My (raw) notes about the 3 projects discussed during the second blogject workshop held in Lausanne:

1) Ubicamera (Julian Bleecker, Sascha Pofhlepp, Mark Meagher, Frédéric Kaplan): Starting point: how blogjects would be used to circulate culture.
I my camera knows that I am in Amsterdam and also that I was there 6 months ago, it would link up on Flickr and establish a network of different sources.
Or, if I go to an event and takes picture, the camera will check other Flickr pictures automatically

“The Flickr camera” is driven by a fascination towards media sharing as a cultural practice. This group thought about how to turn this into the next level of interaction: the social practice of Flickr into a blogject

There are 3 primary Flickr characteristics embedded in a camera:
- the interface (fluidity)
- association: sharing pictures amongst friends and strangers
- browsing practices: go there and look at the 10 different photo of your contacts and then check pictures of a group whom your friends belongs to (”big brown things”).

Scenario: Sascha walk down the road, he sees a Totem, take a picture; a public/private indicator shows up as well as the opportunity to select certain tags: certain are preloaded and other tags are there just becasue the camera has foudn them.

Social camera situation: meet other blogject camera. As you maneuver through your day, you come across similar camera and communicate: embodiment of the Flickr association to find similar pictures and people. You can also specify the tags you’re interested in and the camera would download the pictures of others you meet serendipituously (these people won’t even know).

Also, the camera is GPS-enabled: location can be another key to find information /people/pictures: it’s then an exchange of tags based on location. The camera can also tell the others which tag is proper.

As for the browsing practice, the question is “how do we use the camera as a display device?” Not just for browsing but also navigating in a way that is as compelling as Flickr. There could be different interfaces: photo can be shifted accordingly with time/space/personality/trajectory. The photostream is then the stream of life of the owner; when 2 cameras take the same picture, there would be an intersection of 2 lives: this should also be displayed.

The camera has also a life of its own: no buttons, the photo can’t be deleted. What happen if you buy such camera on a flea market? You buy a camera but also the pictures taken by the previous owner.

Timo was interested in this sort of interface as well as the tagging practices it would generate

2) Nabaztags and blogjects (Fabien Girardin, Alain Bellet, Regine Debatty, Cyril Rebetez)
Starting point: Using Violet’s Nabaztag (the wifi rabbit) as an output device or a blogject aggregator. Using it as a way to make sense of history of interactions. It could also be a nice channel.
A part of the “blogjectsphere”

“Not a rabbit that helps loosing weight” but a spokespet. The main features would be:
- reminder/teaser/awareness
- trigger for actions or to drop an action you are doing based on the data collected by the blogject
- a spokesperson for voiceless objects in the form of a rabbit: it would recycle and analyze data from the environment (other objects), managing an ecosystem of data. The ecosystem of objects is made of objects which have simple sensors:
- letters with your bills you have to pay (RFID tags): a reminder that you have 5 bills to pay
- trash: the rabbit will know the status of your trash as can act as a reminder or warner (”don’t put that can in the bin, it’s only for paper”)
- water the plant: the rabbit recives the answer of the plant sensors and reminds you that you should water it
- playful or unpleasant reminder
- the action generated by one sensore can trigger another blogject
- the rabbit can talk to your friends’ rabbits and your pedometer in your shoe can activate your friends’ rabbit: “hey your friend went running”: awareness of others so that you might eventually choose to join.
- the collar of your dog can communicate with the rabbit: a translator of the barking dog or as a warner that you have to go out with him.

Fabio Sergio was struck by the desire of human beings to have objects that would be like us and he pointed us on the fact that it is antithetic with the fact that animal can act badly. The question is then “do we really want things to have a personality because we would need to manage them?” Do we want to have this sort of relationship with objects?

Sascha raised the question of the underlying cultural aspects: from “mute servants” to agents. But Cyril reminded us that psychology showed that we project meaning and intents anyway.

3) Mobile phones and blogjects (Timo Arnall, Fabio Cesa, Fabio Sergio, Marc Hottinger, Nicolas Nova)
Starting point: The mobile phone is a generic device (phone, take pictures, post it on Flickr…): can it be turned into a blogject? or a blogject controller?
If we become surrounded by blogjects, how do we manage that situation?
The mobile phone as a tool/wand/interface
What are the potential social issues

These last 2 days, I am busy managing the blogject workshop 2 with Julian Bleecker at EPFL. There’s a small group of very relevant people there (Julian Bleecker, Fabien Girardin, Mauro Cherubini, Mark Meagher, Frédéric Kaplan, Laurent Sciboz, Timo Arnall, Sascha Pohflepp, Regine Debatty, Fabio Sergio, Fabio Cesa, Marc Hottinger, Cyril Rebetez, Alain Bellet, Manu Bansal, Cyril Rebetez).

This one is a bit different from the first one we had during LIFT06, with different people, from different background and more anchored into concrete projects and scenario developments.

Still have to write report from the tons of notes, drawings and audio files we have!

There will be a 3rd workshop on its way… (source), stay tuned

I am really enjoying this Muscle NSA project carried out at the Hyperbody Research Group at Delft University. This is a programmable building that can reconfigure itself.

For the exhibition Non-Standard Architecture ONL and HRG realized a working prototype of the Trans-ports project, called the MUSCLE.
(…)
Programmable buildings change shape by contracting and relaxing industrial muscles. The MUSCLE programmable building is a pressurized soft volume wrapped in a mesh of tensile muscles, which change length, height and width by varying the pressure pumped into the muscle.

Visitors of the Architectures Non Standard exhibition play a collective game to explore the different states of the MUSCLE.

The public interacts with the MUSCLE by entering the interactivated sensorial space surrounding the prototype. This invisible component of the installation is implemented as a sensor field created by a collection of sensors. The sensors create a set of distinct shapes in space that, although invisible to the human eye, can be monitored and can yield information to the building body. The body senses the activities of the people and interacts with the players in a multimodal way. The public discovers within minutes how the MUSCLE behaves on their actions, and soon after they start finding a goal in the play. The outcome of this interaction however is unpredictable, since the MUSCLE is programmed to have a will of its own. It is pro-active rather then responsive and obedient. The programmable body is played by its users.

There is also a slight connection with the blogject concept:

For the behavioral system this means that the produced sensorial data is analyzed in real-time and acts as the parameters for pre-programmed algorithms and user-driven interferences in the defined scripts. These author-defined behavioral operations are instantly computed, resulting in a diversity of e-motive behaviors that are experienced as changes in the physical shape of the active structure and the generation of an active immersive soundscape. The MUSCLE really is an interactive input-output device, a playstation augmenting itself through time.

Why do I blog this? what I like in this project is that it mixes different aspects of the HCI world: games, games software, architecture, usage of sensors. In the end, the outcome is pretty original and the visitors’ experience seem to be intriguing. I also like how it modifies the relationship of the visitors to a dynamic place.

I had lunch today with my friend Alex Pang at the Institute For the Future in Palo Alto. The discussion was around the Internet of Things, spimes and blogjects. Starting by discussing Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, we were thinking about the fact that as Sterling says there is no smartness in the objects; the smartness better resides in the was those objects and networks help us to make better choices; especially with regards to specific actions or meeting people. Wired and connected objects may indeed help choosing what tools can be used to consume less energy, sharing certain types of objects with others that would be trackable is also of interest (and is actually a topic discusses in one of the story Bruce Sterling wrote in “Visionary in Residence”): a kind of community hammer or driller for instance.

Alex and I also discussed some potential ideas about the blogjects serie of workshop I am organizing along with Julian. Additionaly, Jason tester updated me on their pervasive gaming projects that is a very relevant synthesis about context-aware games. This project interestingly started first by looking at the history of video games from the POV of users and then continued as an overview of the pergames directions.

Alex finally encouraged me to go deeper in the Science Technology and Society world, which is quite a good idea.

Trapper Markelz designed a nice exemplification of the blogject concept: he built a Blogject front-end using the Xbox360 XML data feeds. Here is how it looks like “I am a XBOX 360 and I can talk”.

So what is all this talk about Blogjects? While at eTech I had an idea to build a Blogject front-end using the Xbox360 XML data feeds. Steve and I have been working on it a few weeks on and off and here is what we have so far. The next step is putting it into a linear blog format so that you can have an RSS feed for your Xbox and it will tell you each day what happened to it.

This is actually the topic of this article (in Nature’s last issue about 2020 - Future of Computing): Declan Butle (2006) 2020 computing: Everything, everywhere, Nature, 440, 402-405

In their current, mostly desktop, incarnation, computers used for science usually come into their own quite late in the process of inquiry. In the future, this set up could be reversed. (…) new computers would take the form of networks of sensors with data-processing and transmission facilities built in. Millions or billions of tiny computers — called ‘motes’, ‘nodes’ or ‘pods’ — would be embedded into the fabric of the real world. They would act in concert, sharing the data that each of them gathers so as to process them into meaningful digital representations of the world. Researchers could tap into these ’sensor webs’ to ask new questions or test hypotheses. Even when the scientists were busy elsewhere, the webs would go on analysing events autonomously, modifying their behaviour to suit their changing experience of the world.
(…)
such widely distributed computing power will trigger a paradigm shift as great as that brought about by the development of experimental science itself.
(…)
But sensor webs currently have major limitations for people doing science in the field, says Deborah Estrin (…) Estrin says that sensor webs alone are often not sufficient for all monitoring needs, and that the cost of sensors prohibits researchers from obtaining the pod densities often needed for detailed field experiments. (…) Sensor webs will frequently be just single layers in a stack of data-collecting systems. These will extract information at different temporal and spatial scales, from satellite remote-sensing data down to in situ measurements.

Managing these stacks will require massive amounts of machine-to-machine communication, so a major challenge is to develop new standards and operating systems that will allow the various networks to understand each other

The article is actually good review of sensor-based scientific projects ranging from glacier surveillance to soil biodiversity.

Here are my slides from the presentation I prepared for the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture, be careful, it’s a 5Mb powerpoint (the pdf was too big).

The presentation actually describes the blogject concept as it started when Julian started talking about it and it presents what emerged from the workshop we did at LIFT06.

This is not the final wrap-up document of the workshop, we’re still working on it

RepRap: Replicating Rapid-Prototyper.

The RepRap project is working towards creating a universal constructor by using rapid prototyping, and then giving the results away free under the GNU General Public Licence to allow other investigators to work on the same idea. We are trying to prove the hypothesis: Rapid prototyping and direct writing technologies are sufficiently versatile to allow them to be used to make a von Neumann Universal Constructor.
(…)
A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.

A rapid prototyper is a machine that can manufacture objects directly (usually, though not necessarily, in plastic) under the control of a computer.

An experimental prototype at LinuxConf Australia 2006:

Check the work in progress on the reprap blog.

The quotes gives some ideas of the scenarios:

I have no need to buy a spare part for my broken vacuum cleaner when I can download one from the Web; indeed, I can download the entire vacuum cleaner. Nor do I need a shop or an Internet mail-order warehouse to supply me with these things. I just need to be able to buy standard parts and materials at the supermarket alongside my weekly groceries.

Chris pointed me on this funny/impressive Aibo roboblog that can blog and upload photos in the form of an ‘Aibo Diary’:

Hello, I am Manuel, owner of Pedro, a Sony Aibo ERS-7M3/W. This is one of two companion blogs to Pedro’s Aibo Roblog #1. Here, you can read Pedro’s Diary, going back to Nov. 9, 2005, the date his Mind was upgraded to v3. Disclaimer: Pedro is the sole author of these posts and I accept no responsibility for them!

You can also check the blogroll, there is plenty of others!

Why do I blog this? I am very interested in the blogject concept lately (objects that blog) as a subset of the Internet of Things. This is a relevant implementation of such an idea.