Gestural interface for TV

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The rush towards gesture-based interface seems to be a new trend, as shown by this gesture-control for regular TV designed by Australian engineers Dr Prashan Premaratne and Quang Nguye.

What seems to change here is the fact that the concurrency problem is taken into account: "Crucially for anyone with small children, pets or gesticulating family members, the software can distinguish between real commands and unintentional gestures". The good integration to a wide range of devices is also new (" elevision, video recorder, DVD player, hi-fi and digital set-top box"), acting as a universal remote control. In addition, the very basic gestural grammar designed here seems to be simple enough.

Why do I blog this? What is intriguing is the way it is referred to as "Wii-style". This type of system has received a lot of interested in the last 20 years, lots of patents have been filed in the area. Maybe the Minority-Report-like UI as well as the frenziness towards multi-touch interface has led to a situation where people are expecting this sort of things to happen soon (normative future shape by cultural artifacts). The arrival of the Wii that can be seen as the "Steve Jobs of gestural interface" is also an important milestone. Will this pervade multimedia system controllers? Time will tell and it would be good to understand what works and what's not working with the Wii in terms of users acceptances.

Lewis Caroll, blank maps and geoware

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"He had brought a large map representing the sea,Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. "What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs! Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank" (So the crew would protest) "that he’s bought us the best— A perfect and absolute blank!"

Lewis Carroll, The Bellman’s Map (from The Hunting of the Snark, 1876).

The map is an ocean chart that allows the characters of the book to cross the ocean, hunting for "the Snark". The fact is that is only shows the ocean without any further details.

Why do I blog this? Stories about maps are always intriguing, this blank sheet of paper with navigational cues (N,S,E...) is very mysterious and may represent humans clueless about where they were located. But at the same time, a map that we can all understand.

More seriously, this is also about granularity, in the middle of an ocean this map is quite exact and accurate if there is nothing in the portion considered. Blank maps can be very often found when changing the granularity of online map applications, leading to this nonsensical situation.

Augmented tabletop with RFID

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Browsing some pdf I have left on my desktop, I ran across this paper by Steve Hinske and Marc Langheinrich entitled An RFID-based Infrastructure for Automatically Determining the Position and Orientation of Game Objects in Tabletop Games (presented at Pergames 2007). It interestingly describes how RFID technologiy could be used in a tabletop gaming context, allowing to identify objects in an "augmented miniature wargame" (a la Warhammer 40K). The section about why augmenting such games has some good points:

"Popular miniature war games like “Warhammer”, “Warhammer 40k”, and “The Lord of the Rings”2 are excellent examples of games that continuously require precise information about the location and orientation of all game objects. (...) Besides measuring distances and angles, the players must consider the individual features and weapons of each game object. (...) such games can quickly become incredibly complex: Tens or hundreds of different game objects with distinct characteristics and equipment turn the game into an intricate and laborious episode of managing charts, sheets of paper, and measuring equipment. Therefore, the goal is to take the burden off the player by generally displaying static, but essential information about individual game objects (e.g., individual firepower, life points, etc.) on the one hand, and, depending on the current context, by providing them with dynamic real-time information regarding the location and orientation (e.g., unit A is 12 centimetres away from unit B), on the other hand. "

The test environment is very intriguing (using a LEGO Mindstorms robot) and provided a relevant platform to examine whether bringing off some burden related to information-management could change the gaming experience. I'd be curious to see how this is apprehended by players. Why do I blog this? Having played such games few years ago, I find it interesting to analyze the player's experience when supported by diverse technologies such s RFID: how does that change the way people negotiate rules and situations? (something that always happen in this sort of context) Are there other values (or downsides) brought by the inclusion of technology? How does it change the confrontation?

And in the end, how does that inform us about how interactive furnitures and the activities they could be used for? (surely relevant for things such as Philips Entertaible).

Talk in Torino

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Currently in Torino, where I gave a talk yesterday organized by Experientia and the Order of Architects of the Province of Turin. My talk "Designing a new ecology of mixed digital and physical environments" was a critical overview of ubiquitous computing (slides as a pdf) based on current research in the field (showing what people like Paul Dourish or Genevieve Bell are discussing but also geographers such as Stephen Graham), art/start-up/research projects and alternative visions such as what I am doing with Julian Bleecker. As I said in the talk, lots of the aspects presented here as design challenges are messy to reflect the complexity of ubicomp design

Thanks to Mark Vanderbeeken, Jan-Christoph Zoels and Michele Visciola as well as the Order of Architects of Turin for setting this up!

Paul Saffo's tools and hints about forecast

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The last issue of Harvard Business Review features an insightful article by Paul Saffo about efficient forecast. Although the title refers to "6 rules" for efficient forecast, the article actually provides the reader with two "thinking tools" and a set of highly relevant heuristics about how do forecasting. The premise here is that forecasting is in no way about predicting the future but instead to identify the full range of possibilities to take meaningful actions in the present. The two tools described by Saffo are the "cone of uncertainty" and "S-curves".

A cone of uncertainty is a tool meant to help the decision maker exercise strategic judgment by delineating possibilities that extend out from a particular moment or event. At first, defining the cone corresponds to set its breadth: the measure of overall uncertainty. Saffo describes that it is important to define it broadly at start to "maximize your capacity to generate hypotheses about outcomes and eventual responses". Defining the edge is also worthwhile since it enable to distinguish "between the highly improbable and the wildly impossible". Then the point is to fill the cone with external factors to consider, inside the cone there would be factors such as the possible emergence of competing technologies or consumer characteristics (preference) and at the edge of the cone would be wild cards (surprising events such as war, terrorist attack), which are what define the edge of the cone. While the neck of the cone depicts the key speculation, the end shows the possible outcomes.

See the example Saffo gave (about robots):

(Cone as defined by Paul Saffo / HBR)

The other thinking tool presented here is the S-curve (as exemplified by Moore's law). As described previously in this blog, S-curves (power laws) are meant to model the way change happens: it starts slowly and incrementally till an inflection point where it explodes, eventually reaching a plateau. Forecasting is about finding S-curved patterns before the inflection point (left of the curve). Moreover, Saffo highlights the fractal nature of s-curves: they are composed of small s-curves; which means that finding a S-curve can lead to suspect a larger/more important one in the background. He also gives few hints:

" the left-hand part of the S curve is much longer than most people imagine (Television took 20 years, plus time out for a war, to go from invention in the 1930s to takeoff in the early 1950s) (...) having identified the origins and shape of the left-hand side of the S curve, you are always safer betting that events will unfold slowly than concluding that a sudden shift is in the wind. (...) Once an inflection point arrives, people commonly underestimate the speed with which change will occur. (...) expect the opportunities to be very different from those the majority predicts, for even the most expected futures tend to arrive in utterly unexpected ways (...) The leading-edge line of an emerging S curve is like a string hanging down from the future, and the odd event you can’t get out of your mind could be a weak signal of a distant industry-disrupting S curve just starting to gain momentum. (...) The best way for forecasters to spot an emerging S curve is to become attuned to things that don’t fit, things people can’t classify or will even reject."

Then Saffo, through his 4 other rules, give a compelling list of heuristics that I will only quote below:

" just as we dislike uncertainty, we shy away from failures and anomalies. But if you want to look for the thing that’s going to come whistling in out of nowhere in the next years and change your business, look for interesting failures—smart ideas that seem to have gone nowhere. (...) One of the biggest mistakes a forecaster—or a decision maker—can make is to overrely on one piece of seemingly strong information because it happens to reinforce the conclusion he or she has already reached. (...) lots of interlocking weak information is vastly more trustworthy than a point or two of strong information. (...) Good forecasting is a process of strong opinions, weakly held. If you must forecast, then forecast often—and be the first one to prove yourself wrong. (...) our historical rearview mirror is an extraordinarily powerful forecasting tool. (...) The problem with history is that our love of certainty and continuity often causes us to draw the wrong conclusions. The recent past is rarely a reliable indicator of the future (...) You must look for the turns, not the straightaways, and thus you must peer far enough into the past to identify patterns. It’s been written that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” The effective forecaster looks to history to find the rhymes, not the identical events. (...) [look for] deep, unchanging consumer desires and ultimately, to the sorrow of many a start-up, unchanging laws of economics. (...) Be skeptical about apparent changes, and avoid making an immediate forecast—or at least don’t take any one forecast too seriously. The incoming future will wash up plenty more indicators on your beach, sooner than you think. "

Why do I blog this? I quite like articles like this because it gives a lot of hints, which resonates with past readings/meetings (see here and there). Currently trying to integrate all these tools and approaches into some more personal approach, I am particularly interested in "find what doesn't fit" or "spot rhythms" hints. I wish he had insisted more on the outcome of such work (story, scenario, decision) and - above all - on what is difficult or hard: how find variables? underlying issues? The part that I am mostly interested in concerns the "data" that could be employed to describe cones or S-curves.

Last, some less organized quotes that I liked: "There is a tendency to overestimate the short term and to underestimate the long term" Roy Amara "Whether a specific forecast actually turns out to be accurate is only part of the picture - even a broken clock is right twice a day" Paul Saffo "Son, never mistake a clear view for a short distance" "The future's already arrived, it's just not evenly distributed" William Gibson "Forecasting is nothing more (nor less) than the systematic and disciplined application of common sense"

200 traditional games for 500 DS software titles

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Some excerpts from the WSJ about the Nintendo DS (by Yukari Iwatani Kane):

"Behind the fastest-selling portable videogame player in Japan is an unusual shift in the culture of gadgets: People are clamoring for it not just for games, but also to keep a household budget, play the guitar, and study the Buddhist scripture Heart Sutra. Since its introduction in 2004, the DS, which responds to writing and speech, has spurred software makers to fill the Japanese market with an eclectic array of reference guides, digital books and study tools. (...) Of the 500-odd DS software titles released or in the works so far, only about 200 are traditional videogames. (...) More than 60% of the DS units were bought by people who don't think of themselves as videogame users, Enterbrain said."

And the difference of strategy between Nintendo and Sony:

"Nintendo's big rival, Sony, isn't following the DS into books and references. Sony is trying to attract new game users to its PlayStation Portable machines with easy-to-play games such as virtual tennis. It says it will continue to focus on games that show off its high-quality screen and advanced technology."

Why do I blog this? some interesting figures and arguments about the success of the DS to be used in some future work about gaming foresight. 200/500 is an intriguing ratio... definitely not followed by Sony.

Judith Donath on "signals"

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Signals, Truth, Design is the upcoming book of Judith Donath which deals with the social dynamics of the "mediated world" (i.e. email, forums and other communication supported by the Internet) and how to design it. To do so, the author use the "signaling theory" as a framework to describe how:

"most of the things we want to know about each other – one’s identity, status, and intentions – are qualities that are not directly observable. Instead, we rely on signals, which are indicators of these hidden qualities, in order to comprehend the world around us. (...) Signaling theory explains what makes some signals more reliable than others are."

She applies it to some more specific topics such as deception, identity, reputation or impression formation. Why do I blog this? this topic is a bit different than what I am interested in, but awareness (as provided by mutual location-awareness tools) can be perceived as a "signal". This "signal" concept sparked some discussion during my PhD defense when one of the reviewer wondered about why employing this "old" metaphor, very tight to the Shannon-model of communication. The argument was about showing that it's still relevant, I'd be curious to know how this book approach the signal notion using the biology background.

Digital/Physical fusing

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Mark Baard in Boston.com wrote a short piece about how certain artifacts aim at fusing digital environments and physical activities. It basically gives an account of the "Virtual Worlds: Where Business, Society, Technology & Policy Converge" conference.

"Second Lifers wearing the gadgets will be able to attend "in-world" parties and gallery openings, whether they are sucking down beers at Cornwall's or stuck in Fenway traffic. Motion detectors and other sensors in the devices will also show your virtual mates what you are up to in the real world. (...) Linden Lab vice president Joe Miller described one of the early products that will bridge the two worlds as a wearable box that creates a "3D sound field" that allows the wearer to hear voices from his virtual world without completely shutting out the real people around him. (...) It will take some retooling before virtual worlds can accommodate all of the data streaming from ubiquitous sensors."

Also curious is the fact that companies such as Linden Lab or Blizzard Entertainment are hiring developers with experience in mobile systems (Symbian and Adobe Flash Lite). Why do I blog this? The examples are quite classic but it seems that the meme started to spread.

Game industry foresight by E. Adams

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Some interesting quotes from Ernest Adam's foresight about the future of gaming:

"Games that depend on that depend on location or travel? Useful in theme parks, Laser Tag, etc. Not ever going to be a major segment. Compare # of video gamers to # of paintball players.Compare # of video gamers to # of paintball players. (...) In the long run...... Mobile phones will not drive out other devices. Other devices will absorb mobile phone capability. Just as everything now contains a digital clock, someday everything will contain a mobile phone. (...) In 30 years, In 30 years, how how we play has not changed - Handheld/mobile on the bus to school - Console in the living room - PC in the home office or kid ’s bedrooms bedroom

Convergence will be partial, not total. - A computer monitor is better than a TV. - Handhelds cannot cannot contain the best hardware. - A PC is a poor machine for group play. (...) The all-over VR body suit: Only as a very high--end option for fanatics"

Why do I blog this? some interesting thoughts here, need to use that material later on, quite like the very pragmatic approach.

A return to the earlier mechanical era, with improvements

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Following on his earlier column about command line as the future of User Interface, Donald Norman now describes physicality in the latest issue of ACM interactions as another important direction ("the return to physical controls and devices"). As he says "Physical devices, what a breakthrough! But wait a minute, isn't this where the machine age started, with mechanical devices and controls?" this is some sort of throwback to earlier times "with improvement" though.

"Physical devices have immediate design virtues, but they require new rules of engagement (...) Designers have to learn how to translate the mechanical actions and directness into control of the task. (...) As we switch to tangible objects and physical controls, new principles of interaction have to be learned, old ones discarded. With the Wii, developers discovered that former methods didn't always apply. Thus, in traditional game hardware, when one wants an action to take place, the player pushes a button. With the Wii, the action depends upon the situation. To release a bowling ball, for example, one releases the button push. It makes sense when I write it, but I suspect the bowling-game designers discovered this through trial and error, plus a flash of insight. Not all of the games for Wii have yet incorporated the new principles. This will provide fertile ground for researchers in HCI."

He also points out intriguing issues such as the movement towards physical interface would lead HCI to "move from computer science back to mechanical engineering (which is really where it started many years ago)". So he advocates for HCI that would take advantage of both mechatronics and UX: "If the future is a return to mechanical systems, mechatronics is one of the key technological underpinnings of their operation. Mechatronics taught with an understanding of how people will interact with the resulting devices"... wondering where this would happen.

Why do I blog this? it's now well established that "new rules" should be written. New games are being design, new guidelines being described, new approach are required (like gestural language annotation for example) but the final part (about need to have more mechatronic + a user-centered approach) is less common in papers about tangible interfaces. It's curious to see how things will unfold towards that direction (yes I assume that it's a correct direction).

Striated space

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R0011875 Why do I blog this? I quite like wall textures like this one, as it reminds us how the space that we inhabit is not so smooth. There is a sense of roughness that is exemplified by this picture. At the micro-level, this image represents how a space is not always a repetition of the same small bits. How to design with this in mind?

The tent as HCI

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Camping in the digital wilderness: tents and flashlights as interfaces to virtual worlds by Jonathan Green, Holger Schnädelbach, Boriana Koleva, Steve Benford, Tony Pridmore, Karen Medina (CHI 2002). The paper describes a very curious project that propose the use of a projection screen in the shape of a tent in order to immerse users in a virtual world (of course based on the metaphor of camping):

"RFID aerials at its entrances sense tagged children and objects as they enter and leave. Video tracking allows multiple flashlights to be used as pointing devices. The tent is an example of a traversable interface, designed for deployment in public spaces such as museums, galleries and classrooms. on interactions that fit naturally with the tent metaphor."

Why do I blog this? what I find intriguing is the discussion about why a tent is an interesting interface:

"As an interface, the tent reflects several current concerns within HCI. First, it represents an example of a traversable interface that provides the illusion of crossing into and out of a virtual world (...) our design tries to meet some of the challenges of designing interfaces for public spaces. For example, studies of interactive exhibits in museums show how passers-by learn by watching others interact. The two- sided nature of the tent provides those outside with a public rendition of the activity that is happening inside, but at the same time maintains a relatively protected and isolated environment for those inside."

Experience-design trappings

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A good read for my daily commute today was this "On the ground running: Lessons from experience design by Adam Greenfield in which he describes the pitfalls and challenges of the "new ecosystem" that underly "experience design" and how to overcome them. Products, such as the iPod, are "no longer an isolated entity, but a way of gaining access to content which might ultimately live elsewhere", which leads designers in a situation where getting this product right "means accounting for your interactions with it across multiple channels over time". Quoting Eliel Saarinen, Adam highlights the importance of having things always "designed with reference to their next larger context".

The article goes through different examples such as the Nike+ system (biotelemetric transponder, compatible Nike sneakers, an iPod nano, and an online environment), a complex Acela train experience and the Puma Trainaway (shoes and clothes, a series of cardkey-sized, plasticized maps to running routes in major cities worldwide, MP3 audio guides, and alliances with Hotel chains). What I found very interesting here is the limitations:

"physical components that are fragile, unreliable, or not delivered to specification to begin with; difficulties integrating those components with online environments, with desktop or mobile applications, and with human participants; and finally, the inherent unpredictability of any attempt to maintain consistent feel across technosocial systems of heterogeneous type and nature."

A potential solution according to Adam concerns the logic of “small pieces, loosely joined,” coming from the Web culture. Favoring this bottom-up (streetwiser) opinion, the point is that

"the network is open-ended, effortlessly extensible, and robustly resilient to the failure of individual system components (...) Isn't it better, then, to open these systems up—to provide the APIs and other hooks that would allow people to configure them to their own liking? (...) the person formerly known to experience design as the “user,” “customer,” or “consumer”; needs to be understood as a human being before designers can do their work properly. Any other approach, he reasons, risks treating this person as an instrumental component, not as someone capable of fully participatory co-creation."

(On a different note, things can go beyond API as described in this article in The Economist about the sharing of data)

Why do I blog this? the issues and problems presented by Adam parallels some thoughts I had recently about complexity, how creating something is now tight to so many different aspects (user, context, regulations, etc.) that lots of flaws might emerge in the end.

Retrofrogging

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Reading this interesting account of a session at Supernova07 (no joke please), I ran across this "retrofrogging" term used by Clay Shirky:

"There’s also retrofrogging. We had such great copper that we now lag the world in broadband. That was our Minitel."

I tried to google the term and nothing else showed up, although I found it exquisitely intriguing (even here). I guess it simply refers to innovations that push in a certain direction when new iterations or disruptions have challenged it. The implicit example for this can be determined by the "frogging" part: frogs = french people.... who developed the Minitel, a pre-Web online service that allowed to do all sorts of things (ebanking, chat, IM, forum, etc.)... which became an impediment for the adoption of the Internet in France.

'Nomadic work' workshop

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Bits and pieces, quotes and notes about a workshop about "nomadic work" I helped organizing (along with Jef Huang, Mark Meagher, Silke Lang, Isabelle Bentz and Alvise Simondetti) on tuesday. Why a workshop about nomadic work in an infoviz conference? because the point was to envision how information visualization could be a way to overcome some of the problems/limits/pain points experienced by mobile workers.

The workshop lasted one day and was based on two parts: 1) a discussion of the current nomadic work situation of the participants through discussion of pictures and maps. This helped us to set research topics, limits and opportunities that can lead to design opportunities. 2) a quick and dirty brainstorm about how to design for such topics.

The 'nomadic work' themes we explored concerned (btw yes they overlap): - selective connectivity: how can we manage our time: being offline on vacation, offline but working on a project, online and available to discuss with others. - supporting collective grounding: how to build trust and mutual understanding over distance - awareness of various kinds: which information about one's state to share - the office in a pocket: access to resources - temporary appropriation of space: how to appropriate certain places to work during short amount of time

nomadic workforce

Francesco Cara interestingly described how work process became 24/7, more a matter of an engagement. To him, the office cleaning used to mark the end of the day, with a fresh start the morning after finding a clean office. Now in certain companies who have office cleaning at 2pm, this ritual is lost. What happens, as he pointed out, is that work will more and more be project-based, about multitasking and with a increasing mix of personal and professional tasks. Jef then remarked that maybe the problem is not make work like home but instead to to make home look like work, how to liberate from domesticity.

Yasmine explained how things unfold in the company she's recently joined: they're a pool of consultants so the office is often too small for when they're all present (back from the field) and too big when they're on the field doing ethnographic research.

Another relevant point raised by Francesco was the "myth of the overload": when looking at the data, what is stressful for people is not that receive too many phone calls or message (in mobile situations) but rather the potentiality to receive them.

As pointed by Roberto: "I don't care about where my colleagues are, they can be in the toilets, as soon as the work is done" "Second Life is a place populated by journalists who have virtual sex with each other to write articles about people having sex in virtual reality" "Most people look bad on picture (me included), I would rather see their heartbeats"

Alvise also described that: "I like cubicles because I can create my own patch of people with videoconferencing applications, I see my colleagues... So when my colleagues are picking their nose I see them but in the end you would skip noticing, besides the sound is too intrusive, I muted it"

Why do I blog this? as the seminar I attended yesterday, it's not directly connected to my research about gaming/space but it's tightly linked to some of my research concerns about computer-supported collaborative work, mobile work and the user experience of such technosocial situations. These messy notes are elements I found intriguing from the day and that we might use to do the write-up.

Digitality and space seminar

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Some notes gathered from the annual seminar of the sociology/geography department at EPFL. This year, the seminar was about "digitality and space", focusing how relationships between the individual, the social and machines are reshuffled and what could we envision "new architectures" for "living together". Boris Beaude about the spatiality of the Internet

Boris, a french geographer, started by showing how the vocabulary about the Internet is spatial: website, navigate/surf, internet explorer, information superhighways, site architecture, "on internet" (in french as well as in english). Is it because the Internet is a space?

He then pointed out that information on the Internet have a speed but not mass... which leads to sensorial issues given that 3 of our senses require mass (proprioception, taste and smell). Therefore, Internet better ease certain type of contacts based on the visual and auditory senses.

Very interestingly, the rest of the talk was about questioning the spatiality of the Internet. Is it because of its infrastructure that the Internet is spatial? Obviously no because it relies on previously existing infrastructure as Boris argued: the existing telecom networks. However, what is curious is that it specificity might be the node of the network, i.e. the content... which would lead us in a situation where the specificity of this network is not the network itself but what is connected.

The last part of the talk briefly concerned the relationships between the Internet and the City. One of them favor connexity and the others is bound to contiguity through two techniques (telecommunication versus copresence) or two different logic (reticularité versus territoriality). BUT the Internet is unique ("un géotype et son unique géon"). This said, Boris describes the 3 sorts of relationships between the Internet and the city: - complementary logic (e.g. an activity on the Internet can motivate physical mobility like having a chat with a friend on the other part of town). - alternative logic (e.g. buying a book on Amazon instead of going in a book shop) - exclusive logic (e.g. wikipedia, open source development: activities that would have a huge cost without the Internet)

Patrick Keller and Christophe Guignard (fabric.ch).

Patrick and Christophe interestingly presented several projects of fabric.ch, their architecture/research studio starting from the idea of the availability of data collected through sensors: what do we do with these data? what's their status? should they be private? public? what technologies deal with them?

Instead of relying on the flawed differentiation between the digital and the physical, they rather presented how they see the hybridization caused by ubiquitous computing to be similar to a spectrum, made of different wavelength. Some are visible, some aren't, and tools/artifacts allow to access to certain wavelength: technologies can then be seen as mediators. They showed how the mediators enable us to access to different fringes of space that would be invisible without them. Another aspect here, also drawn from the spectrum metaphor, is that these different levels coexist: at certain moments, it is possible to access to other wavelengths (interferences). This leads a continuity between the spaces and they describe their work as the creation of interferences.

Their architectural practice aims at understanding the world around them and to propose projects that question it or to describe potential solutions. They then took examples of their work such as Knowscape mobile (a browser that allows to navigate the Internet both as an hypertext and a 3D representation), electroscape 004 (a Playstation dialoguing to an Xbox about their relationships to space), Perpetual Tropical Sunshine (a set of IR lamps that recreate a perpetual tropical client, nurtured by data drawn from a weather database), realroom[s].

Why do I blog this? although these two talks are different from my research, there are very intriguing convergence here and some of the elements discussed are utterly relevant to me in terms of concepts, metaphors, examples deployed. For example, I really like the spectrum metaphor to go beyond the opposition of digital/physical; the description of the relationships between the Internet and the city is also of interest to a project about playing virtual worlds on a mobile phone in a city context.

On my side, it was a way to present my research, about mutual location-awareness as well as the new analysis I am doing with the CatchBob data about the affordances of space.

CACM about gaming

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No time to parse it yet, but the latest issue of Communications of the ACM is about "creating a science of game". As Michael Zyda points out in the introduction:

"Today's game industry will not build a game-based learning infrastructure on its own. It got killed in the early days of edutainment (2000–2004), and shareholder lawsuits continue to prevent game industry executives from attending conferences where the topic of games for education might be headlined. So, computer scientists must be responsible for making this happen and not wait for the risk-averse to come around.

To be able to deploy the new medium for societal good, we need a well-defined R&D agenda. (...) We hope these articles influence your personal research in the direction of games, helping you understand why computer science must be willing to support games' R&D and societal missions. It's been great fun for me to waylay these fellow games researchers and educators into sharing their ideas and insight. Their work represents initial steps on the continuum of research and education necessary to create the new science. With them, we position ourselves to begin to understand and repurpose this vibrant interactive medium."

Why do I blog this? this exemplifies the interesting trend lately towards "game for social change" that include serious gaming or interesting initiative such as worldwithoutoil (although this topic is not addresses in the CACM issue).