Katamari Damacy affordances

Angel Inokon has a good blogpost about the affordances of Katamary Damacy (the PS2 game in which you have to roll a ball to collect items located everywhere):

Three Design Principles Katamari Damacy gets right: - Affordances – affordances enable designers to create gameplay that leverages the natural limitations and features of an object. One of the clear affordances of a ball is that it rolls. Everyone, regardless of age, recognizes a ball and can easily conceive it’s primary function. (...) Users can quickly get immersed because the rolling action is consistent with the simple affordances of a ball. - Visibility – gamers need awareness of the mechanics of gameplay through visuals and audio feedback. Two feedback mechanisms built in the game include a progress icon and sounds. The player is given a simple icon on the corner of her screen that shows the size of the katamari. (...) Gamers need lots of information. Integrating visibility principles allows designers to keep pumping the right information when they need it. - Constraints – constraints prevent gamers from making errors that could decrease enjoyment of the game. Katamari Damacy centers around a single rule – players can’t roll up something that is bigger than their ball. If the player got lost in an area with many big objects, she could get frustrated. So the game blocks the paths to larger objects until her Katamari is large enough to roll over the barrier. It makes the game easier to explore and less overwhelming by essentially modularizing the levels (174). Failure is a critical aspect of gameplay, however good designers know how to constrain the environment so players stay immersed in the game.

Why do I blog this? because I like Katamari and agree with that principles which connects human-computer interaction a la Don Norman to an efficient video game design.

Mizuko Ito on anthropology and design

The last issue of Ambidextrous has been released. Among the different articles, there is a relevant interview of Dr. Mizuko Ito (the interviewer is Danah Boyd). Some excerpts I like:

DANAH: Fabulous! Can you tell me more about what how you see anthropology being relevant to design?

MIMI: I think there is a role for anthropology along all of the steps of the design process. But of course I would say that. Anthropology can help inspire new designs by providing profiles of users and stories about contexts of use. Anthropologists can play on design teams as designs get developed to sensitive designers to culturally and context specific issues. And finally, anthropologists can evaluate the effectiveness of designs through studies of actual use in context, either prototype, pilot, or after product roll-out.

DANAH: So what advice would you have to young aspiring anthropologists who want to study socio-technical practice and get involved in designing new technologies?

This one is tough. Be prepared for some blank looks from people in your discipline - but a lively audience of practitioners and technology designers who are eager to hear stories from the field. The challenge is to be multilingual and interdisciplinary while also maintaining commitment to ethnographic perspectives and methods.

Why do I blog this? that's sometimes a feeling I have while working with a social science perspective with designers. Though, I am wondering whether going beyond telling stories because I feel there s much more to do.

Concerns about what anthropology brings to companies

ComputerWorld has an article about anthropologists working in IT department, which raise quite interesting issues:

Bringing such practices to IT fits in with the overall push to align the tech world with the business realm, Mack and others acknowledge. But even given this alignment trend, Sachs says technologists still have limited ability to garner such insight on their own. "It's a very important thing that technologists are being asked to have a broader view, but they [still] see a problem from their frame of reference and they see a solution from their frame of reference," she explains. (...) even companies that don't hire anthropologists are benefiting from their work, as anthropological tools and approaches used in places such as Intel, IBM and Pitney Bowes bleed out to other companies. "The methods and approaches of anthropology have spread a lot," she says, "and with that, there is a potential for a very large impact."

Why do I blog this? because I am interested in which "other voices" could help design.

Portable consoles, network and turbulences

On the 802.11 Turbulence of Nintendo DS and Sony PSP Hand-held Network Games is a paper by Mark Claypool that analyses the traffic characteristics of IEEE 802.11 network games on the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. Here is the questions they try to answer:

What is the network turbulence for hand-held network games?

Does the network turbulence for different hand-helds (such as the PSP and the DS) differ from each other?

Does the network turbulence for different games (such as Ridge Racer and Super Mario on the same handheld differ from each other?

Does the network turbulence for hand-held games differ from PC games?

Does hand-held game traffic interfere with traditional Internet traffic on the same wireless channel?

Why do I blog this? the paper is quite technical so it's less my focus but the question they ask are interesting from the user experience point of view. This might be close to Fabien's research. How people cope with those turbulences? are there any compensations or strategies (in-game) to handle them?

Chris Heathcote talk at reboot8

Last week, I missed Chris Heathcote presentation at Reboot (because of an early flight). However, since he put the slides on-line (see his blogpost) and given that people conspicuously took notes about it, I managed to get his stance. His talk (called "mobile 2.0 -a mobile Internet manifesto") was about the mobile internet. Chris criticized the barrier people think about when it comes to that: small display size, limited device speed/computing capability, tough text entry and insufficient network speed. Chris states that these limitations were not barriers. Bruno blogged about the real ones:

The real barriers are: transporting data wirelessly costs a lot of money ("flat pricing may partially solve this problem"), battery life is limited (color screen, playing music etc use serious power), the "2 hours problem" ("in the Western world we are always less than 2 hours away from a computer, so we put off doing stuff because we can wait 2 hours for it"), and smart networks ("we want high speed, always on, and don't want anyone interfering with our data").

I also like some of Chris stance about it (extract from Bruno's note, thanks!):

I don't get my best ideas sitting in front of my computer, I get them when I'm out and about. If I have a mobile connection, I can action them immediately. That's where mobile is really useful.

Mobile is social. Many people have tried to push the mobile stuff using the "when I'm waiting for a bus" scenario (mobile applications and content as interstitials in daily life), but mobile is social, and what's interesting is to take the Internet and make it social."

Why do I blog this? I like those points Chris highlighted and which are not so often raised while reading the tremendous body of stuff concerning the so-called mobile internet.

Marko Ahtisaari's talk at Reboot

End of the afternoon at Reboot, Mark Ahtisaari (Director of Design Strategy at Nokia) talked about "Mobile 2.0: Social Renaissance", basically describing the second stage of mobile communication. The mobile industry today has a huge scale: it reached 2bn mobile subscribers today.

The next 2bn are very different, in terms of usage patterns + income. He's wondering about how can something grow to become so big so quickly? This is due to 3 features: - an object with a social function (familiar before: making a phone call and later sending txt messages) tied to a service - service providers subsidizing price (by mobile operators) - the shift from a familiar collective object to a personal object (this is less quoted in the marketing literature), one of the 3 things you carry (with some form of payment + keys): mobile essentials

Because of this growth, this object becomes an hybrid object: a magnet to draws to it other functionalities: knowing time (watch), waking up (alarm clock), taking pictures (cameras).

So far, it was about mobile 1.5 = in the last 3 years, the interest of this industry shifted to another rhetoric: about a separate internet of some kind that would appear (wap...). There was a lot of emphasis on media content at the expense of human created content (social cooperative content)

To him, there are 7 challenges that can be opportunities: - reach: Mobile 2.0 = the next to 2bn users, largely coming from the new markets: BRICs (Brasil, Russia, India, China) - sometimes off: user interface + social design questions, there will be a reaction towars the always-onness - hackability: an important aspect of design is to let the user complete objects: Nokia pushed that: changeable covers, physical personnalisation (stickers, strap-on...and not only kids; and not only in western culture: adding LEDs on phone in India), user interface skin: it's someone's thing, you can pimp your ride, you can pimp your phone. It's also possible to script or sketch your cell phone (python). Finally: mobile phone repair chain (even enhancement of mobile phone). - social primitives: the SMS has been used to inform, flirt, joke, flattened... gift giving, signaling (to present intention, what I am listening too, the use of the IM line/mood), photostream, peer production (a la wikipedia or flickr), remixing - openness: if the core is social interaction, all the successfull forms of interactions are based on open standards/protocols (free:dom); what shape communication take when it's completely free? And it's never free, someone always has to pay. FON is a good thing for that matter - simplicity: new ways to configure the user interface ("Making the simple complicated is commonplace, making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity" Charles Mingus): Indian vibration chatting machine (stereo hifi tapes) - justice: how do we sustainably connect the 2bn who are not connected? if the core growth is in the social interaction then the question of fairness of access emerges.

More about it in his notes about this other presentation

Ito on kids participation in new media culture

Cultural anthropologist Dr. Mizuko Ito recently published a draft about Kids' participation in new media cultures which is very worth reading. She addresses the question of how young people mobilize the media and the imagination in everyday life andand how new media change this dynamic. Some excerpts I found intersting:

Our contemporary understandings of media and the childhood imagination are framed by a set of cultural distinctions between an active/creative or a passive/derivative mode of engaging with imagination and fantasy. (...) Scholars in media studies have challenged the cultural distinctions between active and passive media, arguing that television and popular media do provide opportunities for creative uptake and agency in local contexts of reception. (...) new convergent media such as Pokemon require a reconfigured conceptual apparatus that takes productive and creative activity at the “consumer” level (...) The important question is not whether the everyday practices of children in media culture are “original” or “derivative,” “active” or “passive,” but rather the structure of the social world, the patterns of participation, and the content of the imagination that is produced through the active involvement of kids, media producers, and other social actors. This is a conceptual and attentional shift motivated by the emergent change in modes of cultural production. (...) New technologies tend to be accompanied by a set of heightened expectations, followed by a precipitous fall from grace after failing to deliver on an unrealistic billing. (...) technologies are in fact embodiments, stabilizations, and concretizations of existing social structure and cultural meanings, growing out of an unfolding history as part of a necessarily altered and contested future. The promises and the pitfalls of certain technological forms are realized only through active and ongoing struggle over their creation, uptake, and revision.

She then describes 3 important constructs:

contemporary media needs to be understood not as an entirely new set of media forms but rather as a convergence between more traditional media such as television, books, and film, and digital and networked media and communications. Convergent media involve the ability for consumers to select and engage with content in more mobilized waylateral networks of communication and exchange at the consumer level. (...) These changing media forms are tied to the growing trend toward personalization and remix as genres of media engagement and production. Gaming, interactive media, digital authoring, Internet distribution, and networked communications enable a more customized relationship to collective imaginings as kids mobilize and remix media content to fit their local contexts of meaning. (...) described the kind of social exchange that accompanies the traffic in information about new media mixes like Pokemon and Yugioh as hypersocial, social exchange augmented by the social mobilization of elements of the collective imagination

Why do I blog this? I met Mizuko last month at the Netpublic conference and was very interested in how she's taking another stance regarding kids engagement in new media culture, especially what she was explaining about convergence and hypersociality. I find particulary pertinent the way she rephrase the question of the kids participation into something broader and - in the end - much richer. These constructs are important to me, both as researcher in the field of emerging technologies and also when working with game designers to make them understand the implications of their creations.

Playful situations at home

"Playfully situated messaging in the home: appropriation of messaging resources in entertainment" by Mark Perry (Brunel University, UK), Dorothy Rachovides (Brunel University, UK), Alex Taylor (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK) and Laurel Swan (Brunel University, UK) is a paper from the "Entertainment media at home - looking at the social aspects" workshop at CHI 2006. The authors promotes an an embodied, everyday gaming paradigm in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them to entertain themselves and others. This is exemplified by a field study of how people are engaged in playful activity through (asynchronous) messaging at home.

The activities that we have seen are very much about household members creatively making use of the resources around them to entertain themselves, and (they hope) the others around them. Here lies a serious point for technology designers: systems that open themselves up for, perhaps unanticipated, use (cf. Robinson, 1993) give their users a powerful tool for artfully integrating them into other practices, a good deal of which in the home are playful and entertainment-related. By allowing users to generate, co- opt, display and annotate a variety of media we can give them the resources to do many forms of communication, one of which is the ability to support play. And whilst play does embody social rules, it is the very socially constructed nature of these rules, and not their technological embodiment, that makes them powerful, and allows them to be applied in a variety of ways. We would therefore not encourage strong rule sets that form ‘methods’ of play, but would rather allow these to be generated on an ad hoc basis, and to draw from the existing social practices around messaging that household members already use in their everyday lives.

Why do I blog this? What I like here is the idea that gaming is not just interacting with a gaming system (console, PC...) but something broader that would involved everyday artifacts.

Chocolate Experience for Cadbury

Chocolate Infinity is a project from the HMC MediaLab for Cadburys Chocolate Factory. It's carried out by Adam Montandon and HMC members. It interestingly used a shock sensitive floor and a series of motion sensors to immerse people in an intriguing interaction (to improve the visitors' experience):

As you enter the infinity room a giant chocolate bar melts into gloopy puddles beneath you and, when you jump in them, chocolate splashes all over the floor. Then a sprinkling of individual Roses chocolates appear beneath your feet. You won't believe your eyes when they unwrap as you tread on them – but as you step off they wrap back up.

Chunks of chocolate then fill the floor and when you stamp on them they break open showing gooey caramel, squidgy turkish delight, chunks of mint, orange or Cadbury's Crunchie inside. Finally you get to chase three Creme Eggs across the floor but don't stand still because they'll pop their tops and taunt you until the game is on again.

Why do I blog this? this is one of the trends in roomware: using floor/sensor-based interactions to trigger specific behaviors. I see more and more project about that and I am wondering about potential new places that would allow people to play games with this settings (arcades revival?).

User experience of Community Displays

"Understanding and Designing for the Voluntary Adoption of Community Displays" by Harry Brignull is a very relevant thesis that deals with large digital wall display system for the support of informal social interaction in communal spaces.

One of the contributions of this thesis is a critical analysis of research studies revealing two distinct categories of Community Display settings: ‘one shot’ usage settings and ‘on-going’ usage settings. ‘One shot’ usage settings include one-off social events, conferences (McCarthy, 2003) and festivals (Agamanolis, 2003). (...) ‘On-going’ settings, on the other hand include common rooms (Houde et al, 1998), cafés (Churchill et al, 2003), and relaxation areas (Grasso, 2003), and are used regularly by an established community over a period of months or years.

Findings show that that the spatial distribution of interaction around a Community Display is of crucial importance to understanding its usage and adoption. The concept of ‘flow’ is introduced to describe the manner in which users move through space; and the concept of a ‘honey pot’ is introduced to describe the public interaction space around a community display which users are attracted to and congregate in because of the resources it offers. The public availability of interaction with a Community Display is found to be important in that it allows others to ‘oversee’ interaction while going about other things (Heath and Luff, 1991), creating opportunities for them to join in, and thus facilitating spontaneous social congregations. This overseeing is also found to be crucial to the learning process - studies carried out show that people predominantly learned about Community Displays by observing others using them, i.e. vicariously.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in how interaction could be spatially distributed and how potential users could apprehend such artefacts because it relates with my research about the impacts of technologies on space and place.

No buttons to press, just gesture

Time has an article about Nintendo's strategy. There is a relevant point there:

Nintendo can reinvent gaming and in the process turn nongamers into gamers. (...) "Why do people who don't play video games not play them?" Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard (...) The learning curve is steep.

That presents a problem of what engineers call interface design: How do you make it easier for players to tell the machine what they want it to do? "During the past five years, we were always telling them we have to do something new, something very different," Miyamoto says (like Iwata, he speaks through an interpreter). "And the game interface has to be the key. Without changing the interface we could not attract nongamers." So they changed it. (...) Of course, hardware is only half the picture. The other half is the games themselves. "We created a task force internally at Nintendo," Iwata says, "whose objective was to come up with games that would attract people who don't play games."

And this seems to attract game designers:

John Schappert, a senior vice president at Electronic Arts, is overseeing a version of the venerable Madden football series for Nintendo's new hardware. He sees the controller from the auteur's perspective, as an opportunity but also a huge challenge. "Our engineers now have to decipher what the user is doing," he says. "'Is that a throw gesture? Is it a juke? A stiff arm?' Everyone knows how to make a throwing motion, but we all have our own unique way of throwing." But consider the upside: you're basically playing football in your living room.

"No buttons to press, just gesture": the essence of tangible interactions!

In addition, in terms of innovation, the article highlights few important concerns:

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don't listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal--they blog a lot--but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. (...) Cutting-edge design has become more important than cutting-edge technology. There is a persistent belief among engineers that consumers want more power and more features. That is incorrect. (...) intendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and it's betting its future on the same wisdom. The race is not to him who hulas fastest, it's to him who looks hottest doing it.

Why do I blog this? My interest for this console (and hence this article) is threefold: (1) I am curious to try it out (2) it's a good step towards the use of tangible computing metaphors (3) the innovation model of Nintendo is interesting.

What about the beta mindset in pervasive computing

cph127 has a good point about what they call "the rise of beta": the very fact that . everything is launched as beta and everything happens to be unfinished. They wrote a beta-manifesto, here are some excerpts:

• being in beta is a natural state of life. Everything aroundus is either evolving or dying.
• beta is playing. Experimenting. Trying.
• beta is constant learning.
• beta is profiting in the true nature of the word “profit”. Making progress.
• beta is never perfect. Never completely without fault. Just like any human being. Everything can be made better. Allways. Achieving temporary perfection is better than aspiring for the ultimate perfection that is never reached.
• beta is release as soon as it is safe. But never sooner. Only daredevils flies planes in beta or takes unfinished medicine.
• beta is a natural state of things. Your body is in perpetual beta until you die (maybe..)
• beta is evolution. Many small gradual changes. Suddenly they may seem like giant leaps.
• beta is revolution. Not completely in control. Just like the real world.
• beta is open. Ready for dialogue. Open for change. Positive for co-creation.
• beta stands for things that changes. Change with consistancy.
• beta creates feedback loops for companies, individuals and products.
• beta is honest. Not superficial.

Why do I blog this? First I think the "beta" phenomenon is interesting as a shift in our society from all-set product to constantly evolving "stuff"; the assumptions behind this are both important (product can be improve and are opened) and intriguing (everything needs to change change change...). Second, what will be curious IMO is whether this beta mindset will also reach the pervasive computing world: we would then have unfinished objects and services. After the blue-screen of death for your bathroom, there would then be uncompleted features that you might not be able to use with a "beta-meter" close to the flusher...

"Extreme Users"

Lars Erik Holmquist defines what he means by "extreme users" in his paper: User-driven innovation in the future applications lab:

users that have very particular and perhaps peculiar requirements. We believe such specialized groups are more likely to put our technology in a new light, thus giving rise to interesting ideas. We can think of them as “extreme users”, an analogue to the concept of “extreme characters”, which are persona that are created to generate ideas in interaction design. As with extreme characters, the purpose is to inspire novel ideas that can be generalized for a larger audience. In several instances we have seen how the insights gained from working with specialized users has pushed the original technology and concepts much further than would otherwise have been the case.

Why do I blog this? I like to think in terms of extreme users and extreme "usage".

The importance of the "body" (the why of tangible computing?)

I am sure this paper is interested for Adam Greenfield's next book ("The city is here for you to use"):How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design by Scott R. Klemmer, Bjoern Hartmann, and Leila Takayama For DIS2006:

It discusses how "our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world", drawing on various theories of embodiment in the field of psychology, sociology and philosophy.

What is interesting is that articles presents some relevant arguments and examples that shows the importance of the body. It put the emphasis on the embodiment for (among others), I picked up those I was interested in:

• Learning through doin: physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development (Piaget, Montessori)
• Gesture is important in terms of cognition and fully linguistic communication for adults (to conceptually plan speech production and to communicate thoughts that are not easily verbalized)
• Epistermic actions: manipulating artifacts to better understand the task’s context
• Thinking through prototyping
• Tangibility of representations: The representation of a task can radically affect our reasoning abilities and performance.
• The tacit knowledge that many physical situations afford play an important role in expert behavior.
• hands, as they are simultaneously a means for complex expression and sensation: they allow for complicated movement
• kinesthetic memory is important to know how to interact with objects (ride a bicycle, how to swim)
• Reflective reasoning is too slow to stay in the loop
• Learning is situated in space
• Visibility Facilitates Coordination
• Physical Action is characterized by Risk: bodies can suffer harm if one chooses the wrong course of action
• Personal responsibility: Making the consequences of decisions more directly visible to people alters the outcome of the decision-making process.

Why do I blog this? This echoes with the literature review I did about how space/place affords socio-cognitive interactions. Embodiment is certainly one of the most interesting component of this relationship.

I also think one of the most important dimension is the inherent risk of physical actions, nobody gets physically hurt in virtual worlds but what happened while playing augmented reality quake?

Of course this is meant to support the "why" question of tangible computing?

Sensecam, Collaborative Reflection and Passive Image Capture

This afternoon at COOP2006, I enjoyed a short paper by "Supporting Collaborative Reflection with Passive Image Capture" by Rowanne Flec and Geraldine Fitzpatrick. Her PhD research is about how the a technology such as Microsoft's Sensecam can support reflective thoughts in different situations (teacher's practices, everyday reflections... learning from experience).

The SenseCam is a digital camera that has a light sensor and a temperature sensor (allows to trigger images to be taken)... a passive images capture tool. Then you can get a storyboard of the pictures taken.

She ran an expriment in which students when to an arcade to play games with the SenseCam. They played the game and then went back to their HCI class in which they had to discuss some HCI questions. Some groups had the images, some others not (two experimental conditions). She looked at the "goodness" of answers and the number of issues raised in discussion.

Results: - discussion-led use of images: to ground the conversation (referential communication), as an objective record, to talk about something missed by partner or "just in case" - image-led discussion: trigger memory, confirm/disconfirm memory, reveal something missed at time ("it's quite useful for getting a look at what you're actually because we did not use those buttons in the game".

Why do I blog this? I am actually interested both by the study and the tool. I would be super happy to have this sort of tool for my research project about location-based applications and about video games. It would be a nice way to get some traces of the activity that I'd be able to use to get back to the users and discuss them. Here is how it's described by MS:

SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into 128Mbyte FLASH memory. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded every second.

Sensors trigger a new recording. For example, each time the person walks into a new room, this light change transition is detected and the room image is captured with an ultra wide angle or fish-eye lens. (...) The sensor data (motion, light, temperature, and near infrared images) is recorded for later correlation with other user data, for example in the MyLifeBits system. (...)MyLifeBits will allow the large number of images generated daily to be easily searched and accessed. Future SenseCams will also capture audio and possibly heart rate or other physiological data.

Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace

Report about the Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace by Jan Ohlenburg, Irma Lindt , and Uta Pankoke-Babatz is one of the PerGames 2006 paper. It describes an interesting pervasive game called "the Crossmedia Game Epidemic Menace", developed within the EU-funded IPerG project. It has already been presented at CHI2006 (see here) but the report goes into other details in terms of evaluations of the project. They used field observations done by four observers who constantly followed the players.

The evaluation was mainly based on detailed field observations. Four observers were constantly following the players, writing down their observations with respect to player-environment, player-devices, player-to-player and player-gamemaster interaction. Observers indicated time and location for each notice. Observations were combined with player feedback discussions and questionnaires. During the play test we got results with respects to the game story and game concept, the social play, the suitability of devices, and the technical aspects and game orchestration experiences. In the following we will briefly outline some of the results.

Players liked the two play-modes: stationary play in the team room and mobile play outdoors on the campus. We observed that collaboration across media and play modes worked well. Surprisingly, the speed of movement was rather high in both play modes. The speed of movement was suitable as a means to indicate high player immersion. Players easily understood the meaning and use of devices. However, it turned out that players preferred to play in pairs of two in both play modes, and that device specific roles emerged. The players liked communication and collaboration within their team and competition with the opposite team.

Why do I blog this? I like the usage of different gaming devices (running for example on mobile phones, stationary displays, mobile Augmented Reality) to engage people in a playful experience. A different set of research question arise when you have this sort of game design: how would giving different tool lead to specific roles attributions? How would this impact individual actions? group interactions? communication and actions asymmetry among teams? As you see, I am really interested in the collaborative user experience afforded by the gameplay and the artefacts. This sort of platform is then very relevant to CSCW research as we do in our projects. This kind of approach is described by Chalmers and Juhlin in "New uses for mobile pervasive games - Lessons learned for CSCW systems to support collaboration in vast work sites ".

Rant against 3D

At the Metaverse conference ("Pathways to the 3D Web"), it seems that there were some good discussions about errors of the past concerning the overemphasis on 3D as the solution for moving beyond the current interfaces. Here is what Randy (from the Habitat weblog) says about this:

3-D isn't an interface paradigm. 3-D isn't a world model. 3-D isn't the missing ingredient. 3-D isn't an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue. Any time you read or hear about how great 3-D is and how it's going to change everything about computers and services, substitute the word blue for 3-D.

Don't get me wrong; there are great applications for 3D. That's not the point. The point is that idealistic assumptions and techno-optimism are no substitute for understanding what people actually want and do when they interact with each other, whether via computers or in the physical world.

Let's not repeat the path VRML took - that'd be a double waste and I won't do it. Let's figure out the problem first, and then look to see if a global-shared-3d-standard-UI-identity-object-system is the solution. So far, I haven't found a single one.

Why do I blog this? I am concerned by people's interaction in space/place (be it physical or virtual) and my feeling is that there is always on overemphasis on 3D. Yesterday it was on the web: having boring 3D libraries to pick up books instead than having a amazon-based interface. Today, it's on cell phones, people design 3D application on tiny cell phones screen; I don't really see the point in that. There is clearly an overemphasis about reproducing spatial topographies in 3D, which is not systematically pertinent for interactions. The point is not to have the same structure but more to have a common "place": a virtual location that affords specific interactions.

And of course, this should not undermine the value of 3D, MMORPG clearly shows that they are pertinent and meaningful.

Ethnographical studies at MS

Kelly Goto recently interviewed one of MS ethnographer. While the beginning of the interview is quite classical ("My goal is to understand people's lives and behaviors, then infuse this understanding throughout the development process to help build products that more directly meet people's needs and mold to their lives"), the end is very insightful (because it's less abstract mostly):

Ethnographic work helps show where unarticulated opportunities exist. We closely observe people and look where their current systems break down; in other words we see gaps that are waiting to be filled. If they're turned into a solution, that's where you see innovation. Innovation is not always cool, new and flashy. It's sometimes solving simple problems in new ways, like the 'big button' that Xerox Parc put on copier machines.

And especially this:

Q: What are some of the most memorable insights you've gathered from your research? Every study has unique and exciting insights. But perhaps the most surprising was working with truckers. It was part of a larger study exploring 'blind spots', or areas about which we had little information, and in particular it was part of a wireless hotspot and transit spaces study. We were floored by how much truck drivers are on the cutting edge of communication technologies and strategies to stay connected wherever they are. We heard over and over that 'when you live your life on the road, connecting with the people you love is essential to maintaining relationships.' Traditional stereotypes of truck drivers were blown away as we explored the detailed ecosystems these folks built to stay connected! These were not technology people - but they are driven to use technology in innovative and advanced ways to meet a critical need they have. Ethnography helps uncover these unexpected but invaluable uses of technology.

It reminds me this NPR podcast in which one of person interviewed was a truck driver who discussed the benefits and drawbacks of GPS positioning for his work.

I also like what she said about the fact that lab studies of mobile phone experience are quite useless because it removes the context. Plus, this is so true: "doing the research is only a quarter of the work": communicating results and working with others is another great part.

Why do I blog this? even though these are only glimpses of information, it's relevant to know some of MS usage of ethnographical studies.

Designing relevant mobile interactions

In the last issue of ACM interactions, Lars Erik Holmquist's column is about designing mobile applications. He starts from a not-so-commonsensical take (at least for app developers):

the accepted wisdom from decades of research on interfaces for stationary computers simply does not hold for mobile devices. You will even hear HCI researchers and UI designers complaining that mobile devices are too small and "limited" to permit anything interesting. But the real difference has nothing to do with size. Instead it comes down to the fact that what we do with mobile computers and the situations in which we use them are fundamentally different from what we do with the desktop. (...) Mobile devices follow us through the day, which means that they are used in many shifting roles

Then he presents what he's doing at his lab:

The goal was to investigate mobile services that, rather than just being smaller versions of desktop applications, take advantage of the fact that they are inherently mobile.

Many of the mobile services that were created in the project were based on local interaction. For instance, MobiTip from the Interaction Lab lets you share "tips" with other users in the vicinity through a Bluetooth connection. (...) Another example of local interaction is the Future Application Lab's Push!Music. What would happen if the songs on your iPod had a mind of their own? In Push!Music, all MP3 files are "media agents" that observe the music-listening behavior of the user and other people in the vicinity. (...) The eMoto project by the Involve group extends the possibilities of mobile messaging by adding an emotional component. By shaking, squeezing, and otherwise mistreating the phone's stylus after you have written a message, you generate a colorful background pattern that expresses the emotion you want to put across.

And this actually nicely exemplifies his claim about mobile design:

Those who still worry about the "limited" interaction possibilities of mobile devices should note that all the applications mentioned above could be used on a standard mobile phone today (with small modifications). Yet at the same time they drastically expand the interaction parameters of mobile devices by taking advantage of local interaction, observations of the user's behavior, physical input, and so on.

Why do I blog this? I like this emphasis on taking advantage of external elements in the interactions (spatial proximity, tangible inputs...) and not relying on a limited input/output device.

Tongue-based interface

Using the tongue as interface seems to be a new innovation. Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition worked out an application called "Brain Port" that uses the tongue's ability to detect sonar echoes to control a PC.

"Everything nowadays is so ubiquitous with mobile computing, and we need to find new, hands-free ways of interacting for environments where your hands and eyes are busy," she noted. "I could see something like this being used in cars."

In the human adaptation of this natural strategy, researchers have users stick their tongues into a red plastic strip, filled with microelectrodes, to retrieve information from such instruments as electronic compasses or hand-held sonar devices (...) the project also aims to enable infrared vision via the tongue, resulting in the appropriate tongue-twister of "infrared-tongue vision."

With infrared-tongue vision, divers, soldiers, or pilots could see behind themselves or move in the dark without night-vision goggles, according to project lead scientist Anil Raj.

Why do I blog this? actually I find curious to use the tongue, especially because it raises new questions in terms of affordance, user experience, and involvement in an interaction (what about hygiene?). Let's have video games using this