I Want 2 Know and I Want 2 Go

The Register reports about an experimental mobile phone service IWant2Go available in the London area. People, armed with a suitable mobile phone, can retrieve local based information wherever they are, relevant to their location. TheRegister points out that the problem is not that the technology to develop such services is not available, but that who is going to create the content? Content in the sense of useful and relevant content.

In one hand, content providers will want to focus on the information that can generate revenue for them. On the other hand, most of the local information is generated and lives within the local communities. Anyone living within the locality will tell you where the best pub or restaurant is much better (probably) than any guide, and many other things that will never appear in a guide. However, there are many ways to look at this issue, as The Register highlights.

New Tools, New Thinking

(Source: cardesignnews.com)

At Coventry (UK), students of the final year of the "Transport Design" course get to make their own Ferraris, Mercedes, BMWs and Jaguars, with the difference that the cars don’t work, are made of clay and other stuff and they are very small compared to a full size car.

As their final project assignments, students get to evolve their favorites car brands, create something new or improve some aspect of the car such as ergonomics (and more...). Besides the cars, (some of them they just look beautiful) what it is very interesting as well is what the course tutor explains:

“This year sees the first wave of totally computer-literate graduates who have all studied Alias or other 3D modeling programs. There are fewer presentations of conventional flatwork now compared to previous years and a deeper thinking behind the transportation projects this year - not simply cars.”

As computers (and Weblogs) get more and more pervasive, what will it be when there is a new generation of journalists (for instance) that don’t have the “old ways and tools” of doing things and they just look forward and use the new tools? will they be able to think of journalism in a different way? Just watch a 10 year old kid now using a computer: no fear, learn and play tool, lots of curiosity and impatience. Probably it is good and is bad at the same time, who knows. But evolution goes on and everything changes around us all the time.

Car Design News Coventry Degree Show 2004

(Online) Social Networks to get the CSCW and HCI Treatment

(Source: acm.org & hci-international.org)

A workshop taking place this year at CSCW'04 (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) will look at some aspects of online social networks and will explore what CSCW can learn from them and what online social networks can learn from CSCW, although this is a bit simplyfing the aims of the workshop.

In a different conference, HCI International (Human Computer Interaction) will be running as well a track called "Online Communities and Social Computing"

Social Networks for Design and Analysis: Using Network Information in CSCW.
CSCW'04.
HCI International.

Physical Tagging with YellowArrow

Yellowarrow is a community that allows people to collect yellow stickers and place them on physical places. Currently running in NY, participants can place a text message to the numbered label and visitors to the physical place, via SMS by sending the label number, get the message back. More than just a simple game, yellowarrow lets people annotate something special about the place and visitors that use the SMS service can learn something about the area where they are.

Yelloarrow.com via Wired Magazine.

Zone:CD Wireless HotStpot Kit

If you have a old pc kicking about and dont know what to do with it, or if you need a "plug and play" wireless HotSpot solution, now you can set up your very own hotspot with Zone:CD, a LiveCD linux distribution that allows to set up a PC as a hotspot in no time if you have a pc, some network cables, a Wireless Access Point and an Internet connection.

Check it out!.

http://www.publicip.net

A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

Eugene Eric Kim writes what are his views about why collaborative software is somehow stuck in the old paradigms and why we need to move on. He suggests to focus on people first and learn how they work and collaborate together in order to design collaborative systems around that (CSCW anyone?) and to develop a shared conceptual framework so that everyone speaks the same “lingo”.

He points out as well to the issue that in order to achieve distributed use-to-user collaboration we must address first single user application-to-application interoperability, and built it from there. Pretty similar to my previous post and the idea of the Collaborative Semantic Desktop. The bottom line is that we need open standards that everyones agrees, everyone understands and eveyone uses.

On a different post, Joel from JoelOnSoftware points out with his post "It's Not Just Usability" to somehow different issues when dealing with social (collaborative) software, such as that "the social software should benefit the society that it supports and not the individual". Different rules apply when designing collaborative software that go beyond usability and brings a new dimension to the design of social software systems.

In the meant time, the Open Source model for collaboration seems to be doing pretty well.

A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools. [blueoxen.org]
It's Not Just Usability. [joelonsoftware.com]
Open Source: The model for Collaboration in the Internet Age. [oreillynet.com]

The Collaborative Semantic Desktop

One problem: too much information can be as bad as no information. With the current trend of emails, files, blogs, instant messaging, online social networks and so on, we are already overloaded with information. It is well known that identifying, discarding, prioritising, and archiving information is a job by itself, whereas perhaps your job olny consist only in reusing and generating information.

Stefan Deker and Martin Frank present in a paper the vision/idea where the "metadata enabled desktop" will help the user to use and reuse information efficiently, better than with today’s separated application/programs paradigm where each application has its own format and can not interoperate with other applications in any way.

At the collaborative level, the vision goes beyond current P2P, online social networks and the semantic web, presenting the concept of networking the metadata from the decentralised users and filtering it in order to infer automatically the useful information. In a nutshell, it is bit "like" the RSS of today’s blogs but "desktop wide" and distributed as a knowledge repostitory. One step more towards the vision of the Semantic Web as it was envisioned.

The nooface link contains more information about other relevant work.

Via nooface. [nooface.org]
The Paper. [server2.tecweb.inf.puc-rio.br]
Semantic Web Vision. [w3.org]

Mobile HotSpot

(Source: beamzone.de)

Blue Cell Networks have designed a Bluetooth-based HotSpot called BeamZone with some initial marketing applications. The first application designed allows people visiting a cinema complex to download cinema related information such as timetables, movie related images for phone-backgrounds or video trailers.

To be connected all the time means to be tracked all the time. These types of systems can have very useful applications, like the typical of visiting an historic site and retrieving information about the place. Although the idea of broadcasting some content to passers-by is not new, still the issues around privacy havent been resolved. Do I need to get "spammed" all time as a I walk by? How can I choose which places are "allowed" to push information towards me in a non- intrusive way? How can I get the messages but still be anonymous (i.e. Bluetooth Mac address hiding)? How can we balance the usefulness of the application and the privacy concerns?

From Golem (in german). [golem.de]
BlueCell Networks (in german). [bluecell.de]

Urban Playing Field

(Source: culturebase.org)

we-make-money-not-art published in july a list of 25 pervasive games, where public spaces space are the game board, people are the players, and their whereabouts a main interaction component. Mixing the virtual and the real is the name of the game.

As time passes by, more people have posted links to other pervasive gaming projects, so there are now about 35.

we-money-no-art post. [we-make.money-not-art.com]

floAt's Mobile Agent

Mobile phones are not just tools for communication and every day is possible to see new models with new capabilities built in. Some users are not just happy with the functionally given by the phone manufacturers and the network operators and are creating frameworks for developing tools that can take full advantage of the hardware capabilities of new phones.

floAt’s Mobile Agent, or FMA, allows phone-desktop (SonyEricsson) interoperability and it is possible to control some phone features from the desktop and vice-versa via Bluetooth. It is possible write and receive SMS from your desktop, transfer files, pictures, make and receive phone calls from the computer, control the mouse, DVD/Mp3 player software, and the list goes on an on. If there is a reason to upgrade your phone to a new one, FMA might be one.

floAt's Mobile Agent. [mfa.sourceforge.net]

Interaction Design + Art

(Source: interaction.rca.ac.uk)

The Royal College of Art has been running successfully for a number of years its 2-year Interaction Design Course, formally called “Computer Related Design”, with a focus mostly on art/design and then interaction in any permutation. They carry out as well a lot of research in new forms of interaction, emerging technologies and its implications among people and society.

Although somehow slow to browse around in some sections for the curious mind that just want to have a look fast (due to their extensive use of "pop-up onclick windows" that overlap over each other), the website is full inspiring papers, concepts and ideas.

Royal College Of Art. [interaction.rca.ac.uk]

Form and what Function?

(Source: nec-design.co.jp)

In principle, designers try to balance form and function when they create new “things”. At NEC Design, usual objects take unusual functions to create new digital media affordances. One picture of an idea/prototype is worth 1000 words. Check their showcase out.

From userinstinct news. [userinstinct.com]
NEC Design Showcase. [nec-design.co.jp]
NEC Design. [nec-design.co.jp]

Jaguar LBS

(Source: ordnancesurvey.co.uk)

Location Based Services (LBS) are starting to become a real product and not just a buzz word from research labs. The main idea, in a nutshell, is that your mobile device (PDA or SmartPhone or....) is aware of your physical position and it can help finding information about the place where you are, services available and/or any other type of local knowledge. There are many examples of application.

Traditionally, they combine some sort of location detection (GPS), online connectivity to retrieve up-to-date information, server side infrastructure to manage it, local storage for maps and other types of data and the local applications that glue everything together.

Jaguar, a prototype made by the Ordnance Survey as part of their Emerging Technologies Lab is an example of a LBS demonstrator. On a more higher and commercial level, mobile phone operators offer LBS as well for mobile phones (which dangerously can be a bad marketers dream come true, so watch out for spam coming near you!). Read on about Jaguar LBS:

Ordnance Survey [ordnance.co.uk]

KDE 3.3 Usability Review

(Source: kde.org)

Over userinstinct there is a review of the new KDE 3.3 Linux Desktop Environment. 8 users were observed while they performed tasks such as email, IM, word processing and others. Overall, KDE 3.3 was fairly easy to use for the average computer users, with some minor issues. Read the full review at userinstinct.

Userinstinct [userinstinct.com]

KDE [kde.org]

The Less I Know, the Less I Forget

The less I know, the less I forget, or as Suzanne Ross from Microsoft Research puts it with this little poem:

"The more data you have, the more you know
The more you know, the more you forget.
The more you forget, the less you know.
So why have data?"


How can we keep up with the huge amount of data that is piling up on our desktops? How can we remember what we did and which files we used yesterday, last week, last month or last year? with how many people did I chat online last monday? how many times did I email you concerning our project together? One of the main problems is that the tree-based structured implemented in almost every file system out there is not the best way (for people) to store information.

Currently there are several solutions being develped that will (hopefully) help to manage our data and and interactions with the computer better. The main idea is to use metadata that is captured from the applications and/or use some sort of file system/database combination to store store and index the metadata. Some of them are:


Dashboard (Linux-Gnome)
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/

Gnome Storage
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/

Gnome Beagle
http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/

Apple MacOS X "Tiger" Spot Light
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html

Microsoft SIS
http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=710

Microsoft WinFS
http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/winfs/
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20040129/

ReiserFS
http://www.namesys.com/v4/v4.html

KDE DBS (Linux-KDE)
http://ozy.student.utwente.nl/projects/dbfs/

Of course, there are more systems and I am sure I missed few. File systems are mixed with middleware and end user apps. To finalise, you can read why the tree-like structures found in hierarchical file systems are not a good idea at:
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/sets1.htm

Human Computer Interaction Courses

Postgraduate programs in HCI related topics are becoming more and more commonplace. Over Ok/Cancel, there is a review of the University College London (UCL) Master of Science HCI and Ergonomics program, run by the UCL Interaction Centre.

Link to the article. [ok-cancel.com]
UCL Interaction Centre. [uclic.ucl.ac.uk]

Usability that not only Scratches the Surface

One way to have the best applications in your platform is to have the best developer tools. Apple knows it, Open Source guys know it and Microsoft knows it. Give power to the developers and then everything is possible.

As developers are usually computer experts (or very savvy), usability has often been referred or studied as “end user” apps such as word processors, mail clients, or the operating system user space environment. Basically anything that is GUI based.

Microsoft is currently introducing (has been for a while!) usability studies within their APIs. They are testing what developers make of the APIs and their documentation, how the use them, how they learn them, etc, in order to learn from the experience and design in turn better APIs.

They have developed a cognitive model of the use of the API based in 12 dimensions that can be applied to analyse the impact that the API will have on programmers according to programmer’s profiles (see the paper).

Steven Clarke, a usability engineer at Microsoft Visual Studio and .Net division, wrote a great paper in Dr. Jobbs Journal about how they are using UCD techniques such as “scenario based design” to design the APIs that are going into .NET.

The task is clearly to make programming as easy as possible so that programmers can generate great code fast and still have powerfull APIs. However, the API is only half of what the programmer needs and having good documentation is esential. .NET, following the JavaDoc model, allows the programmer to automate the documentation creation tasks so that documentation can be produced more easily too.

From Wesner Moise's Blog [blogs.com] and Brad Adams' Blog. [blogs.msdn.com]
Steven Clark's Paper. [gotdotnet.com]
Steven Clark's Blog Entry about API Usability. [blogs.msdn.com]
JavaDoc Original Paper about Documentation Automation. [java.sun.com]

Tools for Innovation

(Source: design.philips.com)

To create new interactive systems, new ideas are needed. Is there any tools that will help people to be creative and help them in generating ideas that can spark innovations?. Philips Design thinks so, Ideo thinks so, and thousands of books think so too.


(Source: ideo.com)

Philips New Value Design Tools . [design.philips.com]
Ideo Design Tools. [ideo.com]
Listmania about Innovation. [amazon.com]

Head-up Displays

(Source: edmunds.com)

When you drive a car, the most important task is to keep your eyes on the road and arrive safely to your destination. With more and more gadgets available to drivers (i.e. mobile phones, gps navigation systems, etc) people have to keep an eye on those as well. In some countries, such as the UK, mobile phone use in cars has been (almost) totally banned in order to avoid (potential) accidents as people can get easly distracted while talking or trying to answer a call.

GPS car navigation systems can be very useful but they can be as well very distracting as drivers has to gaze sometimes to the display in order to find out where he/she is. To sumarise, the best thing to do while driving is to keep your eyes and focus on the road.


BMW is currently integrating a head-up display into its new M5 car. The head-up allows to display different types of information in front of the user (not on the side), with the potential that it can be less distracting than having a display on the side.

The head-up display is integrated onto the front windscreen, so that the driver can keep up the eyes on the road and still be informed. This technology has been used already for a number of years sucessfully in aviation.

Although the system can only display currently limited information (speed, rpm, etc), in the future it can be predicted that gps nav. systems and other fuctions will use a head-up display as they are a more natural interface than having extra displays around the car.

From Edmund Car News.[edmunds.com]

Larger Image. [edmunds.com]

Head-up display in F1 .[bmwworld.com]

Uncle Roy Is Going Get You

(Source mrl.nott.ac.uk)

“Uncle Roy All Around You” is a street based game-performance, where art meets mobile devices, wireless and location based technologies and the virtual world meets the physical world. Result of the collaboration of Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab (within the Equator-CityWide project) among others, Uncle Roy is a interesting mixture of performing arts, spy movies, technology and pure entertainment.


From the Uncle Roy website:

“Street players use handheld computers to search for Uncle Roy. They use the map and incoming messages to move through the streets to find a secret destination. Online players cruise through the virtual city, listen in to the street players and assist them to find the office. As you play, you are introduced to a new interactive landscape in which you are less passive than you think: would you put your trust in a stranger?

Using the latest wireless technology, Uncle Roy All Around you overlays a virtual city onto the real city and allows communication and cooperation between the two. It uses this as a metaphor for the intimate, secret city that exists as traces within the mundane urban world. Over the course of the game, players are introduced to a new experience of the city. “

Blast Theory. [blasttheory.co.uk]
Mixed Realiy Lab CityWide Pages [mrl.nott.ac.uk]

Social Interfaces. The Next Interface?

Joel has in his weblog (Joel on Software) an article about the role of usability when new applications domains emerge. He argues that as social software is a relatively new application area, people are able to “put up” with the rough edges of the "first" iterations in order to be able to enjoy the benefits of using them.

As an example, he uses the Napster interface to indicate that although it broke some usability heuristics, people still used. Other example that he uses is the well-known (slow and awkward to use) SMS interface or eBay (check his reasoning why ebay was “bad”). The interface does not really matter but the idea is what is important.

People in Joel’s forum are already discussing prior social software such as CSCW research or Open Source development as a social network. Other software that might be considered as social software could be Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise, Microsoft Exchange, the new Suse OpenExchange, or Knowledge Management tools.

He argues that current social software forces the users to work in certain way and not in how really people work and calls to bring on the "ethno" guys to study people in real settings so that software designers can really design tools for what is really happening. This is not a new subjet and there are many good books on the subject, such as "Cognition in the Wild" by Edwin Hutchins, "Where the action is" by Paul Dourish or "Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography" by Andy Crabtree.

Good points? Bad Points? Are we going through a revolution of social software or just seeing a glorified newsgroup with pictures and a pretty interface? Well, email is a social sofware too...Say no more.

What is true however, is that we are already observing a how mature blogging and other tools are, such as Blogger, Movable Type or SocialText. And they are here to stay.

More on the article and the forums.

Joel On Software. [joelonsoftware.com]
Forum. [discuss.joelonsoftware.com]
"Cognition in the Wild". [amazon.com]
"Where the action is". [mitpress.mit.edu]
"Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography". [springeronline]
Blogger. [blogger.com]
SocialText. [socialtext.com]
Movable Type. [movabletype.com]

EffectTV

Winamp plug-ins are files that extend Winamp's functionality in order to process audio and produce visual output according to some of the parameters of the sound wave.

EffecTV goes beyond just the sound and allows to create visual effects in real time given a video input. The project has been runing already since 2001 and it is Open Source. It works by detecting the moving parts of the video stream versus the background, and applying different filters to the areas that change during each frame, leaving the background intact.

EffecTV opens a new form of posibilities for live perfomances, and the software has been used already to create visual effects in concerts, festivals and nightclubs. As the software gets more popular, the number of plug-ings keeps growing. We had D-J,L-J and now we will have Video-J.

The only thing you need is a webcam and a machine running linux, or a Playstation 2 (running the Linux kit).

EffecTV Website[effectv.sourceforge.net]
Video[effectv.sourceforge.net]

Metadata Monkeys

(Source: espgame.org)

If you try to search for images on the internet using something like google, you will quickly realise how poor the resuls are. Google (and others) only check if the file name is similar to the search terms, with the hope that the file name might describe what the picture is*. Currently it is not possible (not yet...) to extract the contents of an image (is it a plant? is it a car? is it me?) by analising just the pixels and without extra information.

The ESP game is designed to use people as "Metadata Monkeys", so that people type in the metadata that describes the picture. The interface is designed as a game, where 2 people would type away what they see on the picture, and the words that both players type become part of the word description. The ESP game has been out there for a while and has been reported already in some blogs (few months I believe). Recently, they have added image search functionality. In principle, they want to add metadata to images that are found on the internet.



(Source:idemployee.id.tue.nl)



A different approach to the same problem (of creating image metadata) has been presented during ICEC 04 by Youechen Quian, where you do the same but chatting via IM, and with your own images. The idea is that while you discuss the images with your friends via IM, the content and context of the discussion can be used to create metadata and add it to the picture. Great!


The ESP Game [espgame.org]
Youechen Quian [idemployee.id.tue.nl]
ICEC 04 [icec.id.tue.nl]

* Some file formats have the possibility to insert comments, such as jpg, so google might look for those as well. I dont know how it actually makes the search, so I am only guessing it.

Tangible Interaction

What about if you could add interaction to any object you like, anytime?
Sensitive-Object, a french startup has developed a technology that allows to stick small labels onto objects that are pressure sensitive and that can communicate with a host computer when they are touched, without any cables. The image shows how it can be possible to turn a table into a media player!!

Not quite the vision of "Tangible Interfaces" from the Tangible Media Group from MIT but we are getting there nonetheless.

Original Source: The Register [theregister.co.uk]
Sensitive-Object [sensitive-object.com]
Tangible Media Group [media.mit.edu]