Exploring gestural interfaces usage to design sensor-based game prototypes

It’s been a while I haven’t posted about past and current research projects conducted with partners. Last week, I went to DPPI 2011 (Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces) in Milano, a conference that focused on “How Can Design Research serve Industry?“. I’ll get back to the conference itself later and only focus here on the paper I presented.

Written with Timothée Jobert, a Grenoble-based researcher (CEA-LITUS), our paper was about how user-centered design approaches can be employed in the video-game industry. Our point was to show how users can be taken into account at the beginning of the design process, and not just when a prototype is ready to be thrown in the usability laboratory. The short paper is based on a case study of how players use gestural interfaces such as the Nintendo Wii and the Bodypad. Conducted 2 years ago, the starting point of this field study was the development of a new accelerometer sensors by a company called Movea. We conducted a field study in order to explore user appropriation of such interfaces, define a design space and it led to the development of various game prototypes (by eXperience Team and Widescreen Games).

The paper can be found at the following URL.

Slides from the presentation are available on Slideshare:

MP3 players or phones as standardized computing component for upcoming products

Phones and MP3 Players as the Core Component in Future Appliance by Albrecht Schmidt and Dominik Bial (IEEE Pervasive Computing) was a curious morning read.

The paper wonders whether mobile devices such as MP3 players or phones can become the standardized computing component for the next decade. Or, in a more industry-oriented vocabulary, will they be OEM products that become parts of other devices?

“As mass-produced mobile devices continue to become cheaper, they could increasingly serve as a component in a product. For the sewing machine for example, we could imagine replacing the color display and custom computer with a programmable touch-screen MP3 player or phone. The casing design and custom software could hide the commodity device so it would be hard to see without dissembling the sewing machine. Using off the-shelf devices as the core computing component could significantly reduce the development effort of the appliance’s computer parts and hence could allow more people to create sophisticated appliances. The skill sets required are programming a standard platform and electromechanical design, but not hardware development. Combined with 3D printing, this approach could broaden the set of people who could produce and distribute complex appliances.“

Why do I blog this? Simply because I find this idea intriguing.

New book about recurring technological failures

A quick egocentric note.

My new book about recurring technological failures has been released two weeks ago. It’s called “Les flops technologiques: comprendre les échecs pour innover” which obviously means that it’s written in French.

Based on the analysis of several cases (the intelligent fridge, the visiophone and e-books), the book describes the notion of recurring technological flops, discusses the very notion of failures and their underlying reasons. It also addresses strategies and design tactics to take them into account. The intro is available on scribd.

For the record, my introductory speech at Lift09 was somehow the starting point for this project. I’ll use this material in upcoming conference such as NEXT2011 or media footage.

To keep track of interview/critique, I also opened a french tumble about the book here.

Hopefully the next one about game controller is gonna be in English.

Why do I blog this? Well, I just keep track of recent inscriptions.

Science-Fiction timeline

Being curious about timelines and graphic visualization of time lately, I quite enjoyed this project called “Wandering through the Future” by Marjolijn Dijkman. It consists of fragments of 70 film productions from all over the world: Apocalyptic landscapes and scenarios leads the spectator through the future from 2008 until 802.701 A.D:

“The project Wandering through the Future reinserted such science fiction films into the public sphere from which they are normally banned. Clips from seventy movies were compiled into a sixty minute video, and screened in a shed modeled on the fortunetellers’ tents found in Sharjah souks. The compilation took viewers on a journey through popular cinema’s reservoir of scenarios for the future, ordered chronologically according to the date in which they are set, from 2008 until 802.701 AD.
(…)
An accompanying graphic timeline charted how far into the future the various films take us. The timeline made apparent that only very few science fiction films, produced in the optimism of the late 1960s and 70s, project their visions into a very distant future, and imagine a future reality that is desirable. But recent films all present apocalyptic scenarios, set in times that are increasingly near. They envision ecological and biological catastrophes, alien invasions, but most of all technological meltdown. “

Why do I blog this? Timelines and graphical representation of sci-fi flourishes here and there. But this one is intriguing and relevant because it doesn’t try to map everything. I like this stance.

Hauntology

Robot fictions: entertainment cultures and engineering research entanglements

Yesterday in a “secret robot house” in Hatfield, in the suburbs of London, I gave a quick talk about how popular robot fictions influence the design process. The speech was about the propagation of the robot myth in engineering spheres and the influence of certain topics (robot idioms, shapes, behavior and automation)… and how they appear as inevitable tropes in technological research. I tried to uncover what is hidden behind this phenomenon and looked at the complex interactions between entertainment cultures (Science-Fiction mostly) and scientific research.

I’ve uploaded the slides on Slideshare:

Thanks Alex for the invitation!

Domestic complexity: home(s)

Reading Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell last week-end, I was interested by several things. Among others, as I was about to prepare a speech about robot interactions, the part concerning home and ubiquitous computing was of particular interest. Some excerpts I found important:

“That there are so many words, metaphors, and imaginings for home should serve to remind us that homes exist within a wide range of physical, infrastructure, and legislative contexts and that they are also embedded within highly varied systems of meaning.
(…)
Materially, homes are hugely varied and the challenges of designing for and into these many homes are immense. First, there are the practical considerations: size, density, scale, and history. (…) Second, homes are the sites of a range of social and cultural practices, dysfunctions, and aspirations, even within a single city. There are a myriad of patterns of occupation, floor plans, household size, and composition. (…) Third, few homes operate in a vacuum or complete isolation; they are part of a larger social, cultural, and sometimes physical institutions. (…) Lastly, and complicating the picture still further, the different kinds of metaphors and symbols of and for home mean that things we wrap around design or that we imagine design might implicate – ideas about security, trust, the future, and even the relationship between public and private – are all flexible.
(…)
this complexity seems at odds with the current, deceptively simple visions of the digital home. Not only is the home in these visions always singular, but it is nearly always unrealistically large, frequently freestanding, connected to the rest of the world only for the provisioning of services, and newly constructed – without legacy hardware, infrastructure or quirks. It is almost always occupied by a heterosexual nuclear family, which is remarkably accident-and-trouble-free and perfectly happy to perform daily tasks and rituals in series or parallel, entirely without incident.
(…)
these has been visions of domestic life that celebrated technology and its transformative power at the expense of home as a lived and living practice“

Why do I blog this? Some good material here about the problems of “smart homes” and the complexity of context.

Vespa interface simplicity

Interface simplicity at its best.

Locative media, lessons learned in the pas few years

Yesterday, I was at ZHDK (design school) in Zürich to give a talk and a workshop about locative media to students from the CAST department. My speech dealt with the lessons learned in the last ten years of locative media design and deployment. See the slides below:

Thanks Martin for the invitation!

Urban dérive on the (urban) information superhighways

This video of two Japanese guys using Google Streetview to visit the USA from their living room is quite fascinating.

It’s not necessarily the numbers that caught my attention (90 hours, 104,619 clicks, lots of energy drinks). Of course, they’re quite extreme but what’s curious here is the practice itself. Unlike some commenters who fund it useless and pathetic, I find it rather curious and intriguing as a human practice.

This made me think about a recent project by French writer François Bon called “Une traversée de Buffalo” in which he gives an account of how he lost himself in this area of North America using Google Earth (via).

On the same topic, it’s clear that the recent release of Liberty City Streetview map by GTA4net is also relevant (via). It basically allows you to “plunge into the boroughs of Liberty City from the safety of your own chair“. But again, this is only a partial view. The point is not just use this as a complement of the game… exploring this Street View map is a game in itself (a playful activity let’s say).

Why do I blog this? This kind of (extreme) practice can be considered as an intriguing signal for narratives or services that would tell stories in new ways. A sort of dérive is happening here.