Trazes: your path on Plazes

Plazes has a new interesting feature: it displays your Plazes history on a world map.

Trazes allows you to track your historical whereabouts and display the Trazes you left on the globe on a flash based map (thanks, bryan boyer aka IndyJunior). All you need to do is activate “Trazes” in your profile. You will then be presented with the map for the last 30, 60, 90 or 365 days. If the tracking is newly activated, only Plazes you discovered will be taken into account.

Since I did not travel overseas it sucks, so you have to click on the little arrow on the bottom left-hand corner, and you won’t have a nice readable map when zooming.

Why do I blog this? I’m into location-based applications. This feature is nice and the fact that you have XML fils of your position history is interesting. Of course it disrupts my privacy but… It actually used a feature I already mentionned here.

Therapeutic Interactive Yoga System

Responses in Light, Sound and Scent — A Therapeutic Interactive Yoga System by S. Fels, J. Gauthier and P. Smith.

an interactive system that uses gesture recognition to enhance the yoga experience through visual, auditory and olfactory feedback. Ancient theories associated with Kundalini yoga provide the theoretical basis for this research. The sensory feedback provided by the Therapeutic Interactive Yoga System promotes an immersive, multisensory experience that corresponds to the system of sensory stimuli outlined by chakra theory. As a user performs yoga, the system monitors the user’s body and responds with colour, sound and scent appropriate to the user’s yoga postures. Testing reveals that the Yoga System succeeds in producing an “enjoyable” and “relaxing” environment — one that seems to enhance the personal, meditative and therapeutic experience of yoga.

Location matters in collaborative problem solving

Random notes about my research project:

I like this this “location matters” motto. The point is that even though IT modified how people carry out social activities by removing the notion of distance, space and location are still important features in terms of collaborative problem solving. “Location matters” relies on the hypothesis that people use location information in collaborative problem solving: knowing where the parters are can improve collaboration in terms of:

• division of labor among the group (A goes there on level2, B goes here on level1 for instance)
• doing inferences about others activities (past: where you have been can attest what you done, present: if you’re at a specific point you may do something, future: heading in that direction can mean that you will do sth specific)
• doing inferences about others’ availability (A is in X then he may be busy)
• building a shared understanding of the situation: having a map of the environment with potential actors’ positions
• re-shape communication and help referential commmunication: being close to an object you’re talking about helps the others understanding that you’re making reference to it

All of this relies on a “belief system” in which actors may/could assign meaning to people’s actions based on location information. I would like to have a model of this (a probabilistic model?).

(thank you Hillevi for making think about it, now I have a clearer description of what I thought)

DVD controller for kids

A DVD remote control for pre-schooler, made by french toy manufacturer Berchet (which has recently been bought by his neighbor Smoby)

DVD Kids Remote Control is created specifically for children to play with their favourite TV characters.
DVD Kids aims to make interactivity easier for young children through specially designed interactive DVDs.Children will enjoy fun adventures whilst learning new skills.
DVD Kids offers your children a unique level of interactivity between the DVD player and your TV never achieved before.
From 2 years

Why do I blog this because I am watching kids interfaces This one is appealing and way better than the Shinco gamepad-like controller I mentionned last week. The remote is large enough, the two button are well positioned on each side of the controller (it’s possible to add more buttons with special sheet at the center of the pad). Then the most important point is the shape and the size of the object: it’s big and should be positioned on the kid’s belly so that it’s directly pointing the DVD set. Therefore, the designers got ride of the most important problem kids have to control tv/dvds: the fact that they have troubles pointing the device/screen. I am not very surprised to see that Berchet did a good job, they have a pretty nice lab where they do fine user-testing with kids.

For older kids, there is also the weemote:

Military tech versus street tech

Interesting discussion on PopSci: Military Tech Versus Street Tech: Who’s Got the Edge? by James Vlahos. I picked up what I found relevant:

The question naturally occurs: Who gets the better stuff, soldiers or civilians? The military’s gear is often tougher (witness their laptops and cars), more precise and sometimes just plain better, because extreme situations require extreme gear. (…) The military has traditionally tried to develop, own, and control its own technology. But the thinking is shifting, and procurement officers now get pats on the back when they fulfill a military need with a consumer product. The new approach has forged strange alliances, such as the Army’s partnership with the video game industry
(…)
It would be shortsighted, of course, to discuss what’s happening with military tech without discussing what’s happening with the military.(…) New conflicts—smaller, urban, unconventional—will require new tools and tactics. “Soldier-centric warfare” and “situational awareness” are the buzz phrases, because tanks and bombs have limits when you’re fighting among civilians. This combat paradigm places an increased emphasis on the very sort of high-tech tools civilians use. You depend on your PDA to remind you of a lunch meeting. Soldiers, linked by wireless networks, may soon be using theirs to make the right decisions about when to shoot—and when to hold fire.

Then the author describes concrete examples of such an agenda. Apart from humvee’s and the Dragon fire I described earlier, there are interesting ideas about how militaries took advantage of reshuffling existing “non-MacGyver“civilians devices:

• outdoor gear
• tactical communication with augmented ipaqs: rugged, waterproof, networked

:


• waterproof laptops

Why do I blog this? another relevant column about artifacts transfered from one context to another.

txt files addiction

If you’re like me a txt file user, read this post on kuro5hin: “So you want to make textfiles” which is a nice how-to about this very topic. It’s also a good reminder for simple typography.

One great benefit of textfiles is that they don’t need any sissy header text: you can just open up an editor and start typing.

US Marines’ robot controlled by a PS2 like controller

Via defense review, another use of video-game controllers for military purposes (see for the ps2 pad that controls missiles): a remote-controlled throwable robot for which the controller was copped from a PlayStation 2 gamepad (according to popsci).

The ‘Dragon Runner’ and its handheld controller/backpack:

A bunch of researchers at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, Pensylvania have teamed up with the United States Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL) in Quantico Virginia to create a small, lightweight little Mighty Mouse of a prototype “concept demonstrator” robot called the Dragon Runner Mobile Ground Sensor System (or just “Dragon Runner”, for short), which is a man-portable mobile reconnaissance/scout robot (or “bot”), that will travel at up to 20 miles per hour and allow our Marines to “see around the corner” in urban combat/warfare environments.
(…)
So it can “sneak and peak”, Dragon Runner is outfitted with a small video camera, an audio mic, IR (infrared) illuminators (for night operations), and IR sensors (for obstacle avoidance), and is controlled remotely by a single operator via a control unit tethered to Dragon Runner’s nifty carry backback by an expandable cord that looks like a much thicker version of the cord that connects a phone handset to its base on a normal house phone. Since most Marines today have most likely grown up gaming with Sony Playstation2, Microsoft XBox, and Nintendo, controlling Dragon Runner is most likely a relative piece of cake.

A video of the robot here.

Why do I blog this? I am always interested in analogy-based phenomenon – like when something (concept/idea/design) is transfered from one field to another. Here it’s pretty close (remote controlled objects) but as I stated earlier in my post about the missile guided by a PS2 pad, the interesting thing is that the game controller tends to become standard.

Malleable Music: pinching, twisting or squeezing to do music

Malleable Music is a project by Sidney Fels at the Human Communication Technologies Laboratory at the Unversity of British Columbia in Canada:

The malleable surface touch interface combines a deformable input surface and video processing to provide a whole-hand interface that exhibits many attributes of conventional touch interfaces, such as multi-point and pressure sensitivity. This interface also offer passive haptic feedback, which can be effective with applications such as sculpting or massage. (…) This interface allows for people to control the computer using pinching, twisting, squeezing and other forms of whole hand manipulation. We want to use this device to create a new musical instrument.

Video here.
Why do I blog this? looking for new interactions that may be interesting to kids future games, I found that capturing touch interaction through a deformable surface is relevant idea.

Loosing gadgets everywhere

The IHT has a funny piece about tgis new fact: people have more and more gadgets but they are losing them more and more by “misplacing them in airplanes and airports, hotel rooms, restaurants, cabs and rented cars.”

A study conducted by Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a mobile-data protection software company in Chicago, found that the number of laptops abandoned in one London cab company’s taxis rose 71 percent in the second half of last year from the same period in 2001, while the number of personal digital assistants left behind shot up 350 percent.
(…)
The plague of forgetfulness has given rise to several services that locate vanished goods. Trackitback, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and at www.trackitback.com, uses coded identification labels and a reward system to encourage people to call a toll-free number when they find a lost item with the affixed label. A lifetime fee of $9.99 covers standard shipping costs.

How can designers create stuff with a “presence” reminder so that the object is not left aside on the sidewalk after you made a break and alsmot forget your powerbook?

Awareness Communications by Bear/Doll

Close to Nabaztag (the WiFi rabbit), there is this appealing project: bear/doll interface:

Awareness Communications by Entertaining Toy Doll Agents by Kazuyuki Saitoh1 , Tomoko Yonezawa, and Kenji Mase (paper presented at International Workshop on Entertainment Computing 2002)

We propose a sensor-doll system that provides multiple users at remote locations with an awareness communication channel. A doll is used as the interface agent of the local user, and this agent is connected to a remote doll by local and/or wide area networks. The doll sends out information on the local ambient activities and the user’s intentional interactions to the remote agent and, at the same time, displays the received remote activities by adapting its presentation to the local context. Musical sound expression is used to display the remote awareness, mixing the local response and remote activities. Music also provides an entertaining and sympathetic intimacy with the doll and eventually the remote user. The design and implementation of the networked sensor-doll, equipped with various tactile sensors and a PC, are described in detail. We also discuss issues of awareness communication and give preliminary experimental results.

Why do I blog this? I thought it was a cool ambient interface for kids.