From telemetry in trace park to the usage of urban (digital) traces

Augmenting amusement rides with telemetry is a paper about how wireless telemetry can be employed to enhance the experience of fairground and theme park. The idea is collect data (video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration) and stream them onto large public display through visualizations:

"The first (shown in Figure 12) presents the audience with a multipanel visualization of the data from the biometrical data monitor and the accelerometer. When using this visualization, video from the helmet camera is projected alongside on a separate screen, and audio is played over the Dana centre’s audio system. The purpose of this combination is to enable experts to talk the audience through some of the live data and the physiological experiences the participant is undergoing. (...) The second visualization presented to the audience is a non-expert visualization of the data (...) demonstrated how we can use telemetry to transform the act of riding an amusement ride into a theatrical event, extending the experience for riders while also enhancing its entertainment value for spectators. "

Nevertheless, the most interesting part is in the conclusion about why these data are worthwile:

"First, such data may allow the detailed analysis of the riding experience, enabling designers to understand at precisely which moments riders feel the most thrill and also how different people react to different rides, supporting the more systematic design of more thrilling rides. A second possibility is to design future rides that directly adapt to individual riders’ preferences or past history, for example tuning their movements in response to telemetry data, providing a more personalized riding experience than is currently possible. Third, this kind of telemetry system could be used as a marketing tool by enabling amusement rides to be reliably rated for the experience they deliver. The fourth and final possibility concerns extending the spectator experience to include ‘tele-riding’ through a more immersive presentation of the telemetry data such as a through a 3D simulation that could even be experienced by remote friends and family at a distance over the Internet."

Why do I blog this? my interest in people's behavior in space and place makes me wondering about all the "traces" one could leave and how they can be used, why they're relevant. This paper gives a good highlight about these reasons.

My interest is not in the theme park thing but rather in seeing the parallels between this experiment and the data generated in urban computing contexts. As I mentioned here, there are already different use of space/time representations of people in cities (make explicit phenomenon that are invisible, give users some feedback, create new services based on this information). So does this paper bring new elements to the table? In a sense yes, the last excerpt I quoted gives new type of usage for that matter. Let's dig more the analogy between the city and a theme park.

Walker, B., Schnädelbach, H., Egglestone, S.R., Clark, A., Orbach, T., Wright, M., Ng, K.H., Rodden, T., Benford, S. and French, A., “Augmenting Amusement Rides with Telemetry”, In Proceedings of ACE 2007, Salzburg, Austria.

Japan is the first market to see PCs shrink

An interesting read in the SF Gate: this article about the decline of PC in Japan by Hiroko Tabuchi. Some excerpts I found pertinent:

"The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory. (...) Japan's PC market is already shrinking, leading analysts to wonder whether Japan will become the first major market to see a decline in personal computer use some 25 years after it revolutionized household electronics — and whether this could be the picture of things to come in other countries. (...) The industry is responding in two other ways: reminding detractors that computers are still essential in linking the digital universe and releasing several laptops priced below $300 this holiday shopping season. (...) Recent desktop PCs look more like audiovisual equipment — or even colorful art objects — than computers. Sony Corp.'s desktop computers have folded up to become clocks, and its latest version even hangs on the wall."

The author explains that by two reasons. On the one hand the fact that PC have less added value than other devices: a bigger TV is more obviously relevant as a nice output system, a mobile phone allows mobile consumption. On the other hand, it's because "50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones". A third reason is also that japanese do not really work at home.

Why do I blog this? lots of relevant stuff there, but one should be careful to draw parallels between japan and other countries. The mobile phone usage (and infrastructure) is SO different that the situation is not comparable.

Anyway, I also find interesting this idea that PC (as motors in the past) are now folded up in other devices (clocks, displays)... as if computation was meant to go "in the background", the added value lying in the services provided by the devices, not the machine itself.

An intriguing location-based service and the importance of "measurement"

The second issue of PEACH featured a very interesting article by Chris Hand entitled "Electronic Devices as Design Exploration". Mr. Hand describes how design can go beyond the Engineering approach to design interactive electronic products through Art and Design methods. This is exemplified by a location-based application/project he carried out. This GPS-based Frisson Inducer is a portable/wearable device aimed at "the dwellers of small towns who yearn for the edginess of living in a big city and is amazingly intriguing:

"a map-based software enables users to designate any arbitrary space in their town, no matter how dull or empty, as one of their “Thrill Zones”, simply by drawing its boundary. Since the device contains a GPS (Global Positioning System), it can easily determine whether or not the user is inside one of these zones, so long as they are not indoors. Employing classical Pavlovian conditioning to elicit a response, electrodes connecting the device to the user administer electric shocks whenever the location is within one of the Thrill Zones. After a short training period this results in a frisson of excitement or trepidation whenever the user is getting close to a Thrill Zone, even after the shocks have been switched off. (...) By uploading their own data to the device’s website users can share their Thrill Zones with their friends and fellow thrill-seekers, making it possible for social groups to crystallise around these new places and to experience them in a way not previously possible"

This creates what Chris Hand calls "reverse psychogeography, i.e. rather than recording an emotional response to a place, the device is controlling the response. Why do I blog this? Beyond my curiosity towards this application (that I find very interesting), what struck me here, wrt my research, is the notion of "measuring instrument", a device that allow to detect implicit/invisible phenomenon. This certainly an important in interaction design lately; if you think about all the interactive art projects that deals with pollution/noise/electronic sensing and their representation on web maps. What does that mean? Why this notion of measuring is important? Chris Hand highlights some issues:

"Measuring instruments are a special class of device. Using measuring instruments we can interpret our environment and create meaning – it is in the act of interpreting objective data that meaning is created. Furthermore the use of instruments is open, in that their owners can create personal rituals and procedures around them, as well as developing their own methods of interpretation and beliefs about the results and data being collected and displayed. Through instruments, the objective world of cold numbers and statistics acts as a mirror, reflecting the subjective world of our emotions and irrational beliefs.""

Dubai is a powerpoint

Speaking about Dubai, Mike Davis in his essay "Fear and Money in Dubai" highlight this quote from an article by Ian Parker in the New-Yorker:

"It’s as if a list of all known human pastimes have been collected on PowerPoint slides and then casually voted on by a show of hands."

Deliberately misleading ideas

As described by Bob Johansen in his book about foresight, Herman Kahn interestingly use this disclaimer in his reports: "some of the ideas in this report are deliberately misleading in order to provoke thought". I like that sort of angle, very close to the near future laboratory spin; not so much of the "Misleading" thing but rather about the oblique strategy it leads to. It's maybe more "niche" or "provocative" in our case.

Tangible interfaces: Collecting gestural and touch patterns

This transcript of an interview of Dan Saffer about his manifesto for gestural patterns for touch interaction is very pertinent. It's mostly about this wiki resource which aims at collecting and disseminating gestural interface information and patterns, such as found on such devices as the iPhone and Wii (following a discussion Adaptive Path's blog). Some excerpts of this interview:

"How do you document this gesture where I’m sweeping my hand across the screen?” (...) This is our generation’s drag and drop.” (...) I felt it was a really important thing for interaction designers to be doing because, otherwise, we’re going to start to end up with a thousand different ways of turning on my TV where it’s like, “Is this the Microsoft TV where I have to snap my fingers three times or is it the Apple one where I twirl around in a circle?” (...) one of the nice things about having it be in a completely digital medium is that one of the problems with gestures is certainly documenting them. How do you describe something that’s not very ambiguous? It’s awfully difficult with words to describe gestures or even in diagrams to describe gestures.So having the ability to eventually put up movie clips showing this as a pattern with people moving their forefinger and thumb apart, for instance, having that kind of rich experience would be really nice on the website."

(Picture taken from a wii game usability test I ran few months ago)

The examples he gives revolves around the Wii or the iPhone:

"The Wii certainly is very much about sort of movement in space. You’re not really touching anything except the controller. You’re kind of indirectly using a gesture. With the touch screen on the iPhone and other things, your fingertip is actually touching the device that you’re manipulating. So there is this gradation there."

Why do I blog this? this is indeed an interesting issue, how you describe these movements? can we have a grammar (i.e. a set of patterns). This has some tight connections with a project I am involved in that tries to map the wiimote and nunchuk movements of existing games in a database, this will then allow to analyze them and document their relative importance.

Beat wartime empathy device

Look at this beat wartime empathy device by Dominic Muren. As he explained me in his email:

"Though it's not the most traditional interface design, I feel more and more that really functional interfaces in our world of mediation, will need to be physical. And what more complicated topic to give physicality than war, and the civilian relationship to it. The Beat wartime empathy device is actually a pair of dogtag-like receiver and transmitter, one worn by a soldier, and the other anonymously "adopted" by a civilian. The soldier's heartbeat is recorded, and transmitted, real time, to the civilian, where it is physically thumped against their chest, another heartbeat next to theirs. They feel the soldier's fear, calm, or, god forbid, death. With such an intimate connection, it takes a hard heart indeed to ignore the true cost of war."

Why do I blog this? an intriguing project about mediating physiological cues. I like the idea of a very simple sign (heart beat) being conveyed to connect people.

Data for Foresight Research

"Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge (Human Science for a New Era, 1)" by Wendell Bell is one the best book I've read in the last couple of months. It's definitely the bible of foresight research with some extensive discussion of future research epistemology, introduction to research methods, a detailed description of assumptions and examples of work. I won't comment on the whole thing but will maybe grab and comment some part of the book in different blogposts. There are some really good stuff there, so I need to take notes.

Bell's discussion about the not-factual existence and research about the future is interesting and lead him to describe phenomena that aid the scientific delineating of alternative descriptions and assessments of the future:

"

1. Present images of the futures and expectations for the future that people hold, that is, their conceptions of the possible.
2. People's belief about the most likely future, that is, their subjective probabilities concerning the chances of particular futures occurring.
3. The goals, values, and attitudes people hold; the preferences they use to evaluate alternative images of the future, that is, people's hopes and fears.
4. Present intentions of people to act
5. Obligations and commitments that people have to others (...) knowing those responsibilities can help futurists anticipate future behaviors of the people involved.
6. Knowledge of the past: Tradition (memories of the past, legends and customs, highly valued patterns of behavior), the use of trend analysis, the restatement of scientific explanations into a predictive form, analogy, past images of the future
7. Knowledge of the present: we can view the present as containing at least two ways of exploring the future: (a) the design perspective (some things that now exist or are developing can be expected to continue in the future and have implications for shaping the future), (b) present possibilities for the future.

"

Why do I blog this? As the author explains, no one of these "yields easily to measurement and interpretations" since they are, after all, subjective phenomena but they can have objective manifestation that can be observed and from which they can be inferred. This is exactly the point why I am interested in these "sources".. More specifically, two reasons why I am blogging this (1) because I am interested in what constitutes "data" in foresight research, (2) because I am preparing a course about design+foresight I will be giving in 2008 (possibly at different places, the school and for a master in interaction design in France).

The past future of computer games

A P&V reader recently commented on this post by sending me this incredible scans from the "Usborne Guide to Computer and Video Games: How they workd and how to win". The last part of the book is funny in terms of game experience. The predictions are quite on spot with multi-player games, long-distance games and the "ultimate game" (great names!):

But it's definitely the part about "game variations that I found hilarious:

Why do I blog this? this variation part is very interesting, in the sense that it really shows some weird tricks to modify the user experience of games, without any tech breakthrough, rather curious workarounds imagined by writers of that books (or their kids). When I read books about that topic from that last 10 years, I've never really encountered any tweakings like this.

Phlogiston-debunking about robotics

Got back to this interview of Bruce Sterling about robots in 2005 and found some intriguing points:

"AM: How do you think robots will be defined in the future?

BS: I'd be guessing that redefining human beings will always trump redefining robots. Robots are just our shadow, our funhouse-mirror reflection. If there were such a thing as robots with real intelligence, will, and autonomy, they probably wouldn't want to mimic human beings or engage with our own quirky obsessions. We wouldn't have a lot in common with them-we're organic, they're not; we're mortal, they're not; we eat, they don't; we have entire sets of metabolic motives, desires, and passions that really are of very little relevance to anything made of machinery.

AM: What's in the future of robotics that is likely very different from most people's expectations?

BS: Robots won't ever really work. They're a phantasm, like time travel or maybe phlogiston. On the other hand, if you really work hard on phlogiston, you might stumble over something really cool and serendipitous, like heat engines and internal combustion. Robots are just plain interesting. When scientists get emotionally engaged, they can do good work. What the creative mind needs most isn't a cozy sinecure but something to get enthusiastic about.

AM: When will robots be allowed to vote?

BS: At this point, I'd be thrilled to see humans allowed to vote."

Why do I blog this? Only because I liked his description and the phlogiston-debunking tone of the interview.

Dark data to be set free

A very interesting article by Thomas Goetz in Wired entitled "Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments". It's mostly about the publication bias: what is published in research paper is only results that are positive or which have dramatic outcomes. The other goes to the lab drawer but now some initiative aims at setting them free. What about the reasons to do so:

"For the past couple of years, there's been much talk about open access (...) Liberating dark data takes this ethos one step further. It also makes many scientists deeply uncomfortable, because it calls for them to reveal their "failures." But in this data-intensive age, those apparent dead ends could be more important than the breakthroughs. After all, some of today's most compelling research efforts aren't one-off studies that eke out statistically significant results, they're meta-studies — studies of studies — that crunch data from dozens of sources. (...) advocating the release of dark data is one thing, but it's quite another to actually collect it, juggling different formats and standards. And, of course, there's the issue of storage."

Why do I blog this? Great initiative and good material to do research! Hidden stuff is always intriguing anyway.

Beyond the data availability and the possibility to run meta studies, I am strongly interested in this sort of "dark" data, especially about things that failed. It's IMO a topic spot on the near future laboratory edges: documenting the failures, behavior, issues, artifacts that failed. We're currently considering a workshop about this in the field of ubicomp/the future of objects.

Andy Clark's on annexing technology

"Some fear . . . a loathsome “post-human” future. They predict a kind of technologically incubated mind-rot, leading to loss of identity, loss of control, overload, dependence, invasion of privacy, isolation, and the ultimate rejection of the body. And we do need to be cautious, for to recognise the deeply transformative nature of our biotechnological unions is at once to see that not all such unions will be for the better. But if I am right – if it is our basic human nature to annex, exploit, and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles – then the question is not whether we go that route, but in what ways we actively sculpt and shape it. By seeing ourselves as we truly are, we increase the chances that our future biotechnological unions will be good ones. "

In Clark, A. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Mind, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cardinal directions stuck on pavement

Seen last week in Paris, near République:

A piece of street art (made out of stickers) that indicates cardinal directions. I know it's not meant to be an urban sign but it's a curious user-generated/DIY city elements. Standing around it for half an hour (I was waiting for a friend there), it was funny to see people avoiding walking on it: the status of the sign was higher than expected.

Criticizing Paul Virilio

In Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster, Nigel Thrift highlights the problematic tone of Virilio's work on modernity (his book City of Panic in particular). The author raises two issues: - Virilio's arguments are more jeremiads than an answer, which reminds me of Adam Greenfield statement that "nostalgia is for suckers" in his talk at PicNic 2007 (where he expressed that lamenting about the past of cities is not an answer). - The phenomenology of despair described by Virilio is not very well rooted in social or cultural research, as if the only evidence he was relying on were newspapers and books from other authors.

Some excerpts that I found interesting:

"Almost everything he says about the modern city would have to be seriously qualified or reconstructed or just plain retracted. (...) there is a veritable legion of careful empirical studies of information technology that very often show the polar opposite of what Virilio would have us believe. (...) each time he goes round the park, he exaggerates and this exaggeration is not just of the “well, this is an illustration of a general trend and should not be expected to play out equally everywhere,” or of the “well, take this as a warning of how things could become,” or of the “well, it won’t come to pass exactly like this but near to it” variety. It is systematic. And such systematic exaggeration is of more than mild concern. "

The sort of myth Thrift debunks here are for example:

"a common rule in this literature is “the more virtual the more real” (Woolgar 2002), that is, the introduction of new “virtual” technologies can actually stimulate more of the corresponding “real” activity. (...) The idea that increasing speed somehow has causality is an urban myth so deeply engrained in Western individuals’ idea of themselves and how they are that it is probably not dislodgeable – but that doesn’t mean that philosophers have to power it up."

Why do I blog this? Having read (and enjoyed) some books written by Paul Virilio, I was interested in these critiques. They actually echo my feelings about that author. Somehow, I have the same impression with all the books I have read in the same vein (mostly from french sociologist/thinkers/philosophers) such as Jacques Ellul, they are inspiring, they point to interesting issues but they're often exaggerating or hyperbolic ("forcer le trait"). And generally, it's because of the distance between the author and what happens down there. This is sometimes atrocious, when you read books from thinkers speculating about web2.0, television or video games and you definitely know that those persons are not using these technologies (some still call radio "TSF", the word employed 50 years ago in France).

Thrift, N. (2005). Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster, Cultural Politics, 1(3). 337-348.

Mini street art

Mini street art seen last week in Amsterdam, a little door+street number plate that we encountered while wandering around.

Yet another thing to add in the list of objects stuck on street material. Beyond classical stickers and graffiti, the mini-doors is a quite intriguing move.

Game vest to simulate impacts on torso

There is an article in Technology Review about tangible interfaces for video-games by Erica Naone. It's basically about a vest (called 3rd Space) that aims at bringing more realism to the game experience by simulating impacts. It's based on pneumatic cells which produce impacts of various strength in different locations on the player's torso.

The article gives a brief overview of user experience issues:

"Force feedback devices are already popular among gamers, and Ombrellaro says that his vest promises an even more realistic experience than today's vibrating controllers. "The drama moment with this is getting shot in the back in a first-person game," he says. In market tests for the vest, he says, people would turn around in surprise when they felt the impact in the back, even though they knew intellectually to expect it. Based on feedback from its tests, the company chose a standard strength of impact, which is palpable but not bruising. "We're pushing the edge," he says. "We're still keeping it very fun but, at the same time, giving you tactile cues that are important. There's even subtly a message--that there are consequences to shooting people." Ombrellaro says that he also plans to ship vests with a more powerful compressor for a subset of gamers who want to feel stronger impacts and for use in military and police training."

Why do I blog this? video-games (as well as lots of digital environments) engage people in immersive experience but the body is often less involved (although the Wii suffers less from that issue...). In this case, even though the player cannot be hurt, the proprioceptive sense is mobilized in an interesting way.

Cognitive mapping of various means of communication in 1996

In The social representation of telecommunications, Leopoldina Fortunati and Anna Maria Manganelli explore "common knowledge of telecommunications". In a sense, they try to reconstruct how technologies of information and communication "have been metabolised in the system of social thought, and the way in which they have been integrated conceptually. Using Moscovici's frame of reference (social representations), they analyze data gathered from telephone survey carried out in 1996. Interviewees were asked to freely associate two terms with certain cue words: ‘telecommunications’, ‘fax’, ‘television’, ‘telephone’, ‘computer’, ‘mobile phone’, ‘radio’, ‘video-recorder’, ‘stereo’ and ‘newspapers’. Cluster analysis allowed them to represent the similarities between the communicative technologies (represented by the cue-words) through a dendrogram of similarities:

The authors conclude that:

"In conclusion, the analysis of the similarity between means of communication shows that in 1996 there already existed a scission between the real telecommunication technologies, that is, ‘fax, telephone, mobile phone and computer’, and technologies which were not telecommunication, such as mass media or means of reproduction of sounds and images. The first were based on technologies that carried circular communication, the second on uni-directional communication technologies. Furthermore, in the first cluster (not telecommunication), we must note the clear distinction between technologies that reproduce sounds and images and those that carry information. The position of the ‘radio’, assimilated as it was to ‘stereo’, was yet a further indication that this medium was experienced essentially as music.

From this first analysis what emerged is that the profiles of the different forms of telecommunication and the division and cooperation among them were reflected with clarity and precision in common knowledge."

Why do I blog this? I was looking for reference about representation of technologies an ran across this paper; found the methodology quite intriguing (there are lots of other results to check). What I found pertinent is the idea of having a a detailed description of the cognitive integration of the various means of communication. How would that be perceived now? with new forms of communication? with so-called "digital natives"?

Fortunati, L. & Manganelli, A.M. (2007).The social representation of telecommunications. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 1617-4909.

P&U computing: Special issue about movement-based interaction

The last issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing is devoted to movement-based interaction. The 7 papers address what is referred to by a plethora of terms such as "physical interaction, embodied interaction, graspable interfaces, tangible interfaces, embodied interfaces, physical computing and interactive spaces". As the editors put it:

"We start the issue with three papers that present lessons learned and perspectives gained from the design and evaluation of a number of concepts, prototypes and applications, all using a range of movements and tracking technologies to enable interaction. (...) These three papers should move the discipline forward by providing other researchers and practitioners with frameworks to bounce ideas against and concepts to describe and understand movement-based interaction. (...) We also selected four papers that we hope will further the understanding of movement-based interaction through their theoretical and methodological contributions by explicating different/new theoretical approaches and understandings, and extending the methods available to designers in this area."

Why do I blog this? material for current work about tangible interface in gaming contexts. More about this later, as soon as have time to go through them.

Current stuff

(maybe a personal blogpost to keep track of current things I'm involved in)

• Writing (and meeting people from a telco or) a research project in 2008 about the user experience of mobile gaming.
• Meetings with lots of people in Paris: j*b to chat about our current projects (bravo pour la thèse), Bruno Marzloff to discuss about possible collaborations (which starts with a short text I am currently writing), Pascal Salembier to talk about our current research project/positions as well as his recommendations for a young researcher like me (he advises me to write a book about space/location-awareness/mobility/collaboration), Rafi Haladjian to discuss Violet's project, his talk at LIFT and possible collaborations, and the FING people because it's good to hang out there.
• A talk at the Cité des Sciences for the Rencontre des Cyberbases, an event organized by the big french bank Caisse des Dépots. It's basically their annual seminar where all their teams have workshops and seminars about technological issues. My talk was one of the three keynotes; speaking after the director of this initiative and a member of the European Commission, I presented what is Ubiquitous Computing are some critical elements about it (mostly the talk I've given here). Thanks Sophie Bernay, Isadora Verderesi and Charlotte Ullman for the invitation.
• Get back home and headed for the third workshop of the in-betweeness series at the Waag Society in Amsterdam. Somehow related to urban computing, space/place and design, these workshops focuses on places that do not fall into the classic categories (home, café, work) and can be difficult to define: public waiting lines, transitional spaces, toilets, etc. The point of these workshops is to look at how people behave in these places or how things are designed to understand the implications for the design of future technologies. Organized by Karen Martin, Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer, Valentina Nisi and Martine Posthuma de Boer. Enjoyed the informal+ethographical spin+discussion at this workshop. The field trip dimension of the workshop was very pertinent as well as the discussion of what each group collected, what they mean in terms of behavioral traits, social issues, and design implications.
• Preparing a talk I will give tonight at the University of Geneva about location-awareness and social computing to students from a master in IT. Possibly material for future talk at research centers for two big IT companies
• attend an event in Geneva about FON: the Geneva city council to sign a convention with FON to consolidate the small existing wireless network available in some key locations of the city. Discussed last month with Jean-Bernard Magescas about this.
• writing research papers on my PhD dissertation, the first review from a journal paper came and have two other papers in the process
• write a chapter about new interaction partners (pets and pervasive gaming) for the near future laboratory book
• work on a survey/interview about mobile gaming.
• work on some presentations about web2.0 implications for the video game industry or cognitive sciences and gaming for a client and finish the slide for my talk about tangible interactions the European Game Design Conference

Registrations for LIFT are now opened

We recently opened the registration for the LIFT08 Conference. The program is still taking shape, we will announce few things soon (especially the next graphic design ;) ).