Reimann, C.; Paelke, Volker; Stichling, Dirk: Foot-based mobile Interaction with Games. In: ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE). Singapore, Juni 2004

Interaction with mobile applications is often awkward due to the limited and miniaturized input modalities available. Our approach exploits the video capabilities of camera equipped smart-phones and PDA’s to provide a fun solution for interaction tasks in simple games like “Pong”, “Breakout” or soccer.

Our lab has 4 positions. If you’re interested email pierre dot dillenbourg at epfl dot ch.

1. Designing and testing collaborative technology-enhanced furniture, such as noise-sesntive tables. Looking for a creative techie having done his PhD or willing to do a PhD in the field of roomware, tangibles and augmented reality. Duration: 2-3 years. Start: ASAP
2. Design a high level language for modelling CSCL scripts. Scripts are generic scenario that structure teamwork with roles, phases, etc. Looking for a computer science PhD student with an interest for abstraction. Duration: 3 years. Start: ASAP
3. Designing and running experiments on mutual modelling, i.e. the representation that team members have of each other. For this NSF project, we are looking for two cognitive science researchers, a postdoc and a doctoral student. Duration : 3 years. Start: spring 2005

I came up with this: Mutual Modeling: process by which an individual (i) picks up facts he/she estimates to be MANIFEST and RELEVANT in his/her cognitive environment (with regard to the partners’ intents), (ii) builds a representation (more or less formal) about the partners’ intents.

That’s a question I always think about: how to cope with a too large number of RSS feeds? Roland Tanglao answers:

here’s how I plan on eliminating my RSS information overload:

Subscribe only to 150 blogs at the most. These 150 will be people not search feeds from PubSub, Feedster, etc. and I will read them every day or at least try to. And I will update this list and add and remove people at least once a month. This group I will call MUSTS.

For the companies and blogs that I write, I will create PubSub and Feedster feeds for these companies’ and blogs’ keywords as well as RSS feeds for links to their URLs. This will be called WORK. I intend to keep this list to 100 feeds or less.

The rest (over 500!) will go into NICE TO READ and I will set them to the items to auto-expire so that if I don’t read them for 24 hours, they are deleted. And if I find something in a NICE TO READ consistently, then I will promote it to MUSTS.

Of course, as he claims, “There’s no need to read everything”. I tend to think about this as the first rule. The first month I used a news aggregator I used to read everything and then I noticed that being updated is not a matter of reading stuff once in a while. It is rather to read a bit on a regular basis.

Another thing important is the notion of node, some people can keep track of stuff you’re interested in but you don’t have time to browse about. For instance, even though I am interested in blogs and syndication I don’t really check website about it. Instead of reading specialized blogs on KM or blogs, I aggregate 2-3 of great blogs about it.

In the swiss german part of Switzerland…

Interview in Gamasutra on handheld gaming. The guy advocates for the “small is beautiful” approach.

“With handheld development, the teams are smaller than big console production, and that inherently has appeal for us. This is just because we can focus more on the creative effort, and fun factor, and also working within a small team environment, for each one of our projects. I think that’s a good thing. I think that multi-year projects are a difficult thing. Console titles that are multiple years in development can be very big, and the smaller dev cycles also have an appeal, because you can learn and improve your skills, and I think there’s a lot to be gained there. Also, it’s a good business model for smaller developers.”

A very nice paper: Benford, S., Seagar, W., Flintham, M., Anastasi, R., Rowland, D., Humble, J., Stanton, D., Bowers, J., Tandavanitj, N., Adams, M., Farr, J. R., Oldroyd, A., and Sutton, J. (2004). The error of our ways: The experience of self-reported position in a location-based game. In Proceedings of the the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. (UbiComp 2004), pages 70–87, Nottingham.

The use of positioning systems is an important but problematic aspect of ‘context aware’ applications. Through focusing on location-based games, we introduce the approach of self-reported positioning in which players explicitly and implicitly reveal their positions by manipulating electronic maps. A study of a game that piloted this approach demonstrates that self-reported positioning can be a reliable low-tech alternative to automated systems such as GPS. We contrast the strategies used by humans to generate position updates – reporting at landmarks and junctions and ahead and behind themselves – with automated approaches, drawing out implications for how we think of positioning error and design positioning systems.

Interesting because it deals with uncertainty about how LBS report people’s location

A list of interactive tables that may support collaboration (for students projects in our cscw course:

basic meeting tables:

1. della rovere
2. gestarr

interactive tables:

1. scoop
2. chatter
3. the drift table
4. future office table
5. dialogtable
6. lumisight table
7. hitachi tabletop
8. Habitat
9. Interactable
10. Philips café table (my favorite)
11. the little table
12. sensetable (via regine)
13. tableportation (via regine)
14. The Storytelling Table
15. MultiAudable (.pdf)
16. MapNews Table (.pdf).
17. floating number

(via regine)

18. The Table Childhood (via regine)
19. The Rogue ambience table
20. Planar Modular Display (thanks jeff)
21. froggies
22. Individual fancies
23. Lo-Tek (via Long Live the Network)
24. DissemiNET Table (via Long Live the Network)
25. onomy tilty table
26. Pond
27. Le signal
28. Audiopad
29. The Message Table
30. Natural Interactions
31. MayDay Bar
32. Light Tables
33. The Key Table
34. Music Tables
35. Turn Table
36. Intelligent vibrations
37. tviews
38. iTable
39. Counteractive (interactive cookbook)
40. Lazy Susan Interactive Table
41. smart table
42. reac table
43. the Echoes table (.pdf)
44. various tables at interact lab
45. reactive table
46. Smartskin
47. The drumming table
48. MouseHaus
49. Tonetable
50. Living Jukeboy
51. magic board
52. coeno
53. MUSICtable
54. Philips’ Entertaible
55. Tequila Sunset
56. Beat Jigsaw
57. Gullivers Welt
58. Conversation table
59. Misto Table (HP)
60. The sunlight table
61. Gispen XS
62. Weight table
63. Proactive Desk
64. TabulaTouch
65. hap hep hip hop
66. Concerto table
67. Touchtable
68. Symbolic table
69. Amebeats
70. tangible table
71. microsoft surface
72. sandspuren
73. Taito Tabletop Game
74. Update! GranulatSynthese

Thank you regine for some pointers!

Some stuff in my backpack:

The Guardian on “Unwanted mobiles to get new lease of life “.

The communications giant Nokia has developed technology that turns unwanted mobile phones into a range of useful electronic gizmos, including alarm clocks, handheld games and TV remote controls.

The move is designed to help dispose of the growing number of obsolete handsets thrown away or forgotten in drawers by people striving to keep up with new technology.

That’s a nice move and a smart initiative.

Nokia says redesigning old handsets makes the most of extra functions such as the clock and memory while hiding communication features. (…) The casing of the phone can be reshaped to “provide a more stylised device”, alarm clocks could get a snooze function and software could be reprogrammed to talk to remote-controlled devices. (…) “The cell phone is transformed from something having a short lifespan to a device with an undeterminable lifespan.”

When our steps merge meaningfully with the urban space
On perception and expression when walking in town, a paper (in french) about urban walking.

This study takes a micro-sociological look at how pedestrians walk around towns. The aim is to highlight the various ways in which city-dwellers gain access to public places and the practical and perceptive dimensions that this accessibility calls upon. From our point of view urban mobility is based on a process by which pedestrians bond with their surroundings: mobility involves the perceptible environment of the public urban space, the perception of the pedestrian and the ability of his or her body to express itself. It is consequently necessary to characterise and describe precisely the ambient atmospheres in which such activities develop, the forms of motive action and perceptive attention they generate, and ultimately the types of relationship with the city that they bring about. Drawing on recurrent observation and description of public behaviour in the city of Grenoble this work proposes six perceptible figures of urban accessibility. Each one reflects the individual rationales of pedestrians and the special role of sensory perception in the choice of one’s route across town.

Today I am focused on semantic web tool. One of the winner of the Technorati Developer Contest. Dave Sifry announced the winners. I am particularly interested in what Niall Kennedy did: AppleScript plugin that you add to NetNewsWire which will subscribe to the Technorati Cosmos RSS feed for the item a reader is currently reading.

Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos!

(via roland), a new tool that seems really promising: Durl. To put it shortly, it’s a search engine for del.icio.us.

Enter a url to retrieve information about people who delicious’ed it. del.icio.us already provides this service, Durl completes that with an RSS feed containing those results and trend history graphs.

As Roland points it the added value is related to the keyword (metadata) added:

And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas.

A paper about IM and MSN messenger in the french newspaper Le Monde. They report that :

If your had to keep just two media, which one would you choose? 12-15 years old answered: Internet (61 %), television (49 %), cinema (35 %), radio (29 %), daily press (17 %) and magazines (9 %). (…) In France, between may 2003 and december 2004, the number of MSN messenger users went from 2.7 to 6.8 millions (from all ages).

.
Besides, the paper quote the work of Anne Cohen-Kiel, the design anthropologist for MSN. Which is interesting because it is not so often that french press describes user-oriented design techniques like the collaboration of software designers with anthropologists.

A place to be? ACE 2005:

The field of computer entertainment technology has aroused great interest recently amongst researchers and developers in both academic and industrial / business fields as it is duly recognized as showing high promise of bringing on exciting new forms of human computer interaction. Now deemed deserving of both serious academic research, as well as major industry and business uptake, techniques used in computer entertainment are also seen to translate into advances in research work ranging from industrial training, collaborative work, novel interfaces, novel multimedia, network computing and ubiquitous computing.

The purpose of this conference is to bring together academic and industry researchers, as well as computer entertainment developers and practitioners, to address and advance the research and development issues related to computer entertainment.

Prospective authors are now invited to submit Papers/Posters/Demos electronically via the conference website:
http://www.ace2005.org by 15th February 2005