ggalaxy

This page contains lots of great iPhone apps, including an app that turns your iPhone into a Max/MSP controller, an app that simulates a scrolling LED banner on the screen of your iPhone, as well as many other projects that illustrate Mr. Akamatsu's interesting approach to software hacking on consumer electronic devices. This approach is also reflected in the many interesting Max/MSP objects he has created, perhaps the most famous being his object that interfaces the Wii Remote with Max/MSP.

• SNIFtag
  "If you ever longed for a way to monitor your dog's social life, map out his buddy network, and sense who its true friends are, you might have been waiting for SNIF"

It’s been a while that I haven’t seen lot of innovation in the field of location-based games. It’s as if the game play were always repeated (object collection, finding a human who have to escape…). There were some good projects about this in the past but the field has some trouble going beyond a limited range of scenario.

Within this context, Turf Bombing, designed by Che-Wei Wang, looks intriguing:

“Turf Bombing is a location-based turf battle game which rewards and encourages traveling and learning about different neighborhoods.

This game requires a laptop and works anywhere in the world where there’s a wifi connection. Your laptop’s wifi connection is used to triangulate your position.

Gangs are assigned by the zip code of your home address. The goal of each gang is to gain as much territory as possible.

Territories are acquired as players plant time bombs at different locations in physical space. If the bomb is not diffused by a local gang member in time, the bomb will explode and the territory will be turned over to the gang that planted the bomb.“

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the use of a location-based game as a way to encourage new transport modes. A sort of “serious game” in the field of pervasive gaming.

• The sickening secret of Mirror's Edge
  "When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot — precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you. What's more, the Mirror's Edge world feels tactile and graspable."

• Processing monsters [rmx]

Some material about location-based services… and how the user adoption of such artifact has been somewhat delayed (a topic I addressed copiously in my ETech 2008 presentation):

First, this IHT article entitled “Still searching for profit in location-based services”. It addresses how mobile operators are hoping that LBS can lead to new profit for quite a while now. The main issue is that while car navigation devices has been successfully adopted, other technologies typically remains “crude and unhelpful - and unused - for mobile navigation”:

“Despite the increasing availability of GPS-enabled mobiles, many consumers are still reluctant to pay for mobile navigation, said Velipekka Kuoppala, a vice president for sales and marketing at Bluesky Positioning
(…)
How soon will the sales come? André Malm, a senior analyst at Berg Insight, offers this forecast: Global sales from location-based services will more than triple to $740 million annually by 2014, as the number of GPS users rises to 70 million globally from 16 million this year.

But for that to happen, Malm acknowledges, operators will have to sell mobile navigation services for which consumers are willing to pay.“

David H. Williams at Directions Mag has its own bits about why LBS fails to reach a mature market. He sketches 7 deadly sins:

“Sin #1 - Poorly Identifying Opportunities
Sin #2 - Poorly Articulated Customer Value Proposition
Sin #3 - Weak Business Case
Sin #4 - Inflexible Business Model
Sin #5- Flawed Technical and User Design
Sin #6 - Inattention to Intellectual Property
Sin #7 - Deficient Marketing“

Also very interesting for that matter, Gerhard Navratil and Eva Grum from the Institute for Geoinformation and Cartography (TU Vienna) have a paper about What makes Location-Based Services Fail? that gives a good overview that overlaps with my etech talk. They basically explain how technical solutions, legal restrictions and usability influence the design and efficiency of LBS. What is interesting there is that they show how the failure is systemic, that is to say, how the combination of factors per se leads to a problem in user adoption:

“A reason for failure could be that one of the three influences limits the service. It may be that the technology simply does not allow locating the mobile phone accurate enough or the LBS is not accepted because it is too difficult to use. Also threats of a lawsuit for violation of patents or copyright law may stop an LBS.“

Why do I blog this? material for a book about LBS/locative media.

In contrast to the structures that I talked about the other day - the ones that Rothko and Markson set up halfway between your mind and what is ostensibly their art (but their art is actually these collaboratively unfolded mental sculptures) - I want to take a minute to talk about an alternative category of artistic expression, which is the transportation into the extended present.

There's something that happens when you listen to the music of Steve Reich which is that the pattern is at least short term predictable, and so you hear not only the presently-playing music but also you hear the previous 10 seconds (by memory) and the next 10 seconds (by expectation). And here I have to modify my argument with two points:

One: your expectations of music are not completely intellectualised. Your pattern recognition systems have their own particular grooves or lines of flight and so even when you know exactly what is coming up, your internal expectation might be different, like a corner on a known road which is always out of character. Two: this is of course true for all music, only it's easier to discern with the music of Steve Reich.

So what happens when your expectations are violated is a gap opens up between reality and your counterfactual present, a bridge over a chasm which suspended only because it is held at either end by the memory of the past and the predictability of the future. What's important here is not the bridge itself but the height of it, which manifests as either a tension - a kind of predictive vertigo - or a tickling. To me this tickling is the most enjoyable quality of this kind of art, arising from the joyful violation of expectations, and is only possible where the art allows the long present.

Another way the present can be extended is to make time smooth so that you slip over it and forget what the past is and what the future is. This I experience when I'm using the iPhone app RjDj, which takes the noise from around you and plays it back to you through your headphones, sliced and processed and echoed, so I'm not sure whether I'm hearing something live or a slice of it that is repeated a second later and incorporated into this generative soundscape. RjDj ends up being a world mindfulness enhancer because whereas I might not notice a sound because I am momentarily distracted by dodging a person on the pavement or reading a road-sign, here I have multiple opportunities in a several second window to listen. RjDj is especially enhancing when reading, because it turns out - at least for me - that my sense of linearity when reading down a page is anchored on time's arrow as it presents itself in sensory data from the world around me. Isolated from the moment-by-momentness of the world and having my sense of now extended by RjDj results in me reading the book page by page instead of sentence by sentence, having awareness of the page behind me and - because I am so aware of this larger context and the longer curve of narrative - an expectation of the page ahead. It dissolves the experience of reading.

There's a curious shift here in the focal distance of time. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, makes a comment that European men rest their eyes on an object so that they touch the surface, as if they are reading it, because of their history reading books; American men, by contrast, are from a televisual culture, and rest their eyes an inch or two ahead of the object, in order to take in a wider surface simultaneously. American women, says McLuhan, are disconcerted by Europeans because the men appear to be examining them closer, really penetrating them with the focal distance of the gaze, and this is felt as intimate and erotic. RjDj helps me move my focal appreciation of the present back a couple inches, a non-European connection with now, so that I can apprehend it; regard it; look at it from the side.

9 Beet Stretch, Beethoven's Ninth time-stretched over twenty-four hours, does this. Long hikes or drives through the desert - undifferentiated scenery - does this. Repetitive beat music does this; dancing does this; being in the flow does this. The communication of highly complex ideas relies on using rhetoric to construct a long present as a kind of carrier wave on which a subtle and highly structured object can be authored in the listener's mind: an example is the I Ching.

But to me it's this tickling quality that is what makes the production of the long present worthwhile. To have a constructed artwork that exists over time and mirrors your thoughts so completely as to mesh with your expectations, fooling you into thinking it's of your own origin, using repetition and rhythm to construct a smooth space over which you can slip between the past and the now and the easily expected future, and then to make a surprise key change, to demonstrate the autonomy of the artwork, well that tickles me and it's why A Thousand Plateaus makes me laugh out loud, and this is simultaneously the experience of flirting when you can find the flow, and of wrestling with a dog, and familiar music, and if you're lucky even your own body and your own mind, which are really one, and are yourself too actually, with their own grooves and own lines of flight, but still you reflexively look inward and predict yourself, incorporating that too, recursively, making a kind of extended present of self, which is what we call identity, and you make actions and create thoughts which are consistent with your sense of self, but sometimes, as I say, if you are lucky, your body and your mind can jump the groove and prove that they too, in the context of the long self, still have the capacity to surprise, and this, I conclude, making a comment on a feeling that makes me happy and how to achieve this, is how one is able to tickle oneself.

• Ignition City: Steampunk Meets Cowboy Cursing In Ignition City [io9]
  New project by Warren Ellis

Incomplete buildings are something that fascinate me. The raw backbone of the buildings looks as if it had been never finished or strip naked after a momentarily stopped renovation. To me, the city of the near future definitely looks like this sort of architecture. And this fascination is not just poetic, it’s a very recurring encounter in lots of cities due to economic and cultural issues in construction.

For example, the picture above has been taken in Cusco, Peru. It nicely reveals how the floors reached different levels of completeness. The one above is a restaurant where I had lunch in august, whereas the two other stories below have a totally different affordance. Sometimes, it’s even more fascinating when you have incomplete skyscrapers, falling into despair. Some are totally abandoned, some only partly… with pockets of emptiness. These structures often lead to interesting new forms of socialization that would surely need some time to be uncovered.

If like me you’re into this sort of things, you may be intrigued by a french architecture firm called coloco which works on this concept. Régine pointed me to their Skeleton Observatory. It’s actually a summary of their exploration, about why the think this architectural typology is important and may play a role in the near future. It eventually lead them to describe projects about “inhabiting the skeletons”, i.e. the re-appropriation of abandoned and incomplete architectures. The skeleton becomes and “invitation à l’usage” (i.e. “an invitation to be used”). They even have their own France-based abandoned building to test their hypotheses.

Why do I blog this? cataloguing curious signals about new forms of architecture on a pure exploratory angle.

Flickr place info now includes shape data for many places. See the Flickr code blog for more.

We’ve correlated most of Dopplr’s places with Yahoo WOE IDs using Flickr’s reverse geocoder, so we can use this data too. As an experiment, I wrote some clientside code to overlay this shape data onto the maps we use on Dopplr. Help yourself to the code if you want it: gist.github.com/25502

In “Experience Models: Where Ethnography and Design Meet” presented at the EPIC2006 conference, Rachel Jones discusses the roles of ethnography in design. She gives a quick overview of the literature regarding this topic:

• “Identifying “sensitizing” concepts (the identification of researchable topics)
• Developing specific design concepts (studying settings that may shed light on what abstract design concepts might mean concretely in order to sketch out and work up potential design solutions)
• Driving innovative technological research (explore the sociality of novel design spaces opened up by radical technology in real world settings)
• Evaluating design (conduct a “sanity check” on the design. Ethnography has also been used to inform the iterative design)
• Context awareness (immersing researchers, designers and sometimes clients in the setting, for the purpose of understanding the context in which a product will be developed)
• Identifying key emerging themes (an area of study, and developed with a view to identifying design opportunities and influencing design solutions)
• Developing experience frameworks (models that identify the key components of an experience and indicate the structural relationships between those components… facilitate the generation and mapping of opportunities)”

Why do I blog this? interesting overview, material for my UX course where I show the importance of “people research” (based on ethnography-inspired methods) for design.

On a different note, I am less and less using the term ethnography because (1) I am not an ethnographer, (2) the use os methods coming from ethnography is far different from conducting ethnography, (3) there seems to be some weird trend currently that confuse ethnography with data collection.

• Blended Reality: Reports from the Digital/Physical Future [IFTF]
  I am intrigued by the IFTF process: "You will interact with researchers developing some of the leading edge applications, people on the forefront of evolving new social practices in the blended world, and IFTF researchers who will share foresights based on their recent ethnographic research. And you will experience the debut of a unique video installation called Global Lives, a project that embodies what IFTF has termed "bottom-up ethnography." Global Lives is an international collaboration of filmmakers, designers, architects, and activists from around the globe who are documenting 24 hours of the lives of 10 people from 10 different countries."
• About Qwitter (monitors your twitter account and notifies you when someone stops following you) [Sean Bonner]
  "I’ve had 4 people confront me because I stopped following them and Qwitter told them. All 4 of those people were pissed off at me for it. 3 of them had stopped following me to get even. The one who didn’t, well he didn’t follow me to begin with but was still angry, yet in the e-mail he sent me he noted that he didn’t know who I was. The truth is I didn’t know who he was either, don’t remember following him, don’t recall anything he’d ever tweeted about and can only assume I added him by accident at one point when following a reply thread. Qwitter caused negative drama between two people who don’t know each other, have had no interaction, and really no reason for any bad feelings."
• Also Plants Fly
  Nice blog by Andrea Bianchi about interaction and interfaces
• Where is the future that we were promised? [Martin Varsavsky]
  "My worry is that, regarding scientific and technological innovation, the creativity of this generation is slowing down and this slowing down of innovation only makes it less likely that future generations will be able to brake the cycle of stagnation." "Five years into the 20th century, Einstein was living his Annus Miarbilis. Where is our patent office today? Who is our Einstein? Are we the first generation in many years incapable of true innovation? And let’s not just talk about things as complicated as the theory of relativity."

Signage frenziness redux in Lyon, France. Certainly the second phase of bopano.

An occidental kitchen, classic, with postcards, boxes and… this lighbulb. Why would people keep this? To have it up one’s sleeve if another one breaks? Actually no, the bulb is sitting there because the owners do not know where to put it. In a 21st century society where you cannot trash anything (especially in Switzerland), when you don’t know how to toss something, you preciously keep it.

Why do I blog this? thinking about practices related to electricity for my course/lecture in Paris tomorrow.