Talk at SK Telecom

Wednesday started with a talk with Julian at SK Telecom in the Technology Innovation Planning Team, a sort of foresight/innovation group. Our presentation can be found here (.pdf, 15.5Mb).

The point of the meeting was to discuss the near future laboratory methodologies and projects. We spent 2 hours talking, exchanging about foresight methods, trend analysis and how it's difficult to have a rigorous scientific methodology. Our point was that we aimed at mixing wide-analysis of social, cognitive and cultural trends to inspire sketching and prototyping + testing. Prototypes are not the end per se but a way to try and gain some understanding about tech uses and innovation. A sort of bricolage way to inspect the near future. We insisted on this aspect that we did focus not on tomorrow's design nor long term-range foresight but 3-4 years ahead.

The presentation also included past project description such as the blogject workshop serie (See the report here and there), insisting on some concrete outcomes and how we appreciated that the meme spread and lead some attendants to design their own projects (see Blinks and Buttons for example).

Present projects we described revolved around the "new interaction rituals" (going beyond current I/O in pervasive computing) and the "new interaction partners" (letting pets participating in video games and the social web).

Thanks JongChae Oh for the invitation!

Nintendo DS service

Also seen in the COEX Mall in Seoul, this "Nintendo DS Service Zone":

Use power adapters (lock it while shopping), screen cleaners among other tools. This service, often provided for cell phone now extended to the NDS. Compared to Laurent's experience of asking a screwdriver in a digital camera shop (in which employees said "no we cannot do that"), this sort of little booth/area to adjust your portable console is convenient and DYI.

The Economist about the geoweb

The Economist's tech quarterly has a good piece about the geoweb called "The World on Your Desktop". Although nothing is really new here, the description gives a good overview of the current state of the industry. As usual, expectations are high:

"At the same time, the incorporation of satellite-positioning technology into mobile phones and cars could open the floodgates. When it is available, simply moving about one's neighbourhood can then be tantamount to browsing and generating content without doing anything, as demonstrated by a company called Socialight. Its service lets mobile users attach notes to any location, to be read by others who come along later. Taken further, the result could end up being a sort of extrasensory information awareness, annotation and analysis capability in the real world. “When that happens”, says Mr Jones, “then the map is actually a little portal on to life itself.” The only thing that can hold it back, he believes, is the rate at which society can adapt."

But:

"Since the beginning of last year more than 20 geospatial firms have been the targets of mergers and acquisitions, with Google, Microsoft and ESRI among the buyers. But it is not quite time to declare the dawn of Web 3.0. For one thing, consumer geobrowsing does not make any money. "

Why do I blog this? the article is very interesting and I can imagine that E. readers need this sort of update but I don't understand why the author does not put things in more perspective. It's been now 5-10 years that people, start-ups, academic labs and big companies are working on this topic and the failures or problems are scarcely discussed. Or, when something is discussed it's the lack of business model. But there are tons of other issues: granularity of information, relevance of these systems in people's lives and habits, reliance on certain (seamful) infrastructures, etc.

Talk at Korea University

After two day of jetlagged visits and brainstorm with Laurent and Jaewoong Lee (Daum) about LIFT evening, I visited Korea University with Bruce Sterling and Jesmina Tesanovic. We both gave a talk at the Korean Business School there to MBA students, as part of their evening program. My talk was about the current state of location-aware social software, the problems and possible opportunities, based on literature review, my PhD research and projects that I found pertinent. Slides have been adapted from a talk I already gave in Arhus few months ago.

Then Bruce gave a powerful lecture about the Estonian/russian storm worm.

Thanks Jean-Henry Morin for the impromptu invitation!

George Legrady's talk at LDM

A good talk I will miss this week at the lab: "Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization" by George Legrady on September 12th at EPFL in BC01 at 4:00pm:

"The lecture will trace the intersection of data organization and visualization in a number of the artist's projects such as "Pockets Full of Memories" (Souvenirs plein les poches) inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou, and "Making Visible the Invisible" a public arts commission for the Seattle Central Library, and the Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive (GCVMA) cellphone visual archive exhibited this summer at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. These projects consist of visualizations generated by custom designed software that dynamically organize data."

George Legrady is Professor of Interactive Media at the UCSB. He holds a joint appointment in the Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program, and the Department of Art. His current research addresses data collection, data processing methodologies, and data visualization presented simultaneously in interactive installations and the internet. He is Co-Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Interactive Digital Multimedia (IDM) Program at UCSB.

Reactrix's game

Visiting the COEX mall in Seoul yesterday, I ran across several interactive media displays designed by Reactrix. Although the point of this device oriented towards promotion and branding, I was more curious about people's reaction. Stood there for a while with Laurent to see what happens around these floor-displays. It's basically a beamer which projects some interactive scenes on the floor. Walking across or gesturing triggers reactions. There are different minigames like 2-players soccer games, whack-a-mole bits and other instantiations such as the one below:

People's reactions range from 0 attention (those people never look at their feet or they simply do not care) to short play and long play. The only thing is that the mini-games are so short that people seems to be fed up waiting the bloody soccer game to be back. Also of interest, the fact that a minority of users try to understand the infrastructure, looking up at the beamer or opening an umbrella above the floor.

Anyhow, the system's is not really about gaming and rather about enabling brands to be recognized, which obviously failed with him because I am incapable of remembering what ads I've surely seen after staying around these.

VR just happened

Read in "Spook Country" (William Gibson):

[Hollis] "Some told me that cyberspace was 'everting'." [stands for 'everything' mispronounced by the french artist Odile] [Bobby] "Sure. And once it everts, then there isn't any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we're here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here" [Hollis] "virtual reality? Remember when we were all going to be doing that? (...) [Bobby] "We're all doing VR every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn't need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was en even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going."

Why do I blog this? it's funny to see Gibson talking about this issue, as well as describing locative media/ubicomp. An updated version of cyberspace. Certainly food for thoughts for Alex Pang's next book about the end of cyberspace.

In Seoul

In Seoul for Lift evening, some talks in different institutions, meeting people and enjoying the city with our speakers. Nice wiring, shot this afternoon.

Agents and artifacts

A good read in the train: "Agents and Artefacts" by John Pickering (Social Analysis, March 1997, Issue 41 (1), pages 45 - 62). The article addresses the role of technological artefacts play in the integration of technology with human practices and how they create skilled practices in which humans and machines interact socially. Pickering describes how social interactions with machine "intelligence" is becoming more realistic. Although it's more simulation than genuine "human intelligence", the important point is that technological artefacts are treated as "agents" and that "new values and sensitivities are being created as people and agents co-operate". Conversely, artefacts will participate in the development and transmission of skilled practices.

"Human relations will be technologised to the extent that such artefacts are able participate as agents in social interaction rather then merely to mediate it. The encounter with these artefacts will occur earlier and earlier in human development. They will thereby take part in the sociocultural learning by which skilled practices, and the values they express, are transmitted. The attribution of human like agency to artefacts will change the image of both machines and of human beings. (...) Theories of psychology and evolution that emphasise internal cognitive or genetic mechanisms will not be much help in understanding what is going on here. (...) Moving beyond these restrictions makes it easier to bring these sciences together with anthropology and ethnography. This blend of disciplines is needed to understand how technology supports thought and creates human values. In the longer sweep of cultural evolution, and the broader perspective of anthropological and ethnographic observation, it is clear the use made of artefacts by human beings shows that technology is assimilated to human practices rather than the other way round. (...) technology shapes the cultural conditions within which people develop their ability to live together. These conditions now include agent like artefacts with which human beings will need to co-exist."

Why do I blog this? This is the type of paper I like reading in the train stepping back from down-to-earth issues. There are important point here, especially about how to grasp this new situation. Coming from a background in life sciences and psychology, I have to admit that Pickering's stance is entirely true: methods and theories from psychology (for example) are a bit limited to grasp these issues (think about running lab experiments, or about reductionism).

(Lovely) street hacking

Seen in Lyon, during lunch.

The frontier

Major Fambrough: "You wish to see the frontier?"John Dunbar: "Yes sir, before it's gone" Quote from Dances with the Wolves

There’s no reason why WoW couldn’t be represented by anything other than an RSS feed

Gamasutra has an insightful write-up of Raph Koster's talk at the Austin GDC. The talk is about how the web is destroying games in terms of revenue and access and how to rely on the web model to design future playful games. Koster slides can be found here (pdf, 3.8Mb) (Another good writeup is here). Some excerpts I found interesting:

"If you’re like me, you’re really tired of hearing about Web 2.0,” says Koster – but he maintains that the elements of the concept behind the buzzword are sound. (...) The net says the platform can be anything - there aren’t real hardware requirements or interface problems. The hot topic right now is the non-gamer. The hot feature is other people (as in YouTube), not the systems we write. The hot technology is connectivity and simultaneity. He added: "The hot game is a mini-game. Really small games."

“When you look at the kinds of problems we ask people to solve, and the things we assume them to do, it’s like we’ve given them a PhD in mathematics. No wonder you sit mom down and she asks 'how do I move?'”

If I look at that WoW screenshot,” says Koster, “I see a user interface begging to be simplified.” He calls for something along the lines of just showing the most pertinent information – and already there are hacks to do this. “Every time you make an assumption about inputs or output, you’re shrinking your user base. This is really the secret behind the DS and the Wii – it’s mapped to stuff we already know, which reduces the learning curve.” (...) “There’s no reason why WoW couldn’t be represented by anything other than an RSS feed, and if you could, it’d probably be doubled in users.” "

Well, without the context the last quote might sound weird but there is an relevant point here. And I quite his description about what works on the web that can be transferred to gaming:

"- the system is the game, not the interface, not the presentation. - any button will do. - long phases take your time – response time is rough. - be done fast, once you’ve made a decision. - do it side by side. Has to be massively parallel. - extended accumulated state – save your profile. - no roles – classless – teams are deterministic. - representation agnostic – draw it however. - open data – change it however."

Why do I blog this? preparing a presentation about how web practices (social web, web2.0) will change digital entertainment, and how to turn some of this into sound game mechanics. There is a lot more, especially about game grammar. If you take a look at the slides, their are also nice prognostication about the evolution of digital entertainment based on what he finds important in Web2.0:

"- Participation: trust, remix and mashup, cult of the amateur, Quality not required, distrust of centralized authority - Abandonment of the publisher model: long tails, niches, duplicate content - Different distribution channels: digital only, monetize passion not trials, slow openings, not big - Services instead of products: data not code, perpetual beta - 3R's: Ratings (the participatory Web is premised on metadata on “content”), rankings (And metadata on “users”), Reputation (adding up to a user-driven system of surfacing user-created content) - Run anywhere, common platform: “Above the level of a single device.”"

Challenges for MMORPG on cell phones

In 2003, Tommy Palm wrote an insightful piece in Gamasutra about the birth of mobile MMORPG. What is interesting in this paper is the development challenges described by the author:

"

• Latency: Whereas latency in network calls for PC games is measured in hundreds of milliseconds, for mobile phones latency is typically measured in seconds. (...) How can these long latencies on mobile networks be hidden from players? (...) Tick-based gaming is a solution to this problem. In tick-based gameplay, you take a turn-based game and allow all players to plan their moves ahead of time, and then the game executes all the moves simultaneously.
• Device Anarchy: The mobile phone market doesn't offer as much hardware certainty as today's PCs. (...) The screen sizes vary wildly, as do the number of buttons and their locations on the phones. It may go without saying that until there are standards for the most basic hardware capabilities (...) Application size is limited on many models. (...) Color depth also varies substantially between phones, but luckily there are not an infinite amount of color depths from which to choose.
• Operator issues: Internet connectivity for mobile phones isn't as easy as it is for PCs. (...) everything relies on the capabilities of the operator. (...) network packages are transmitted via the operator's software, and in many cases those messages are like frogs crossing a highway: sometimes they make it, sometimes they don't
• User Behavior: the average gaming session on a phone lasts just a few minutes. In some respects, this fact bolsters the case for 3MOGs since a persistent world can make better use of short playing cycles than a game that requires a player to start a new session each time the game is played. (...) Mobile games must behave politely and accept that the player's situation must always come first. A game in which the player's character dies and can't be resurrected -- just because the player got off the bus or answered a phone call -- will aggravate users and result in fewer players and lower revenues. Devising multiplayer functionality to accommodate frequently distracted players is one of the great challenges

"

Why do I blog this? food for a new project I am writing. These elements are very interesting, even though it's form 2003. Most are still relevant today. And I am quite interested as well in the implications for game mechanics plus how to cope with the limits from the user point of view. There are surely near future solutions to put in place to take these problems into account. The creation of playful interactions can use some of the limits.

Platforms such as Tibia ME or Mini Friday are intriguing systems, with different mechanics. Platforms to observe!

Sidewalk obstacles

"The following objects can make a sidewalk difficult for some users to traverse if they protrude into the pathway or reduce the vertical or horizontal clear space: Awnings, Benches, Bike racks, Bollards, Cafe tables and chairs, Drinking fountains, Fire hydrants, Folding business signs, Grates, Guy wires, Landscaping, Mailboxes (public and private), Newspaper vending machines, Parking meters, Planters, Public telephones (mounted), Puddles, Signal control boxes, Sign poles, Snow, Street vendors' carts, Street light poles, Street sculptures, Telephone booths, Telephone/utility poles and their stabilizing wires, Traffic sign poles, Transit shelters, Trash bags and cans, Tree, bush, and shrub branches, Utility boxes"

Found in sidewalk design Why do I blog this? browsing some resources about sidewalk design... after reading papers about how space is not uniform and homogeneous. What I find important in this list is the idea that space is filled with different type of objects, that have particular qualities (without any equivalent in a digital world).

Would these elements be problem or opportunities for a ubiquitous computing city?

The picture shows some pavement obstacles encountered few months ago in Geneva.

Street graffitis as equalizer viz

When street graffiti looks like low-fi equalizer visualizations. Seen in Lyon, France last week.

Cops aren’t really looking for guys attaching grids of foam board to giant TV

The august issue of ICON featured an article about the physical customization of cities by Scott Burnham. It describes how the frustration towards municipal policies against street art has led to a "fresh wave of guerrilla urban design"/interventionists to focus on "physical objects, media channels and aesthetics of the city as source material."

"The current physical city is seen merely as a starting point – its streetscapes malleable and interactive. (...) Scott Wayne Indiana: “Parking meters, sidewalks, fences, gates, awnings, alleys, manhole covers… there is a list of things that could be designed in such a way as to engage with cities [and shift] the focus on the urban environment as a vibrant place that inspires the imagination, intellect and wonders of the human experience.” (...) Yet in the face of such work, the authorities remain largely unforgiving – intervention equals vandalism, and many of the cities coming down hardest are those that lust most for “creative city” status."

For example, it's interesting to hear about Jason Eppink's motivation and methods:

“I started looking at the city in a completely new way. The urban landscape was suddenly full of potential. Objects weren’t just objects anymore; they were opportunities. I occasionally stumble upon an area so devoid of either life or humour that I have an incredible urge to contribute something. This is when I take pictures of the area, study them and develop a piece around what exactly is missing from the space. I look at it like a tailor measuring a client to make the best fitting suit, or a doctor examining a patient to prescribe the right medication.” (...) “One advantage of working outside of the traditional graffiti media is that cops aren’t really looking for guys attaching grids of foam board to giant TVs.”"

Why do I blog this? It's interesting to see how street arts evolved form graffiti/sticker to much more elaborated practices because of various factors ranging from form novelty (beyond graffiti), security issues (cops, municipal policies) and possibly the need to craft/DIY more concrete stuff.

Picture taken by myself in 2005 in Geneva, some folks here hang up paintings in the city.

About Intellectual Ventures

Some excerpts from an interview of Nathan Myhrvold (about his company Intellectual Ventures):

"What I decided to do was create the invention capital model. Making funding invention an investment. Imagine this. That there is an invention capital industry that raises billions of dollars a year to fund inventions, not startups. (...) we don’t create a company. We don’t ask for an idea. If you go to the venture capitalist, they expect you to come with an idea, a plan and a team. But if you go to them and say you don’t have an idea yet, they will say to come back when you have one (...) One of the things about my current business is that it will need to be ten years. We have a get rich slow scheme because it requires tremendous patience if you’re going to invest in really important research and invention. If you want to do really big stuff, you have to plan things that are some number of years away from reality. We plan for the closest something that is five years away from being a product. Some of that is pragmatic. Most of the engineers out there plan for the zero to three years range. That’s the nominal time. Obviously things slip and take longer than three years. Almost nobody works on stuff that is five years out. So if we work that way, it gives us a huge advantage. It lets us conceptualize things that are much more radical. The downside is that it may take you five years before anyone is interested."

Why do I blog this? was trying to understand what Intellectual Ventures was doing after chatting about it with a friend. Intriguing company, curious model.

It doesn't do "choo-choo" but it's a train

Overheard in the train tonight:"This, is a train, it doesn't do "choo-choo" but it's a train" says a mother to her kid point at the nice IC2000 CFF Double-decker train.

(picture courtesy of railfan europe).

Why do I blog this? It's curious how onomatopoeia, which start becoming names for things can survive after the artifact's behavior becomes utterly different. It's always intriguing when the naming of things goes berserk. The noise, (i.e. one of the physical manifestation) is more important than the appearance and the behavior.

Choo-Choo, now it's a wrong onomatopoeia. Other examples?

Location-awareness to initiate mobile phone call

De Guzman, E., M. Sharmin, and B.P. Bailey. Should I Call Now? Understanding What Context is Considered When Deciding Whether to Initiate Remote Communication via Mobile Devices. Proceedings of Graphics Interface, 2007. This paper deals with the problem of disruptive phone calls (to the current task or social situation). The authors propose to provide callers with a an awareness display of the receiver's context (very similar to what Jyri described at Reboot 8.0, which became Jaiku). They report here the results of "a four week diary study of mobile phone usage, where users recorded what context information they considered when making a call, and what information they wished others had considered when receiving a call".

Results shows that the call initiation process would benefit from an awareness display system by giving access to more accurate context information that caller already consider (e.g., task status and physical availability) and encourage callers to consider additional context that they consider less often, but receivers deem important (e.g., social availability).

What is relevant in the paper is the implications for awareness display systems described in the conclusion. Among them, I was very interested by some of them:

"Provide more than location. Though our results show that both callers and receivers consider location, it is considered much less than other categories. For example, if a receiver is engaged in face-to-face conversation, results from our study indicate that it is more important to make the caller aware of the conversation itself than its location. Thus, though awareness displays should display location-based context, they should not rely on this alone. "

This is definitely close to my phd research, given that it highlights the importance of activity against information about location. This lead also to the description of different levels of granularity, which are of considerable importance in terms of user's appropriation of the location information:

"Consider granularity when collecting and presenting receiver context. When describing context information in the diary study, the granularity varied depending on the situation. For example, when inquiring about a receiver’s task status, some callers asked “Is he studying?” while others asked “Is he writing a paper?” In the first case, showing the receiver’s location (e.g., at the library or in a classroom) may be sufficient. However, the second case would require more detail such as what application is active on his desktop. An awareness display should thus be able to present varying levels of detail regarding the receiver’s context. "

Finaally, that advice is also of importance:

"Empower callers to make inferences based on multiple cues of a receiver’s context. Even as sensing technology becomes more accurate and capable of sensing more behavioral acts, there may always be a large gap between the low-level information that can be sensed and the high-level task or social situation of a receiver. Based on our results and experience gained from this study, we learned that awareness displays should be designed such that they provide callers with discrete cues of a receiver’s context, rather than trying to compute a single, holistic measure of “availability.”"

Why do I blog this? some good elements in this study that echoes with my phd research, surely to include in current thoughts about future projects on this topic.

Ubisoft CEO on future of gaming

Excerpts from an interview of Yves Guillemot, UbiSoft CEO:

"We are moving towards launching books, games and movies at the same time," he said. "The movie industry creates more ideas than us at the moment, but the more they work, the more they are coming up with the same ideas. We are working more and more on re-using the same graphics [to reduce costs], and we are going in that direction, especially for AAA products."

"We will have to start making movies," he continued, "because if we don't do it, we won't be able to take advantage of the power of the next generation. In creating movies and games at the same time, we see what we have to improve to make better games as well.

Guillemot admitted that "you have different experiences in different mediums." (...) "We try to make the products complementary in different media," he said. "The goal is not to do the book of the game, but a quality product in itself, that will help you feel more immersed in the game because you know more. It's the same in the movie.""

Why do I blog this? focusing lately on reports about the future do digital entertainment, these quotes are quite interesting to see to what extent it lies in "complementary" experiences.

Beyond the situations that are expected (release of AAA-game+movie+book+merchandising simultaneously), it would be good to think about complementary aspects in the game design. For example, how to include cues and elements helpful for the game in books or in movies, etc.