Weeknotes 108

The week was short because I took few days off in the South of France to relax a bit, read some books, visit old cities and focus on reviewing projects from my students at the University of Art and Design in Geneva (HEAD-Geneva). They basically had to conduct a short field study about a topic of their own, observe people's practices and produce design implications for this. Some comments about their work:

• The range of research questions was broad: how people behave in conferences, where people leave their cell-phones at home, how people keep track of their todos, how people choose clothes in shops, how people keep track of time. It's funny to contrast students which are more into the arty side of design and these which are into industrial design projects. While the former literally re-appropriate field study techniques to their own needs (finding ideas), the latter are following the methods to the letter and are sometimes less creative than I expected.
• Although I have shown them various methodologies and insisted on the use of photography, the majority only relied on interviews. Speaking of which, some students still confuses an f2f interview and a questionnaire (paper-based or on-line) but I guess this is linked with my next point.
• 1-2 students are super lazy, which is a classical %
• The toughest part of the job is to produce original, meaningful and creative design implications. Extracting peculiar insights, constant design patterns, issues, problems and potential solution is one thing but turning them into more tangible aspects is difficult. Some proposed interesting conclusions, others carefully crafted personas or use cases while others listed few bullet points. I think I will spend even more time next year on this part to show them how to go beyond the classical formats I've shown them.

On a different note, I took plenty of pictures of intercoms (in French they're called "interphone"). I don't really know why but it became an obsession in the previous weeks. It was perhaps caused by the fact that the old town in Montpellier featured remarkable instances of these devices. The contrast between the old stone walls and these modern elements made of steel and graffitis was inspiring. The stickers used to indicate new names as well the written information (names, name origins, use of capitals, presence of surname, etc.) seems pretty informative too. At some point, I may use this material in a project about communication and architecture; i still need to find why this is interesting.

Finally, I worked on 3 research papers, trying to pursue academic work in parallel with consulting/conference business. Two of them have been accepted in a design magazine and a HCI conference. The third one has been submitted to a workshop at Ubicomp 2010.

Back to Geneva, I spent most of my time at the Lift offices working on the preparation of the upcoming Lift France 10 conference. I spent time in conference call with various speakers to discuss their speech and discuss communication matters with the local PR agency. We're almost there.

Making intentions explicit through social media

An interesting diagram by John Battelle found in the June issue of Wired UK (and pointed to me by Rémy)

Called "How the check-in extends the great database of human intentions", this categorization describe how user intents are made explicit by various platforms. It shows of social media make them explicit.

Besides, the "check-in" item corresponds to what I described in my PhD dissertation with "self-declaration of location".

Why do I blog this? this is connected to research issues I tackled in my research. The difficult thing would be to add a fourth line to describe the meaning of each of these signals: what inference can be drawn from my whereabouts or my interest. This is course addressed in human-computer interaction and there combination of each column can also be important.

Augmented Reality B&W footsteps

How Augmented Reality was portrayed back in the days. The evolution with B&W graphic landmarks:

Circa 1992 (Source: T. P. Caudell, and D. W. Mizell, “Augmented Reality: An Application of Heads-Up Display Technology to Manual Manufacturing Processes”, Proceedings of 1992 IEEE Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, 1992, pp 659-669)

Milgram's continuum (Source: P. Milgram and F. Kishino, "Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays", IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 1994, pp. 1321-1329.)

2D matrix code (Source: Rekimoto, J. (1996). Augmented Reality Using the 2D Matrix Code. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Interactive Systems and Software (WISS'96).)

More material (in color too!) at this insightful URL

Why do I blog this? Collecting material for an upcoming presentation. It's interesting to get back to these early representations that I studies during my MSc in HCI... and compare them to current instantiations.

Bill Buxton on "The better we do, the bigger the problem we make"

Bill Buxton's column in Business Week are rare but always intriguing. The latest dispatch offer interesting remarks:

"what to do when an idea or product gets traction and starts generating a bunch of revenue. First, show restraint on the self-congratulation front. Next, invest a significant proportion of your resulting windfall into sussing out your next great idea. Keep moving and don't count on the continued success of your original one. (...) If you make the revenue from your great idea your only food, you are going to have a problem. The longer you take to broaden your menu, the bigger that problem will be. Great ideas need to be displaced, even when they still have the allure of the cash cow. (...) Here's the sentence that should immediately set off alarm bells for those who don't want to head to the cemetery of one-category wonders: "We can't pursue that idea, because doing so will cannibalize our existing revenue stream." If you hear this phrase, stop whatever you are doing and give what lies behind these words your undivided attention. In general, here is my advice: If you can't change the minds of those uttering it, you should head for the door."

Why do I blog this? interest towards innovation process and how temporality (or people's perception of time in the short term versus the long term) influences decisions in R&D process. Besides, it reminds me of a friend who always tell me that he tends to do the opposite of what he has done before every year (in terms of design/writing/creative) process. Finally, I find interesting to wonder about "The better we do, the bigger the problem we make" because it can be a frequent trap.

Traffic light impersonation

Seen in Lyon, yesterday. The smiley affordance again... on a traffic light this time. Anthropomorphism with symbols and colors.

Lift10 recap

Last wednesday, we did a debrief of the previous Lift10 conference in Geneva, with partners and local guests. It was an occasion to give a very quick and punchy wrap-up of what speakers presented at the event:[slideshare id=4533357&doc=lift10recap-100618032308-phpapp01]

Urban futures: from science-fiction to design fiction

Yesterday evening, I gave a talk at the Cinemathèque suisse in Lausanne. There was an event organized by the swiss radio and Les Urbanités about movies and cities and my speech was before "Brazil" by Terry Gilliam. The talk was called "Solar progeria versus renaissance of urban fictions" and it wasn't related to this film per se. Rather, I gave a talk about an interesting shift from urban representations of the future created by science-fiction writers/directors to design projects about urban phenomena created by designers: video games, visual representations, new forms of maps. All of these can be considered as "design fictions" which have something to say about cities. See the slides below, the images I used actually corresponds to several videos I commented to the attendants. [slideshare id=4488727&doc=cinematheque2010-2-100613131628-phpapp02]

In sum, new representations of the urban futures I'm interested are mostly design fictions with the following characteristics: 1. They’re not only about the urban morphology, they’re also about invisible phenomena such as radiowaves or the city metabolism (e.g. with cell-phone usage), 2. A new asthaethic emerges from the digital culture (video games, web and mobile culture) and leads to curious metaphors and representations, 3. The territory itself is augmented and new layers of information/experience is added on top of existing places.

Thanks YGM for the invitation!

A robot called Gerty

Finally had some time to watch Moon by Duncan Jones yesterday evening. Certainly a good sci-fi movie with different implications to ruminate and ponder. Slow and with a nice music. I found the props quite curious and not necessarily super showy.

One of the most intriguing feature of the movie is certainly GERTY, a robot whose voice is played by Kevin Spacey. Based on the Cog project, there is both a prop for static scenes and CG when it's moving around.

A convincing character, GERTY has a limited AI, as discussed by the director in Popular Mechanics:

"There is limited AI. GERTY is not wholly sentient. He really is a system as opposed to a being in his own right--that was one of the things I wanted to get across. The audience, and the different Sams, bring their own baggage to GERTY. They're the ones who anthropomorphize him and basically make him out to be more than he is. GERTY's system is very simple: He's there to look after Sam and make sure that he survives for 3 years. That's it. When you start watching the film, you're already making unwarranted assumptions about GERTY because of the HAL 9000 references and Kevin Spacey's slightly menacing voice. That's what the Sams do as well. The company itself, Lunar Industries, is nefarious. GERTY is not. He's doing his job. He has conversations with the company but he doesn't tell Sam because he's programmed not to. It's as simple as that. (...) The idea was to create a machine that was incorporating more than one type of sense data. So it had cameras for eyes, tactile fingertips and a moving robotic arm. It had an audio capture system. It was basically taking all of these various forms of data, giving it the eyes to see something and have the arm reach out and touch it in the right place"

See also some interesting elements about him from this interview in fxguide

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of GERTY (IMHO) is its smiley-face display to express its feelings. This little screen is meant to express the robot's emotion in a very basic ways with different permutations. Here again, it's good to read the director's intents:

"I use a lot of social networking sites. I’m on Twitter all the time. I use all these various forms of networking, including the text version of Skype. I tend to use smiley faces to make sure people know that I’m joking. That’s my own reason for using it on Gerty. I also like the idea that Gerty’s designed by this company which doesn’t have much respect for Sam and treats him in a patronizing way. So they use smiley faces to communicate with him."

I really liked the way the smiley are used, a sort of simplistic (and patronizing as he mentionned) representation of an assistant. Very much reminiscent to Clippy. This use of smileys reminded me of the Uncanny Valley and this excerpt from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art:

For McCloud, a smiley face is the ultimate abstraction because it could potentially represent anyone. As he explained, "The more cartoony a face is…the more people it could be said to describe". Besides, it's really curious anthropomorphically because the robot design has two characteristics: the smiley face (with eyes and a mouth) and a camera. It's quite funny because in lots of sci-fi movies/comics, the camera looks as an eye and is sometimes perceived by people as having the same function. In Moon, the combination of the camera and the smiley face makes it very quirky.

Why do I blog this? trying to make some connections between this movie I saw and some interesting elements about robot design.

3D map complexity

This map encountered in Lausanne this week struck me as interesting because of its complexity. The organization in 3 dimensions coupled with the somehow weirdly legible architecture turns the consultation of the map into a curious exploration.

Why do I blog this? It's important to see how signage in public space is evolving. This map actually looks like a video-game experience and may be indeed more easy to understand for digital-savvy people. An interesting complement to my earlier post about maps.

The street, being used

A street scene, captured in Lyon (France) yesterday. An interesting example of two street activities. The book-reading-while-walking is a striking ancestor to the smartphone-contemplation-while walking and the guy in the background reveals the playful activities enabled by street infrastructures. It reminds me of this quote by Geertz that I mentioned earlier on: "We can always count on something else happening, another glancing experience, another half-witnessed event".

Beyond Future Fatigue

Some interesting quotes from a blogpost by William Gibson about science fiction and temporal dimensions (present, near future, distant future):

"Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? (...) The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian. (...) Please don’t mistake this for one of those “after us, the deluge” moments on my part. I’ve always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now. (...) The best science fiction has always known that, but it was a sort of cultural secret. When I began to write fiction, at the very end of the 70s, I was fortunate to have been taught, as an undergraduate, that imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they’re written. (...) I wrote a novel called Virtual Light, which was set in 2006, which was then the very near future, and followed it with two more novels, each set a few imaginary years later, in what was really my take on the 1990s. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Lots of people assumed I was still writing about the capital-F future. I began to tell interviewers, somewhat testily, that I believed I could write a novel set in the present, our present, then, which would have exactly the affect of my supposed imaginary futures. Hadn’t J.G. Ballard declared Earth to be the real alien planet? Wasn’t the future now?"

Why do I blog this? some resonance with the theme of Lift09, these quotes are inspiring after a good discussion with Julian about design fictions.

Week-ending 106

The previous week was slightly less packed with travels and meetings so I finally had some time to work on parallel projects and be inspired with discussions here and there. A project I really want to push forward is certainly the one about game controller. It's been a while that we have accumulated the material, but we have trouble doing the analysis because of business matters. Laurent and I finally completed a big spreadsheet (see picture above). It's basically a table with the 42 gamepads we consider as being "official" along with a description of their characteristics: number of buttons, surface, button surface, shape type, d-pad type, connector type, etc. Given our slow rhythm to work on the project, we decided that we will release an intermediary step: a booklet to describe our "visual corpus", i.e. the structured set of artifacts we are analyzing in our project. This booklet will be both available physically (printed) and as an ipad/iPhone app. It will show a sort of series of identity cards describing the joypads.

Vaguely related with this project: I was interviewed for a french exhibit called "Museogames about the history of video-games. The interview was about the evolution of computer and console game interfaces, the agent of change and the role of cultural difference in this.

As mentioned in my blogpost earlier, I worked on the Lift France 10 program and we are currently tuning the last details, discussing with speakers about their talks.

Besides, I went to Lausanne last Friday to spend the day at the Panoramic Lab. it's basically the studio occupied by Bread and Butter and Ozwe. A good place to spend some time on Friday, to work/discuss/chat with like-minded people, play and observe robots and get some inspiration out of my daily office. I think I will try to keep doing this. Spending a day a week in another office is also healthy in terms of social activities, work on side-projects (such as the game controller thing) and change from daily routines.

Finally, the week-end was sunny but I managed to find some time to start writing a research proposal about personal data. A potential partnership with local universities and the design school as well as a partner in Asia. We'll see how things goes.

And yes, I read this novel called "Omega Minor" by Paul Verhaegen. Very curious, all over the place (a la Pynchon) and stunning with regards to the topics he deals with. It's not just a book about nazism as the largest European catastrophe, it's also a novel about memory crossed with nuclear physics, wizardry, Berlin, lies, the resurgence of ideas over time and the Holocaust. The author is a researcher in cognitive psychology and given my background in this discipline, I read the book with the information in mind. It lead me to appreciate quotes such as the following: It reminds of me of how I perceived cognitive psychology with regards to much broader perspective about the world. This quote may come handy in presentation about reductionism. Besides, readers interested in his view of memory can also look at the 52 occurrences of the term "memory" to dig more how this topic is addressed in the novel.

Lift France 10: Marseille

The program for Lift France 10 in Marseilles (yes, it's in English, there's a "s") is now completed. The theme is called "dot.Real" and the conference is meant to explore how the technologies and concepts of the web are changing the real world today and in the future:

"For the last 20 years, networked technologies have redistributed the power of imagining, evaluating, and acting. No frontier has remained fixed. No longer the world's factory, Asia has become a major source of innovation. Consumers have also become producers. The divisions between industries or disciplines are being redefined. This change extends far beyond the digital. It transforms manufacturing, learning, cities, public policy, perhaps even our own minds… The Web changes the world – But to what extent? With what limitations? How can it reach its full potential?"

The program is described here with speakers such as Matt Cottam, Jan Blom, Jean-Louis Fréchin, Adrian Boyer, Manuel Lima, Anab Jain.

If you're interested in proposing a short speech (open stage), the call is still opened here

Tangible representation of emotional bonds

Seen in London last week. An interesting sign says "Don't go Neil! We want you to stick around".

Why do I blog this? an interesting example of emotional attachment represented with tangible artifacts on the street. The motorcycle acts a proxy for the owner who is attached to a streetlamp.

Sony move and gestural interactions

Some interesting insights about gestural interfaces, the Wii and Sony Move on Gamasutra in an interview of Rob Dyer (Sony Computer Entertainment America's senior vice president of publisher relations):

"There are certain games and certain genres that are great for motion gaming. I think the biggest problem that third parties have had with the Wii is that everybody had to implement everything with the Wii-mote, and a lot of games were never meant to have that kind of physical [interface]. It was supposed to be a D-pad only type of experience.

There are going to be some categories that are going to be absolutely spectacular with the Move. There are going to be some categories that are going to be very good with Natal. Now, the big difference with the Move and the Natal, if you're going to do it with Natal, you're going to do it exclusive with Microsoft. That's not going to be the case for the Move. You have a code base that works across all three platforms. How do you build that up and how you implement it into your game? Do I think you're going to see [inappropriate Move implementations]? Absolutely. Our challenge here is to make sure you're doing it with the right games and the right genres, and that's where we're spending a lot of our time, going back to people and going, "Good idea. Bad idea. Good idea. Yeah, not so good idea." Those are the types of things that we're trying to at least steer people away so they don't spend millions of dollars, come back to me and go, "Eh... It didn't sell." "Well, okay. You never should have made it. It was never going to work anyway. It didn't work on the Wii for a reason. That category didn't. Why did you think it was going to work on this one as well?" (...) The Wii doesn't have a camera. We've got a camera. Use that camera, implement that in there. A lot of these guys don't want to. They just want to use the accelerometer and say, well... No. Not gonna happen. It doesn't work that way. Put the camera in there, make it work with that, get your trophies, up-res is, put some more content in, come on down.

Why do I blog this? curiosity towards this new interface... and I cannot help framing it in the evolution of game interfaces. Surely some stuff for the game controller project

Habitar: bending the urbran frame

For researchers and designers interested in urban informatics and architecture, the HABITAR exhibition at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industria seems to be a great pick. The curator (José-Luis de Vicente) and his conceptual advisor (none other than Fabien) describe it as:

"The new urban landscape is no longer predicated solely on architecture and urbanism. These disciplines now embrace emerging methodologies that bend the physical with new measures, representations and maps of urban dynamics such as traffic or mobile phone flows. Representations of usage patterns and mapping the life of the city amplify our collective awareness of the urban environment as a living organism. These soft and invisible architectures fashion sentient and reactive environments.

The Habitar project offers a journey through these emerging urban scenarios. It is a three-dimensional catalogue of projects and images by artists and design and architecture studios, as well as hybrid research centres and media labs. It is an overview of the practices, tools, solutions and languages that are being developed to negotiate every day life in this new urban predicament."

The artists, designers and researchers who contributed to this are: Timo Arnall, Julian Bleecker, Ángel Borrego - Office for Strategic Spaces, Nerea Calvillo, Citilab-Cornellà, Pedro Miguel Cruz, Dan Hill, IaaC - Instituto de Arquitectura Avanzada de Cataluña, kawamura-ganjavian + Maki Portilla Kawamura + Tanadori Yamaguchi, Aaron Koblin, Philippe Rahm architectes, Marina Rocarols, Enrique Soriano, Pep Tornabell, Theodore Mohillo, Semiconductor, SENSEable City Lab, Mark Shepard.

The catalogue of the exhibit (PDF) also features 8 essays from Benjamin Weil, Molly Wright Steenson, Bryan Boyer, Usman Haque, Anne Galloway, José Pérez de Lama and myself.

Why do I blog this? I see this exhibit (that i still have to explore) as an important landmark in the evolution of urban informatics. The projects and abstract considerations describes in the catalogue can be seen as interesting pointers to what I see as the most intriguing issues and topics in the field.

“I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

From Ubik, by Philip K. Dick (1969):

"The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” "

Why do I blog this I really enjoy this quote and find it exemplifies the ever-increasing delegation of decisions that are embedded/inscribed into technical objects. The Ubik door might certainly be the ubicomp posterchild in a parallel (and dystopic) environment but it seems highly plausible nowadays. Let's accumulate this kind of examples and see what patterns one can find.

Context-aware applications in 2010

Interestingly, location-based/Context-aware services are more and more present in the press. After the frenziness of 2004-2005 (and less interest afterwards), I see more and more article about the potential role of location and context as the starting point for complex scenarios. See for example the ideas described in this article:

• "My context device "knows" it's noon. It also knows (via accelerometer data) that I haven't moved from my desk for the last couple of hours. Because it "knows" I have a TBD lunch scheduled for 12:30 (it reads my tagged calendar entries), it will remind me I should leave. As soon as I move the device, it displays the list of places where I had lunch the last couple of weeks. Since most were Italian restaurants, it suggests Chinese or falafel and generates the latest consumer rating of the restaurants offered. At the same time, it also highlights restaurants located within walking distance that will allow me to be back in time for my scheduled 2 p.m. meeting.
• I am on a business trip to Madrid, have just finished my meetings and have three hours until my flight back to New York. My device "senses" I started moving and "knows" my schedule, therefore it asks me if I prefer to get a taxi to the airport, or if I prefer to stay in the city since the drive to the airport takes about 15 minutes. I choose the second option, slide the "ambient media streams" all the way from "privacy please" to "hit me with everything you've got," and the device offers me all the tourist attractions around me, even a nearby coffee shop that has received exceptionally high ratings (I love coffee). I choose the coffee shop, and as I am drinking my second cup, the device alerts me that my flight has been delayed by an hour and will board through gate E32. I drink another cup of coffee and read from my device the history of Madrid until the next alert updates me that I should call a taxi -- immediately providing me with an application that directly books one.
• I leave my office to interview someone at a nearby bar. My device "knows" it is a job interview (tagged in my calendar), therefore it automatically Googles the applicant, uploads his resume and image, and then provides me with a summary of the available information found about him from HR, the web and other social sources. As I approach the bar, my device turns itself into "meeting" mode, in which I can view a map that displays two dots approaching each other. As we meet, the device asks me if I would like to record the conversation and send it to HR."

Why do I blog this? I am not sure I am convinced by these scenarios but it's interesting to contrast them with the one we saw in 2004-2005. The move from location to context is interesting because it shows that the former is only a component of the latter. It also acknowledges the importance of taking into account the complexity of contextual information which cannot be limited to mere locational data.

Unlike the 3 stereotypical scenarios we had 5 years ago (friend-finding, location-based ads and geotagged post-its), the ones described here are a bit more complex and rely on the connection between "personalized social/behavioral data" and contextual information (location, time, etc.). Using algorithms, services would then be able to infer different things that can supposedly interest people, especially in urban environments.

Week-ending 105

[I started making weeknotes too, This is week 105 because I started working at Liftlab 105 weeks ago] Last week-end was a sort of retreat/holiday to recover from Lift10... and work on the "Lift insight" report, which will summarize the various topics that has been addressed at the Lift 10 conference two weeks ago. It was good have already existing material such as the drawings you see above (made by Integral Development) or the notes by Hubert Guillaud on InternetActu. The event was good and dense, as usual, and it's important to highlight what has been uncovered. I'll post the report on-line when ready.

Spent one day in London for a project with a mobile phone carrier and a design agency. The project consisted in both a presentation and a workshop to make clients appropriate the insights I brought (through a set of exercises/break-out groups). It was kind of painful to each LHR because my Easyjet flight has been cancelled and I had to take BA, which was on strike.

In parallel, Fabien, Laurent and I completed another project about networked objects and home appliances for a client with the help of Etienne from XPteam. I still have to finalize the exec summary of the report and send it tomorrow to the client.

Finally, it was my last week of teaching for the semester at HEAD-Geneva. These two sessions about evaluating design products were the conclusion of my "Field research and interaction design" course. Students now have to work on their assignments: a field study that will lead to the description of design implications (storyboards, scenarios, paper prototypes, specifications, etc.) I am definitely curious about the results and now need to write a review of the year course to see what we can change or improve for next year. And yes the picture above shows the place where courses are given, an old and curious building in Geneva.

Besides, I received my (physical) copy of Laurence Dupuis' dissertation (under my supervision, at ENSCI in Paris) about Imagination, design and digital technologies. It's full of interesting insights and discussion with people such as Jean-Louis Fréchin, Frederic Kaplan or Bruce Sterling. Only in French though.

More and more complex pedometer games

Pedometers connected to video-games are more and more complex, as attested by this Pokéwalker, a Poké Ball-shaped pedometer which can connect to Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver game cards via infrared signals. See the possibilities:

"It uses a currency known as "watts", which are obtained as the player walks with the device. Every 20 steps will earn the player one watt. It can communicate with other Pokéwalkers. Exchanges are not limited merely to watts, but also items and Pokémon

When players transfer a Pokémon from their game into their Pokéwalker, they can select which route they would like to take their Pokémon along. Depending on which route the player takes (such as in a grassland or by the sea), they will encounter different wild Pokémon and items. When players first begin their journeys with the Pokéwalker, the list of routes they can select from is short. But, the more players take a stroll with their Pokémon, the more routes will appear and the more Pokémon and items they will be able to get.

And you can get a more in-depth perspective in Katie Salen's article Pokéwalkers, Mafia Dons, and Football Fans: Play Mobile with Me. Why do I blog this? documenting material about tracking technologies and how game mechanics could lead to peculiar usage of such platforms.