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.

Just ran across that quote by Nigel Thrift (in this paper

“I have what I think is a pretty good test of whether a person is a social scientist or not: do they eavesdrop on a fairly regular basis on other people’s conversations on trains and planes, on buses, in the street, and so on? If they don’t, I suspect that they really want to be a philosopher or an architect – or both. The difference is crucial for me. One kind of work (mainly) involves trying to figure out what other people are thinking as they are doing. The other (mainly) involves thinking. They are not the same.“

Why do I blog this? maybe it’s a bit of a stereotype (especially towards architects) but I find that quote curiously exemplifies the empiricist versus speculative debate.

Reading Where Are You Now? Design for the Location Revolution on UX Matter this morning makes me wondering about the advancements in the location-based services area. Although I agree on the premise (”The true power of the mobile Web lies not merely in providing remote access to data, but in letting users view contextual information relating to location and interact with that information.“), the rest is still a rehearsal of past arguments and examples:

“Mobile product innovator Apple showed in its Calamari iPhone ad how a person hungry for calamari can easily find a nearby seafood restaurant (…) Relative location data makes possible the first wave of mobile social networking applications—dodgeball,Loopt, and even the location plug-in for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)—which inform users when friends or colleagues are in their vicinity. The value of this kind of communication is immediately apparent. I enjoy keeping up with friends and colleagues using LinkedIn or Facebook, but often wish I could have more personal interactions with people in my network rather than just relating in digital space.“

Why do I blog this? I wonder about what will be the next generation of location-based services or how to improve the problems users face when employing place-tagging systems or buddy-finder. Although things have been achieved in the academia (and start-up projects), it’s as if we had troubles going beyond the current state in gaming (it’s all about treasure hunt and object collection), social computing (buddy finder suffer from lots of problem such as market fragmentation, low number of users, privacy tuning issues, etc) or navigation (the restaurant finder example never really took off). My point here is not to criticize this blogpost but rather to show that LBS innovation is VERY slow.

Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control Away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined by Barkhuus & Dey is an interesting paper about the users’ experience of different degrees of automation in ubicomp. They investigated this through a user study of a context-aware application in which 3 levels of interactivity are defined:

“personalization, passive context-awareness and active context-awareness. Personalization is where applications let the user specify his own settings for how the application should behave in a given situation; passive context-awareness presents updated context or sensor information to the user but lets the user decide how to change the application behavior, where active context-awareness autonomously changes the application behavior according to the sensed information“

The results are intriguing (please see the details of the methodology in the paper):

“Our study found that users’ sense of control decreases when autonomy of the service increases, as suggested by previous research. We believed that personalization would be preferred and would be more accepted than both passive and active context-awareness, however, the results of our study do not support this. Instead we find that people prefer context-aware applications over personalization oriented ones.
(…)
participants felt they had less control in the context-aware groups but still preferred the context-aware approaches (…) The incurred cost due to loss of control can result in users turning off a service. While the participants initially liked many of the active context-aware services, they might become frustrated by their perceived lack of control and eventually turn the service off. (…) Our conclusion is that users are willing to accept a large degree of autonomy from applications as long as the application’s usefulness is greater than the cost of limited control.
“

Why do I blog this? This is close to the debate about automation that I described here. I am indeed interested in this differentiation between levels of interactivity and how people felt them.

Barkhuus, L. & Dey, A. (2003). Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control Away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined, Proceedings of UBICOMP 2003, The 5th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 159-166. October 12-15, 2003.

Doing research is facing this sort of email in the same hour:

“Email 1: Dear Mr. Nova, I have the pleasure to announce you that the Advisory Board of XXXXX has chosen your proposal …

Email 2: Dear Dr. Nicolas Nova, We have received the reports from our advisors on your manuscript, “Blah Blah Blah”, which you submitted to the Journal of XXXX XXXX. Based on the advice received, I feel that your manuscript could be reconsidered for publication should you be prepared to incorporate major revisions….”

Of course they’re not directed towards the same publication but the effect is always curious.

A quite interesting session at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference: Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect (transferred to me by Fabien). Organized by Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, the session deals aims at questioning the social effects, cultural meanings and political economy of in-car satellite navigation:

“Comprehensive in-car satellite navigation (Sat Nav) systems have rapidly become affordable and ‘must-have’ mass-market accessories, advertised on television and the focus of ‘scare’ stories in the tabloid press. With their driver’s-eye position, dynamic maps and an authoritative voice telling you where and when to turn, these archetypal geographical gizmos depend on the ‘magic’ locational power of a cluster of unseen satellites and the global reach of corporations marketing the latest consumer fad. SatNav offers technologically sophisticated spatial data models of the world, but the technology quickly sinks into taken-for-granted everyday driving practices, such that its social and political significance is hard to assess. The gadgets themselves take
space on the dashboard and windscreens, but also make new senses of space for the driver, well beyond the car. What exactly is the nature of this TomTom effect? “

Why do I blog this? it seems it’s too late to submit something there but it connects with my interest in studying the user experience of location-aware technologies. My PhD research addressed the socio-cognitive implications of mutual-location awareness. How this connects to the present session? The results from my dissertation would be interesting to discuss in conjunction with features such as TomTom buddies that lets you track your friends on the road. A friend locator coupled to a car navigation systems? What’s new? What are the constraints? What can be the impacts? etc. Perhaps that can help “questioning the TomTom effect”.

This morning, Julian Bleecker, Fabien Girardin, Dennis Crowley and myself participated in a panel called The Near Future of Pervasive Media Experience. Here is the annotated version of my slides from the PicNic talk (pdf, 9.5Mb):

The talk entitled “new interaction partners: perspectives on the pervasive media world for pets” was basically the proposition of bringing “new interaction partners” in the pervasive game model. A problem in that field is that designers actually took the technologies from ubicomp as well as the assumptions coming from that field: seamlessness, technology that is “pervasive” (everywhere, every moment)…
BUT, and yes there’s a “but”, the world is not like that. The reality is a bit more like a pig farm: it’s dirty, messy, accidents happened, technology sometimes fails, interoperability fails, etc. and above all: there are other beings that humans and technological artifacts. If we think about with whom we have most of our playful interactions, it’s simple: the environment (parks, sport areas, etc) and animals. My previous work has focused on the environment, I am now interested in animals as a way to renew the visions of pervasive gaming. What about having “new interaction partners”, i.e. including new beings such as pets?

I then presented various examples that I already blogged here such as Augmented Animals by Auger-Loizeau, Wim van Eck’s pacman with cockroaches, etc. as well as two projects I am doing with Julian Bleecker:

• we have a dwarf on World of Warcraft that is played by a dog (sensors track its physical activities). So this little character is running around and it has a very basic grammar of interactions in the game. What is interesting here is to study the implications for participants. There will be a new type of characters, which won’t be played by a human nor by and Artificial Intelligence (Non-Playable Character)
• A raddish toy meant to be employed by cats: when the cat touches the raddish, it sends a message on Twitter, when the owner sees it there, he/she ca reply and the toy would vibrate or glow. A two way relationship of some sort.

This talk was a little bit provocative and funny… meant to show that other sensations or desire could be mediated in a pervasive game. It’s not only about pets or even plants but also the weather, the environment, data feeds extracted from contextual events. The point is that to be rich and playful, pervasive gaming should benefit from other things than just human or computers actions.

Given that I am at PicNic, the “cross-media” topic is everywhere (from talks to random people met on streets of Amsterdam). Being interested by that topic as well, it made me think of this pdf that stands on my desktop for ages: “Transmedial Interactions and Digital Games, actually a description of a workshop organized by Shaowen Bardzell, Vicky Wu, Jeffrey Bardzell and Nick Quagliara.

Some excerpts that I found interesting:

“Transmedial access should not be confused with what is currently labeled as “cross-platform” games, where a particular game is developed for the console, PC, and mobile. Cross-platform games, are generally variants the same game, customized for a given set of user inputs, but they are not a single game experience accessible from multiple devices. For example, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is available on Xbox, PC, and mobile phones, but they are three separate games, and a mobile phone user cannot access her or his Xbox version of the game from the morning train. Providing this ability to access and interact with a game anywhere, anytime is the primary goal of TMA,
(…)
Although any game with elements of persistence or community-driven content will benefit from transmedial interactions, persistent online worlds especially stand to benefit
(…)
Transmedial interactions offer an infinite variety of possibilities for game design, as the following examples illustrate:
- A collectible-card game, such as Perplex City which introduce players in an alternate reality
game.
- A team-based alternate-reality simulation spread across diverse “stations,”
- Both Nintendo’s and Sony’s dabblings with GameBoy-GameCube and PS3-PSP connectivity
- A guild management tool, where increased connectivity leads to increased social networks and a richer, more
realistic experience.
(…)
Beyond the games themselves are meta-game content, such as blogs, guild pages, and social network sites, strategy guides, mod sites, and so on. Most of this content is player-created and accessed through different mechanisms. Devices or interfaces that aggregate meta-game content in ways that help create coherent, if not seamless, game experiences represent another potential area for transmedial interactions to improve gaming.“

Why do I blog this? this is material for a new research projects I am starting about digital/physical worlds interconnections. I am quite interested in how to augment games with new layers of interactions (both in mobile and fixed contexts). But, as opposed to certain arguments in this paper (”Time investment for players must be reduced to achieve the market’s growth potential, recapturing those who quit because of demanding commitments in real life, and attracting those who never even made the effort to begin.“), I am more interested by the new forms of interactions that may appear than by market growth or filling every human’s free time with content.

Dearman, D., Varshavsky, A., de Lara, E., Truong, K.N. An Exploration of Location Error Estimation. To appear in the Proceedings of UBICOMP 2007: The 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (September 16-19, Innsbruck, Austria), 2007.

The paper deals with location-aware computing and how location predictions often fails to report their accuracy. The authors propose to reveal the error of location prediction (in a very “seamful design” way) and evaluate different possibilities in a field study, showing significant benefit in revealing the error of location predictions.:

“Predicted Location. In the predicted location condition, we provided participant with the predicted location of herself and the poster

95% Confidence. In the 95% confidence condition, we provided participants with a region defined by a confidence ring, in which the application is 95% confident that the actual location is contained within the ring.

Customizable Confidence. In the customizable confidence condition, we provided participants (by default) with the same visualization as the 95% confidence condition; however, they could manipulate the confidence level of the ring.

Optimal Error. In the optimal error condition, we provided participants with a ring for each location (see Figure 3(e)) where the ring’s radius is defined by the true error of the location prediction.“

What is very interesting here is the description of how users cope with the localization system and how they benefit from the presentation of the positioning error:

“Our results show that presenting an estimate of the positioning error provides a significant benefit. Fixed estimates of error (e.g., 95% confidence and customizable confidence) provided little additional benefit, but they do help confine the search area. The optimal error condition strongly and positively in-
fluenced participants’ search strategies. Participants found all posters where the true error was small. When the true error was large, participants experienced the same problems for finding the posters as the participants in the other conditions. However, participants in the optimal condition could identify that the true error was large and differentiate between high and low true error, where as participants in all other conditions could not. “

Why do I blog this? because this field study is an interesting exemplification of seamful design, i.e. revealing the limits/shortcoming of a system to the users. Results are quite interesting as they express which sort of information can be valuable to the users.

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.

Enhancing player experience in MMORPGs with mobile features by Elina M.I. Koivisto and Christian Wenninger is a paper presented at DIGRA 2005 that addresses how the massive multiplayer game experience could be augmented through mobile services. Although written in 2005, not much has really change concerning the cross-platform issues described in this paper, so it’s still very pertinent.

The paper interestingly provides the reader with a categorization based on “how the player can interact with or influence the virtual game world and other players by using his mobile phone. It’s actually obtained through focus groups conducted both in Helsinki and in a virtual chat-room. The results they describe concerns:

• Communication access: through IM or voice communication.
• Event notifications: to be aware of specific events, some level of control is needed here, given that it could be intrusive.
• Asynchronous gameplay: to manage specific game feature asynchronously, like crafting, mobile auction.
• Synchronous player-to-player interaction, which may allow the mix of players using different platforms, through articial intelligence, especially in turn or tick-based game.
• Passive participation: observe the game world or influence the game by voting or rating with the mobile device.
• Parallel reality: “Real-life events can have an effect on the events in the virtual game world and vice versa“, like location-based games.

It’s also relevant that the authors describe how these feature would change (or not) the game mechanics. The factors that limit the mobile-enhancement are also mentioned and revolves around the problems of latency and I/O issue (text) as well as pricing for data transfer. This last point might eventually be fixed soon through flat fees.
Why do I blog this? this classification emerged from focus groups is great material to be included in the literature review for a research project about this topic. Also, it allows to set some baseline about the current ideas concerning cross-platform gaming. There is a “physical” axis here which ranges from basic observation (gamer as spectator) to using real-life events in the game mechanic. I am convinced that other axes should be found to map more design opportunities.

McGregor, G.L. (2006). Architecture, Space and Gameplay in World of Warcraft and Battle for Middle Earth 2 , Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Game research and development, pp.69-76.

This paper, which is very relevant to my work at the lab, is an architectural analysis of the spatial qualities of two video games: World of Warcraft and Battle for Middle Earth 2. The author starts by pointing out how game architecture is different from architecture in reality because the underlying rationale has a different purpose. In games, the architecture is created to produce challenges and gameplay.

The whole paper offers an analysis of two video games, let’s jump to the conclusion to see the main issues of interest to me, i.e. the meaning of space:

“Both games build on established fantasy traditions, using architectural and ecological diversity to differentiate races and spaces. Both games use architecture to clarify and simplify gameplay in two very different ways. World of Warcraft uses architecture and landscape as an organisational system that contains activity and builds on usage patterns from real life. In contrast BFME II creates architecture as a symbolic object that stands for complex systems within a flattened and simplified contested spacemap.
(…)
The dichotomy between architecture in videogames as a spatial entity or as an object suggests a primary division of games into those that are concerned with movement through space as a visceral experience and those that are not.
(…)
they operate with significantly different approaches to spatiality. On one hand we have a game that represents architecture and landscape as accessible and spatial, that is characterised by an embodiment in and a personal view of space, that focuses on an individual’s movement through that space and that simulates a physical (though primarily visual) experience of space. On the other we have a game that produces architecture as an object and the landscape as a map, that uses architecture to represent intangible concepts, that simplifies the landscape and favours an external viewpoint, a game that simulates a conceptual view of space in which codified relationships are more important than physical characteristics, favouring metaphor over corporeal experience. “

(Pictures taken from the paper: WoW and BFME II)

I was also interested in the part about affordances:

“It is interesting to briefly consider the architecture of both games in relation to notions of affordance, taking William Gaver’s separation of affordances and perceptual information. The architecture of BFME II exhibits a false affordance of conventional architectural/spatial use in the way it mimics the visual properties of real buildings. Other uses of architecture in gameplay, for example creating soldiers, exist as hidden affordances. BFME II relies on the gameplay manual and knowledge of established traditions in real-time strategy games to indicate to the player the buildings utility. Conversely World of Warcraft primarily exhibits perceptible affordances of customary architectural and spatial use to its architecture, creating a congruity between what between what the player perceives they can do and the activities they can perform. “

Why do I blog this? it’s been a long time that I am interested in finding this sort of paper, that would use architectural analysis of video game. This type of work is both interested for architecture (new objects to analyze, new behavior to observe, etc.) and for game design as it allows to understand more level design and how space could be articulated with game mechanics.

I am also wondering about how to go further, how to enrich game/level design through that sort of research analysis. Currently, I am gathering material like this paper and hopefully try to integrate this more deeply, maybe I’ll try to write a paper about architecture and gaming to formalize more the interconnections.

Writing a paper about the affordances of space, I tried to get back to Catchbob data and create some heat maps that would represent players’s exploration of the environment with two different weather conditions: with (first) or without snow (right)… a sort of commonsensical demonstration of how weather conditions influenced participants’ behavior:

Why do I blog this? achievement of few hours toying with this idea to illustrate a paper.

Alla Varney in The Escapist has an interesting piece about gaming and architecture. Some excerpts that I found relevant (some parts are quotes from an interview of Andrew Hudson-Smith):

“Slowly, architects - not software architects, the brick-and-mortar kind - are starting to notice. They’re gradually repurposing 3-D computer game engines to visualize real-world building designs. (…) Remember how machinima inspired the game community’s budding filmmakers? Now, in the same way, the architectural use of photorealistic 3-D game engines heralds an imminent and exciting new pursuit.
(…)
Of course, architects already use advanced modeling software (…) In comparison to game engines, architectural packages need heavy hardware, aren’t optimized for real-time walkthroughs, and cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
(…)
That’s the view from the architect’s side. Should gamers care? Will ordinary gamers really want to use their favorite games to design, not deathmatch and capture-the-flag, but mundane buildings?
(…)
Early adopters may include the vocal minority of players in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) who enjoy player-created housing. They’ll tinker obsessively with their dream houses, like your sister playing The Sims. After that, the next city’s worth of game buildings may arise in - wait for it - machinima nonfiction documentaries.“

Why do I blog this? some good points here but the author did not deal with the notion of simulation, how some architect study people flow in space/buildings (supermarket). It would be curious to study more what architects can do with regards to gaming practices, spatial behavior in games and stuff like that; not only the tools but behavior.

For example, looking at “consumption of space” in a building (the equivalent to what I described yesterday as examples of playtest), the intensity of places usage, interactions, with what objects, etc.

Leigh Star, S. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure, American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), pp.377-391.

This article interestingly propose to take an ethnographical approach of infrastructures, and study these so-called “boring things” as indicators of practices and culture. Phone books, international classification of disease or power plugs are described as important indicators by the author. The point is not only to “study the unstudied” for the sake of it bur rather to take them as a relational concept (”for a railroad engineer, the rails are not infrastructure but topic”).

She then defines infrastructures with 9 properties:

“Embeddedness. Infrastructure is sunk into and inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies.
(…)
Transparency. Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks.
(…)
Reach or scope. This may be either spatial or temporal—infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice.
(…)
Learned as part of membership. The taken-for-grantedness of artifacts and organizational arrangements is a sine qua non of membership in a community of practice
(…)
Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice
(…)
Embodiment of standards. Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion.
(…)
Built on an installed base. Infrastructure does not grow de novo; it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strengths and limitations from that base
(…)
Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks
(…)
Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally. Because infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above.“

Why do I blog this? “Reading” infrastructures can be done by identifying the “master narratives” and “others” (i.e. the single voice who does not problematize diversity), find the invisible work (i.e. the traces left behind by coders, engineers, builders) and understand why people “persist in using less functional but more routine actions when cheaper alternatives are nearby”. This obviously utterly echoes with the near future laboratory concerns and methodologies.

What would this infrastructure - currently being fixed - reveal from the society? (Picture taken in Oaxaca, Mexico, last week)