’s own affordable and easy way to make learning fun, to turn play time into education time. Many of the unique properties of media lend themselves not only to making learning fun – like engaging characters, compelling images, and attention-getting sounds – but also, potentially, to making learning more effective. Many child development experts believe that the qualities inherent in some media – such as interactivity, repetition, and the ability to customize content marketing and advertising. Many of these home-based products are created for very young children, for use at an age that is critical to children’s brain development, but when the effectiveness of media as an educational tool is, at this point, unproven. In fact, preliminary research indicates that the various media may be less effective in educating very young children than are the other activities that they may well be displacing – such as one-on-one parental interaction.

Wearable computing and Mobile computing convergence

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Via Roland's sunday trend: What Would You Do with a Wearable Computer? By Mark Long.Here is a summary of the pertinent statements the article presents:

  • "Although we've been talking about wearable computing for a decade, it is only now that the general public gets what that is, there's still a long way to go before the technology is embedded right into our garments." (Michael Sung)
  • "we could start taking steps in the right direction by putting advanced technology in the electronics devices that people are actually willing to carry for extended periods, such as cell phones or wrist watches."(Michael Sung)
  • "The whole wearable-computing space is folding into the mobile-computing environment these days, and it is becoming tough to draw any lines of distinction between the two" (Bruce Lambert)
  • "Early efforts to introduce wearable computers failed because of what used to be perceived as the inherent "dork factor,", "When you used to see a person talking to himself while walking down the street, you'd have thought he was crazy. But with Bluetooth headsets and other wireless technologies so prevalent today, we now see this type of activity as normal" (Stephen Glaser)

Although there are some issues I don't agree with ("We see the biggest market growth coming from people having video streamed to a cell phone," ) the article gives a good picture of how computing is now pervasive.

Deaf people and cell phones

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An article about how deaf persons benefit from cell phone features in french journal Liberation has caught my interest this morning. Actually there are two important things: SMS (+IM on blackberry) that allows them to communicate and the number/caller display that easily tell them who is calling. This reminds me an australian article about this toopic: Everyone Here Speaks TXT: Deaf People Using SMS in Australia and the Rest of the World by Mary R. Power and Des Power in Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 9:3 2004:

This article examines the extent to which Short Message Service (SMS) messages are breaking down communication barriers among deaf people and between deaf and hearing people. It is predicted that deaf texters will use SMS to increase the bonds between themselves in deaf communities, creating new opportunities to develop relationships, understanding, and intimacy with those not physically present. The most exciting question raised by this article is whether those kinds of relationships, understanding, and intimacy will develop to the same extent with hearing colleagues, friends, and intimates.

The article in Liberation also shows how the SMS syntax is different since some persons first think in sign language then translate it in french and finally in SMS ("en langage texto" as french people says):

Recevoir le texto d'un sourd peut surprendre. La syntaxe est approximative, les bouts de phrase parfois en désordre. Ainsi celui qu'envoie Yohan, 24 ans, qui passe un bac pro informatique : «Après midi qu'est ce que je peux te voir après midi 14 h ?» Des incohérences inévitables, selon Hamadi Abid, directeur du Centre d'éducation du langage pour enfants malentendants (Celem), à Paris : «Les sourds sont privés de l'apprentissage du langage, alors ils approchent l'écrit avec un décalage énorme.» Et comme l'analyse Pierrette Pouliquen, mère d'une petite fille sourde et traductrice de Yohan, «ils pensent en langue des signes, puis essaient d'écrire en français. Alors cela donne des textos compliqués, un peu à l'envers».

The 3G however seems to be a failure (bad transmission, need to hold the cameraphone in one hand...).

Roboblog: close to the blogject idea!

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Chris pointed me on this funny/impressive Aibo roboblog that can blog and upload photos in the form of an 'Aibo Diary':

Hello, I am Manuel, owner of Pedro, a Sony Aibo ERS-7M3/W. This is one of two companion blogs to Pedro's Aibo Roblog #1. Here, you can read Pedro's Diary, going back to Nov. 9, 2005, the date his Mind was upgraded to v3. Disclaimer: Pedro is the sole author of these posts and I accept no responsibility for them!

You can also check the blogroll, there is plenty of others!

Why do I blog this? I am very interested in the blogject concept lately (objects that blog) as a subset of the Internet of Things. This is a relevant implementation of such an idea.

Trip Hawkins about mobile games

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Via Stowe Boyd, this article in USA Today about the social side of video games. It's actually about Trips Hawkin's new company Digital Chocolate.

Hawkins started to feel that something about video games was lacking. (...) And that's connection and community. People want to go to Super Bowl parties or interact while playing fantasy football, Hawkins concludes. Fidelity is important to an elite segment of the market, but social connection is important to just about everyone. (...) That's Hawkins' epiphany: If you're going to make games, make them social and mobile. (...) Neither game tries to use all of a cellphone's processing power. The graphics are minimal. The allure is in the social connection, Hawkins says, not the on-screen experience

Why do I blog this? I think he definitely gets the point: not having super high-tech features (like 3D on mobile phones) but focusing on specific needs/human beings characteristics (social aspects) to design games on cell phones. I also have the same feeling, espeically when reading this paper about Neopets

Mobile games and psychology

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This talk proposed at ETech 2006 seems to be very appealing to my interest: Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Design to Mobile Services by Amy Jo Kim:

obile games are becoming a big business. But on the horizon, there's an even more exciting opportunity to develop compelling mobile services that help people get things done--services like restaurant reviews, weather reports, stock quotes, diet support, and meal planners. Developers who are interested in building these services can learn a lot from game design.

In this session, we'll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and learn how to use game mechanics to create a mobile experience that's fun, compelling, and addictive. We'll conclude by showcasing some cutting-edge mobile services from Europe and Asia that incorporate these ideas and show us what future mobile applications will look like.

Why do I blog this? This is the approach we have at the lab and the one that I try to promote when working with video game companies. I am looking forward to see what she says about it when it comes to mobile games.

About cell phones' future

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In the last issue of Receiver, there is an insightful article by James Katz (Professor of Communication and founder of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University) about cell phones and the changes telephony encounters. When giving his take about cell phones' future, he highlights an interesting point:

In terms of anticipating what future users will want of their future phones, an important consideration is that the categories by which one orders the universe today are not necessarily good guides to understanding the way the world will be seen in the future. A brief anecdote may illustrate the principle using a perspective of a phone's operating functions: a bright 9-year old American boy I know downloads mobile phone games and ringtones at every opportunity. He is also adept with videogames and online games, joysticks and controllers. Yet the first time he encountered a fancy 1970s "Empire" style wireline telephone, which had a rotary dial, he was baffled. He simply did not know how to use the phone because he was unfamiliar with a rotary dial and he had never seen one operated before. In effect, the digital dial pad had de-skilled an entire generation. It is easy to imagine that within a few generations knowledge of the rotary dial's operation will become nearly extinct. So one important lesson that could plausibly be extracted from this anecdote is that future users are likely to have a different sense of how communication technology should operate.

Why do I blog this? This is relevant in terms of future forecast since it shows how different systems could operate, through various affordances and interactions.

[James Katz also has another cross-generational anecdote about an 8-year old girl who exclaimed to her grand-mother using a bulky cordless phone "Gee Grandma, does that phone of yours have a phonebook?" when the grandmother informed the little girl that she needed first to look up the telephone number in the phonebook.]

The culture of SMS lives among younger women users

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Richard Ling's latest paper is very pertinent with regard to sociocultural aspects of SMS usage: The socio-linguistics of SMS: An analysis of SMS use by a random sample of Norwegians by Richard Ling:

a corpus of SMS messages gathered from a random sample of 2003 Norwegians. The data was collected in May of 2002 by telephone. Along with demographic, behavioral and attitudinal questions associated with mobile and SMS use, we asked the respondents to read (and where necessary, to spell out) the content of the last three messages they had sent. This resulted in a body of 882 SMS messages from 463 (23%) of the 2002 respondents. What does all this tell us about the socio linguistic nature of SMS? The paper examines various aspects of SMS production including themes in the messages, frequently used words, word and message length, use pf punctuation, capitalization, salutations and closings, etc. A general finding is that the culture of SMS lives among younger women users. In spite of the fact that men were early adopters of mobile telephone, it is among these women that the great motor of SMS lives. Women, and in particular younger women, seem to have a broader register when using SMS. They use them for immediate practical coordination issues and also for the more emotional side of mobile communication. In addition, their messages are longer, have a more complex structure and retain more of the traditional conventions associated with other written forms than men. This competence is also extended to telephonic communication.

Glucoboy: a glucose meter for gameboy

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Finally, I found a picture of the Glucoboy, a glucose meter that can be inserted into a Nintendo GAMEBOY.

The product operates independent of the video game system but downloads video game programs that are contained within its circuitry into the GAMEBOY as a reward for maintaining good blood sugar control. With the patient being responsible for so much of proper diabetes management the GLUCOBOY® carries an essential dual role, providing accurate medical diagnosis for the disease as well as an incentive delivery platform which serves as a key portal for obtaining patient-critical medical data; the foundation for fully automated, individualized, disease management program.

Comments about serious games

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What is crazy here is that the largest number of projects are based on false premises like what is good to extract from games is 3D environments, cool in-game features or (again) using 3D environments as real-world look-alike. Of course it's part of the experience but the most important thing in games is what the first speaker (jesper juul) explained: video games is a matter of having (or not) goals. Players then enjoy the challenge of working towards this goal (and if the challenge matches the player, he or she's gonna be in the state of flow). Also it can be about ignoring the goals and still getting an experience. What we see in lots of serious game projects is that there is an overemphasis on the environment, the game levels used to (re)create the real world. That's why there are tons of boring 3world in which participants have to play the role of firefighters/military/nurses... But hey! this is not a video game... Having little characters on a 3D levels and an in-game menu to move them is clearly not a good way to let people reach a state of flow so that they can learn how to fix the situation. Furthermore, from an educational technology point of view, the underlying pedagogical model (or even the pedagocial scenario) are clearly undefined. I am always amazed by the belief that a new media (like radio, tv, the web, video games) might be the solution to every problems. It's based on the assumption that the intrinsical properties of them media may support learning. The most important part is not those properties (3d rendering, cool features...) but instead what players/learners can do: their interaction between them or with the world, the activity they are engaged in, the pedagogical scenario they are involved in... For that matter, Jim Piggot's presentation about the game his company (TPLD) develops was interesting. They work on multi-users projects that aims at 'collaborative training': training people to collaborate achieving a common goal. In this case, the emphasis is put on collaborative dynamics and processes trough a very simple interface which engages players in simple activities. Caspian Learning's engine also has a good approach, trying to rely educational or cognitive psychology theories like Bloom's taxonomy of educational activities. They also stated their commitments towards attesting the validity of their products as well as their integration into existing settings (it's impossible to use Civilization in a 45minutes history lesson).

Anyway, I need to express that this is not so general, there is just a trend. There are however relevant applications that are based on interesting game features. Finally, I was really interested in how Ben Sawyer defined the serious games. He definitely expands them to all the applications that use video games in other context than just playing. Among what he said, here is a short list of pertinent serious game application, not so-tightly related to learning:

- consoles as low coast videoconf systems - pain distraction - LAN parties as team building exercises - general purpose GPU programming - machinima (game based movie marking) - game devs input on vheicle and interfaces - polling method: logging gameplay choices - economic research in online worlds (games as a petri dish for economics) - exergaming and rehabitainment (sony kinetic, using eyetoy for exercises) - PostTraumaticStressDisorder and AttentionDeficitD treatments - phobia treatments - unrealart.co.uk: artistes using game tools for artwork creation - Communication in various context (medicine, soldiers.....): VoIP chat via wifi for DS, web browser and RSS feeds to PSP, Xbox live with soldiers, in game chat in onlie games and worlds, eyetoy phonecam and xbox tv chat, p2p handwriting chat with DS

I played the party pooper here but this is really my feelings. What strikes me is that video games is taken as a miracle solution to do training or elearning by using platform that takes game aspects that are not really relevant to meet this end. I don't even mention the fact that serious game client wants packaged solution that may allow their learner/player to learn as fast as possible using the platform. This does not really work like that! To connect what Jesper Juul and Ben Sawyer said, I appreciated this comment by Ben: "beginning a news job is like beginning a new job in the sense that you have to figure out what you have to do".

Video Game settings

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(Via trendwatching) For people interested in what setting video game users are playing, there is this interesting resource that shows plenty of video games-related pictures: http://games.textamerica.com. The best are the video game settings:

Why do I blog this? when studying how people use video games, I've always found the game settings interesting and relevant: how people seat, which artefacts do they use (apart from the game pad, like notes on paper, a music player, a cell phone to communicate with remote players or just to chat...), whether there are friend or co-players (co-present person who has not the pad but help the main player completing the game...).

This is of particular interest, especially when doing 'user experience' research of mobile applications like location-based games or mobile game. Look for instance at this picture I took last week in Japan, it's a group of kids all participating in playing a DS game.

I do think there is a lot to learn of studying such settings and all the interactions that occur between participants/artefacts.

Interview of Nokia's Director of Design Strategy

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A very relevant interview of Nokia's director of design strategy. Among all what he said, some excerpts I found interesting:

We actually do studies - with full consent of the users - on smartphones. We do 100% tracking of all functionalities over a period of time. This means, we have granular view of usage. So then we can look at what are people using, why, what paths aren't working. This has been missing from an industry that tends to ask people "will you use an MP3 player on your phone?" and they answer "yes" and typically people will overestimate their own interest in it. (...) the definition of hackability is too narrow. Hackability is much more about everyday kind of things, starting from the colored replaceable covers. You might say, that it is too tightly driven but the trend of customizing the generic will continue. This will continue both in hardware and in software. We have tools to sketch in software, like on the Nokia series 60. I am not a programmer but it took me two hours to learn it and to write applications that I use nearly everyday. So that's me sketching my own use. I think that's another way of staying close to users and usage. Hackability is broader than just open software. (...) one thing that we have launched publicly is an application that allows people to have a local Bluetooth web-page while they are walking around. It can be read by other people in their proximity. We are trying it out just by having the software available for the Nokia series 60 phones. I think the software that we are building for the series 60 will allow a lot of innovation in that area that we can't anticipate.

Why do I blog this? it's vers refreshing to get Nokia's director of design strategy. His insights about Nokia's paths are very insightful and might shape some current trends.

Gonzo Gizmos

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This seems to be an intriguing resource:


"Gonzo Gizmos: Projects & Devices to Channel Your Inner Geek" (Simon Field)

Here is the blurb:

It's possible to use optics to roast a hot dog without electricity or a stove; to make a simple radio with just an iron, a few basic circuits and three shiny pennies; and to assemble a simple steam-powered boat with a plastic bottle, a candle, copper tubing and a nail. Of course, only die-hard science nerds would attempt these projects. But information systems specialist Field knows he's a geek, which is part of the charm of his science manual-cum-survival guide. Like Cy Tymony's recent Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things, Field's book does not depend on high-tech equipment. Most of the "shopping lists" he includes for each gizmo consist of items that can be found in hardware stores. His experiments range from the disarming (e.g., a plastic hydrogen bomb which, he admits, "sounds a bit dangerous" but can also function as "a high-tech squirt gun") to the useful (such as a "quicky electric motor"). Throughout, Field shares explanations of each process, with sidebars entitled "Why does it do that?"

Autonomous sharing of music files on mobile devices

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Designing a Mobile Music Sharing System Based on Emergent Properties by Maria Håkansson, Mattias Jacobsson, Lars Erik Holmquist (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Sweden), short paper for the conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. It discusses a system for autonomous sharing of music files on mobile devices:

In our approach, songs are treated as individual agents that act autonomously according to input (e.g. listening habits) and given rules.introduce new music based on peoples’ shared music interest. (...) Imagine that you carry a mobile device that has the ability to store and play back music files, e.g. a mobile phone with an MP3 player. As you encounter various people, the devices you are carrying connect to each other, e.g. via Bluetooth. Media agents from other nearby devices check the status of your media collection. Based on what you have been listening to in the past and which files you already own, some other music might spontaneously “jump” from another device to yours (and vice versa), on its own accord. Later, when you listen to your jazz songs, the system also plays a newly obtained Frank Sinatra tune that you had not heard before.

Why do I blog this? this is a clever design, it may be great if there is a critical mass of users.

Worst technologies for girls

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The Worst Technology for Girls? is a paper presented by Wendy March (Intel Research) and Constance Fleuriot (Bristol University) at the EPIC 2005 Conference (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ).

The aim of the research was to discover how teen girls use technology in relation to privacy practices in their everyday lives. Asking teenage girls to describe the worst technology they could imagine was a fruitful way of exploring their feelings towards location-awareness, tracking and surveillance in particular and served as inspiration for the design of concepts which embody many of their concerns.

What is interesting is the focus on participants' view of the potential impact on their privacy of technologies such as location-aware computing. With a peculiar emphasis on this question: "How do they feel about technologies that reveal their locations to their families and friends? " (joint photo blog for two weeks +i n-depth individual interviews of 24 teenage girls, aged between 17 and 18)

The approach of asking for the worst technologies is very relevant with regard to thoses goals. And the winners are:

  • Family Video: A small video camera attached to a flotation device acts as a personal CCTV which sends back a constant video stream to home.
  • Constant Connection provides a continuous open communication channel for parents and children ( the home audio device, which is ideally suited for a kitchen counter.)
  • Ticker Text converts all communication from designated cell phones into an easy to read text format. Each text message that is sent or received on the phone is printed out on a paper roll.
  • Teen Monitor provides a simultaneous broadcast of all your teenager’s conversations through an audio speaker in your home.

Why do I blog this? I really like this approach, not for imaginer do's and donts but instead to get insights about participants' feeling towards privacy concerns. Besides, imagining a situation in which all the family could read teenager's conversation on a paper roll in the kitchen would be a funny but tough issue!