Solo bus stop ads let you talk to strangers. Over.

Nokia’s got bored British commuters playing games, but Solo takes a different approach to interactive bus stop marketing by showcasing the phone’s walkie-talkie feature. Under Vancouver-based agency Rethink’s creative guidance, bus shelters in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary were equipped with built-in two-way radios that connect commuters between different cities, in real time, with just a push of a button.

via ad goodness

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Apr 25, 2007, 10:41AM

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect Where’s The Phone

This essay presents data from a series of Nokia street surveys conducted between 2003 and 2006 that explored where people carry their mobile phones and why. The first study in this series, conducted in Helsinki during the summer of 2003, was designed to understand the extent to which people noticed incoming communication. Since then the study has evolved to encompass the carrying location of other objects, collect a visual snapshot of mobile phones and their ‘owner’s’ and has since been run in eleven countries across four continents.

A look back at Kinnernet 2007

A few weeks ago, Rafael Mizrahi told me about the 4th Kinnernet, a hyper-geek event organized each year on the southern shores of the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret Lake) in northern Israel. I checked out the website and started bombarding Rafael with questions “What’s this robots?” “And that vehicle?” “How about this gaming arcade?” Here’s a few notes from our conversation:

Computer Crash Course and Game Rider

Set up in cooperation with Hubert Burda Media, creators of DLD conference, and following Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, KinnerNet intvited about 150 technology addicts and creative people to gather informally and discuss topics and concepts such as software development, internet culture, social networks, web services, Wi-Fi, open source, cellular services, computer games, interactive TV, VOIP, technological trends, gadgets, security, etc. The general purpose is to share thoughts, work-in-progress, show off the latest tech toys and hardware hacks, and tackle challenging problems. The camp is a closed and private event and participating to it means contributing.

Rafael defines himself as an “artificial vision explorer” at Feng-GUI lab (which developed the ViewFinder, an algorithm that simulates the human eyes and brain and what would be the gaze path of the eye movements while being exposed to visuals. Similar algorithms are embedded into robots) and a member of GarageGeeks (which looks like “crazy projects paradise”.)

As part of the Robot Extravaganza of KinnerNet 2007 camp, he presented the GuitarHeroNoid which he built together with Tal Chalozin. The full-scale humanoid autonomously plays the Sony PlayStation game Guitar Hero II (video of GuitarHeroNoid playing the song Woman by Wolfmother).

Can you tell us more about the robot that plays the PlayStation game “Guitar Hero”? How does it work and play?

At the game, each song is presented on a set of five columns, resembling a real guitar fret board, that scroll constantly towards the player. The five columns correspond to the five fret buttons and appropriately colored notes appear in these columns.
We connected the PlayStation video output using a capture device into a computer and by live video streaming filter capture the video frames as images. Each image is being processed and the detected notes are sent through the parallel output or through network cable directly into the robot. This distributed architecture is also used by a robotics bio-technology called Remote Surgery and actually this distribution saved us when my parallel output was burned by an electric shock coming back from the robot solenoids, and we separated the process into two laptops.

Tal built computer-controlled, solenoids fingers that matched the fret board and strings in the game. Getting the fingers to press the fret buttons and hit the strum correctly was the hard part.

Tal took a storeroom mannequin and positioned the arms to hold the guitar. But the arms couldn’t be put in the right position, so he had to break and glue them to hold the guitar right. All the robot wiring is inside the mannequin ending at a control panel on the back of its neck.

This first public demonstration of GuitarHeroNoid received a rock star ovation from the ultra-geek audience. We also prepared a multiplayer mode, so you can play against the robot. Pushing the envelope higher, maybe next year we will build a robot that plays the game “dance dance revolution” (known as Dancing Stage in Europe).

Now how about “Real Pacman”?

The Real Pac Man (Tal Chalozin, Niv Efron) main idea was to build some old school tech symbol using as much nowadays-technologies as we can find. Right away we knew that we want a large scale game that will give the feeling of the “PacMan come to life…”
The game board made of a projector mounted on a stand, projecting a 15-square-meters game board on the floor. The PacMan was a wireless Pac-look-a-like robot which “drives” over a game board, equipped by RFID reader, Bluetooth transceiver controlled by ATMEL microcontroller, riding on a game board marked with RFID tags.
At the button of the PacMan there is an RFID reader that reads the tag location and sends it back to the game “engine”. The game engine is a java game we hacked, running on a laptop computer.

The result is that you are playing with a completely realistic PacMan over a full virtual game board, but they communicate as if they are one.

To make it more useless tech powered, we’ve written a J2ME application running on a cellular phone for controlling the PacMan. So, instead of playing with the laptop keyboard, you play the game on your cell, which sends via Bluetooth the control commands.
The next step is to make it a multiplayer, PacMan and ghosts…

Pac Man does not get anymore realistic than that!

All around the room were screens and gaming consoles and a hydraulic driving simulator, so you could just sit down and rumble. At the center of the gaming room there were two home made arcade tables, one crafted by Davidi Silberstein and the other by Amit Jurgenson, both musicians, handy-men and old-school gamers.

Arcade Machine Quest and Amit’s Arcade Machine

And the hydraulic driving simulator?

Power tool drag racing took place inside a large and crowded tent. Crossing the middle of the tent, were two long wooden strip tracks in which the racers ran, dragging their electricity cables behind them. The race judges where Michael Shiloh, co-founder of MakingThings and an annual participant of drag racing, World class notorious hacker Pablos Holman who breaks and builds new technologies and Eyal Gever with the “from a designer perspective” opinion.

Image on the right: Vladimir’s Warm vs. Shy Vardi’s Spider (photo: Yaniv Golan)

Of course, the fastest racers were the ones Michael and Pablos brought. Michael had Jim Mason’s blazing fast “monorail” that runs as a monorail train on top of one of the sides of the track, and Pablos had borrowed an “Old Killdoggie” model racer, which is a modified grinder with inline-skate wheels. But getting first to the end of the track is not the goal of such a race.

At least half of the races were built by Yedidya (Didi) Vardi and his crew. Didi, a junk collector, designer of hands-on science models and screws-and-bolts seller. On Didi’s team were Shy Vardi, Vladimir Zviagintsev an aircraft engineer, who built the kites that were raised to thousands of feet in height, and Shlomo Abayoff.

Babylon Tower Racer was built by the GarageGeeks Zvika Netter, Yuval Tal, Ohad Pressman, Gil Hirsch and Tal Chalozin. A laptop sitting on a wagon with electric lawnmower wheels, motivated to move forward by SMS sent by the audience to Yuval’s phone number. Each time an SMS arrived, the light blob was blinked the message in morse code, and a Text-to-Speech algorithm announced the message using the racer’s speakers.

More racers such as the bottle Xylophone, playing on bottles set at the sides of the track, containing various amount of water for different tones. A CleanTech racer that needed no electricity but the moments of falling parts, Vacuuming Hovercraft, Skateboard Ventilator, and Parking, which actually did park most of the time and didn’t finish the race.

Crocodile “rocket” Handy by Naama, Achi and Yariv

KinnerNet looks like a hell of fun. Why is the number of participants limited to 150?
Are there like-minded events in the country during the rest of the year?

KinnerNet is a a lot of fun and in order to participate, you have to contribute and not act as a “camp potato”. I guess that the number is limited because only super geeks are invited. Since there are many people who wish to share and expand their connections, forks of miscellaneous camps and events are being formed. For example, GeekCon, EureKamp, and even us, the GarageGeeks are hosting (images) content evenings, barbeques and Gaming Lan Parties (images.)

I saw on the programme that there was some place dedicated to digital art? What happened there? Any good work you’d like to highlight?

I think digital art was everywhere. In the evening we all gathered in the dining room and watched videos prepared by participants. Michal Levy, for example, a saxophonist and graphic designer, presented a beautiful visual interpretation that she made for John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.

We were asked to bring from home any junk we don’t need anymore and Hanoch Piven hosted a face making workshop that was one of the most popular happenings. Hanoch has been making collages with objects - mainly illustrations of faces for magazines and newspapers since 1992.

The GraffitiPrinter

Ariel Schlesinger, presented his GraffitiPrinter, a handheld printer, feed from punch card that translates to spray writing on the wall.

Inside a large room, Ezri Tarazi along with the creative industrial designers Maayan Hagar and Yasmin Yotam, and anyone who wished to help, built a chain reaction sculpture called a machine that does something that does something.
Next to that sculpture, and the Superman Simulator, Didi Vardi presented his Vibrating Laser Balls Organ, a 400 pound golf-ball-and-aluminum Stradivarius, a wonderful, real musical instrument inspired by the Animusic’s virtual Pipe Dream. (video)

I’m also very curious about the Cooking Madness event. Was there anything edible there? What does “Cotton Candy with ambient touch” taste like for example?

Cooking Madness was more than edible all right. As you cannot be in all of the activities, I didn’t get the chance to taste that Fluffy Clouds Cotton Candy. But I ate two pieces from Tal’s mother’s terrific passion fruit cheese cake, which was introduced by 3 Powerpoint slides at the camp’s first gathering. Most of the time I stood next to Yuval Tal who prepared the Extra alcoholic chocolate drink, and verified the quality of the cocktail.

At night, things were getting weirder, people juggling, geeks playing arcades or fighting each other with light sabres, and Vladimir, inspired by The Burning Man Project, was riding a bicycle while dragging another bicycle with a burning doll, which was created earlier by Didi’s team.

I’d like to finish by send a enormous thanks and hugs to anyone who helped in the great 2007 KinnerNet event and also thank Yaniv Golan and Alex Sirota for the photos.

Thanks Rafael!

A last tip from Rafael: Gil Rimon and Lior Katz’s Supermarket 2.0 parody (video.)

More images at Flickr tag KinnerNet2007. Photo of GuitarHeroNoid by Yaniv Golan. More images.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Apr 7, 2007, 8:10AM

IFID: Mike Richter’s talk

Mike Richter’s talk launched the second day of the Innovation Forum Interaction Design conference. Richter is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt focusing on media system design; his other job is iconmobile -a design, technology and content provider company for “the mobile world”- which he founded in 2003. The company grew very quickly and has now headquarters throughout the world (LA, Tokyo, London, Sydney, etc.)

He started by saying that the day before had been mostly about “innovation” and “explorative approaches”, he has to be much more down to earth. His work at iconmobile has to move within set borders, there’s innovation but it has to be do-able and marketable.

Very few people use data services: there’s way too much time investment and not enough return. Iconmobile is more interested in experience. A mobile phone is embedded into a value chain (device itself, GUI, services, network, operators, and third parties.) All these channels have to converge so his company cannot focus on the mobile aspect or the phone aspect only: it has to take other domains into account.

The company has to keep the balance between innovation and the objective to be commercially successful. Take for example QUAM. It was a 40 bilion disaster. The operator made it from scratch, it was very innovative. Too much innovative: the market was not ready.

Successful examples: Paris Hilton Mobile; TIMTou, a mobile variety of mySpace where TV, mobile and web converge; Starbucks selling music for mobile phones (pre-listening, coupons, backstage passes in exchange of 5 latte).

Technology is an enabler not a driver.

The most important criteria in mobile telephony for Richter is the user. They try to understand who he or she is and develops stereotypes scenarios. Helped by what they can find online. A website like “Hot or Not” provides them with precious demographic data for free.

Not the world of mobile phone is gigantic. You can take pretty any element of your life and add the term “mobile” to it: mobile keys, mobile tickets, etc. hard to keep the pace and look ahead. Besides any element in the mobile chain reacts with the others. You can’t focus on just one, you have to get the global picture. Even the music segment has to be sub-segmented. Iconmobile solution is structure, a kind of “industrial flow” where each one knows his or her place and role.

He ended by showing one of their successful projects, a mobilnovela called Mittendrin. Protagonist are aged between 14 and 25. Each of them have their own blog so that fans can interact with them, they are also reachable through SMS or MMS.

Bad snaps of his slides.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Apr 1, 2007, 9:10AM

Cities as Billboards

The train of thought that I started as I discussed Fabien Girardin’s Flickr heatmaps a few posts back, and which led me to thinking about mining consumer line-of sight data to target advertising, seems to be continuing here in a recent New York Times article about how advertisers are now looking to use what they would consider "unsold" space to place their messages. This phenomenon even has a name, urban spam.

But why just post the same ad for everyone to see?   Why not use an individual viewer’s line of sight as they travel as a "channel" into which to project ads and messages where blank space exists? Fabien’s recent post, illustrated here,  shows the "traces" left by Flickr photographers as they transit  Barcelona. Where his heat maps showed the locations of single images, the traces follow the path the photographer takes through the city, or his visual corridor, if you will.

Originally from Smartspace by Scott Smith
reBlogged by michael on Jan 17, 2007, 6:41PM

tactile vest display

a wirelessly controlled tactile display, consisting of a 4 × 4 array of vibrating motors that is mounted on a waist band or on the forearm. this tactile display can be used as a navigation aid outdoors, as experiments have proved that 8 different vibrotactile patterns can be interpreted as directional (e.g. stop, look left, run, proceed faster or proceed slower) or instructional cues (e.g. “raise arm horizontally”, “raise arm vertically”, “hop”) with almost perfect accuracy.

see also tactile sports vest & tactile compass belt.

[link: newscientisttech.com & ieee.org (pdf) springerlink.com|via boingboing.net|thnkx Zac]

Originally
from information aesthetics

reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 10, 2007, 3:38AM

“Big games” and environmental space

The Porous Border Between the Real and the Mediated

Parsing tons of papers, articles, documents and pdf that I accumulated in the last few months, I ran across this article in Vodafone’s Receiver: Big Games and the porous border between the real and the mediated by Frank Lantz.

In this short piece, the author describes what he means by “big games”, i.e. “Big Games are human-powered software for cities, life-size collaborative hallucinations, and serious fun“. Some excerpts I find pertinent regarding my research:

Imaginary places, constructed from code, are now being represented not just as pixel grid windows into synthetic 3D environments, but mapped onto the actual 3D environments in which we live. Called “Big Games”, these large-scale, real-world games occupy urban streets and other public spaces and combine the richness, complexity, and procedural depth of digital media with physical activity and face-to-face social interaction.

He then describes games such as ConqWest, Mogi Mogi, PacManhattan, Superstar, Can You See Me Now, Uncle Roy, Botfighters… And describes how the urge to use spatial environment as a playful space did not come out from the blue: children’s neighborhood games (like Red Rover, hide and go seek, and kickball or Capture the Flag), Assassin/Killer game, skateboarding and Parkour, location-based art activities of the late 20th century, Live action role-playing. And those activities share some common purposes:

a desire to push game experiences beyond traditional boundaries of time and space. But there is another, complementary desire within conventional computer and videogames themselves. Over the last 10 or 15 years, these games have developed a profound obsession with play dynamics of 3D spaces, architecture, and environments. (…) In some ways, Big Games are a natural extension of this obsession with environmental exploration and social dynamics as gameplay subjects.

The author hence describes how mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies are a catalyst for big games creation. And finally, his thought about spatial practices are very interesting:

There is no longer a clear, well-defined boundary between the virtual spaces and interactive systems of our digital experience and the concrete, tangible aspects of our physical experience. Even as high-resolution computer graphics make the simulated worlds inside our computers more realistic, the actual world outside our computers is behaving more and more like data.
(…)
Regardless of the technology with which they are implemented, Big Games reflect a change in perspective brought about by mobile, pervasive, and ubiquitous technologies. Even Big Games that use chalk on sidewalks to make a citywide puzzle, or appropriate the archaic technology of payphones to make a game of urban tactics, are made possible by a shift in how we perceive our environment brought about by the new relationship between space and computing. (…) Whatever else they are, these games are primarily about connecting people – a way to reclaim public space as a site for a new kind of shared experience.

Why do blog this? because it gives a very good summary of “big games”, which I am partly interested in my research (I use big games to study how people collaborate and use location-awareness features). On a different note, it seems that in the location-based/geowankin scene, the term “big” now receives more and more interest. See the “big here challenge” or how Fabien describes it (or even Matt Jone’s video!).

Finally, what the author stress in his conclusion (big games to reclaim public space), is exactly something Mauro and I wrote about three years ago in the following paper: To Live or To Master the city: the citizen dilemma or in this short pdf report I dropped on the web: Augmenting Guy Debord’s Dérive: Sustaining the Urban Change with Information Technology. The report only focuses on the use of LBS to foster new public space practices. [blogged by Nicolas on Pasta and Vinegar]

Originally
from networked_performance

by jo


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 28, 2006, 12:27AM

Make’s open source gift guide

Our pals over at MAKE magazine have put together a fabulous list of open source gifts for geeks that encourage tinkering, riffing, remixing, building and tweaking:

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don’t own it, you can’t improve upon it, you can’t share it or make it better, you certainly can’t post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we’ve put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source.

The list includes a DIY MP3 player, a wifi router running Linux, a high speed photography kit and even some open source beer (!). Make readers are adding to this one continuously, so be sure to add it to your holiday bookmarks. — Gina Trapani

Originally
from Lifehacker

reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 28, 2006, 12:00AM

Book: Designing the Mobile User Experience

The book “Designing the Mobile User Experience“, written by Barbara Ballard, is due out in January 2007. It provides the professional with an understanding of the users, technologies, design principles, techniques and industry players unique to the mobile and wireless space. Ballard describes the different components affecting the user experience and principles applicable to the mobile environment, enabling you to choose effective technologies, platforms, and devices, plan appropriate application features, apply pervasive design patterns, and choose and apply appropriate research techniques. The text also includes a historical overview to help you understand which developments are likely to appear next in the field. Barbara Ballard is the principal of the mobile user experience design company Little Springs Design, which has an interesting blog on the same matter on its home page.

Originally
from Putting people first

by Experientia


reBlogged

by michael

to mobile, design, experience

on Oct 1, 2006, 9:31PM