Just Bru

Found this post while wandering on smartmobs.

Roland Piquepaille

Now, a new video conferencing interface, named Facetop, improves the level of collaboration by blending transparent images of the user filmed by a video camera on the computer display. This results in a 'ghost' image of the user on the screen. When he points at something, "his video reflection appears to touch objects on the screen." The computer scientists also developed a two-user version in which the 'ghost' images of the two users appear side by side. Both can alternatively take control of the desktop, again allowing a better collaboration.

It looks like a very interesting way to apply videoconferencing techniques to enable (or at least help) true distributed pair programming... also a good deal of natural interaction finds its way in it, since "ghost" images can actually interact with the desktop items, selecting links, opening applications, moving objects and so on... cool!
Last but not least... it works on Mac ;)

For the Italian speakers out there, Idearium (Italian eZine about interface design) just renewed its interface, and published a very interesting article about how the new interface was designed using Eye-tracking technologies.

UPDATE: Among the interesting new features, the site now has a blog area where authors are free to post their contributions.

Eye Tracking
Finally I'm back from yet another crazy weekend. On friday I arrived in Milan just tin time for a speedy sushi break and then a really interesting visit to SRLabs, the Eye Tracking company.
Leeander told me about his experience with SRLabs and the story so far, and I also had the chance to do some demos of the eye tracking technology they're using. Cool!
We used CodeWitch as test site, and so now I have one more confirmation that this layout is a mess :)
New look is coming soon, promise! (definition of "soon" is fuzzy enough :P ).
As a bonus, while there I had the chance to have a peek at some very funny movies involving Segwaying around Milan, that made the backstage of the latest Leeander's post (in Italian).

Natural Interaction News
It looks like the nice dinner we had a little while ago together with Ben, Lilia and Stefano created some kind of connection ;)
Here we have a really nice article on the Guardian about Natural Interaction projects developed by Alessandro Valli.

da BlogFest!
Last but not least, Saturday night I've been at this great BlogFest2004 in Milan.
My agenda was not unlike Luca's one, but sadly enough I had to leave very early, so all I was able to do was shacking hands and kissing a few blogfriends I recognized at once (believe me, it's not so easy to match face with name when you are in the middle of a crowd of 200 or so people you saw at least a dozen time on random facerolls ;) ), consuming my freedrink, answering a few question, and getting quite convinced that Gianluca definitely can organize a good party :D
Update: Gaspar has started a Flickr tag to collect blogfest pictures!
Also more clicks can be found on Clickati! and on Servi della Gleba

I’ve been trying for a week or so to figure out what flickr is. I mean I know it’s a photo sharing site, but what makes it so damn interesting? Then, last night, I finally figured it out: flickr is a MMORPG.

It presents a primary “plot” (upload photos and look at other people’s photos). This backbone gives users an immediate sense of the “story” of the site. But this central narrative exists in a space which allows for relatively freeform interaction, and the UI also helps nudge users off the main path with teasers like “Do you have a Cameraphone? Learn how to send photos to Flickr.” Like a video game, there’s a sense of progressive disclosure.

The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network (PLAN) is holding a two day workshop at the ICA ( Institute of Contemporary Arts) on Tuesday 1st and Wednesday 2nd February 2005.

From the official announcement

The event launches a new international network (PLAN), bringing together artists, activists, hardware hackers, bloggers, game programmers, free network builders, semantic web philosophers, cartographers, economists, architects, and university and industry researchers.

Many many interesting speakers. Jo Walsh and Schuyler Erle among them :) I'll try to be there at least on wednesday. If you feel like having a beer together, sign on the wiki :)

Regine reports about this desk, merged with an answering machine.

When a message is left, a box representing that message slowly rises from the desk. The higher it rises, the longer the message. So when you return home, you know how many messages are waiting for you. To hear one, open the box's lid. Pushing that box back down into the desk deletes the message.

Cool, ain't it?

Now the question is, from an interaction point of view how much “natural” can this be considered? Starting from the consideration that answering machines are something we are already used to. Is there a point in re-creating a pardigm when one has already been assimilated by at least one generation of users?

Anyway, I want one of these @ home. Now.

P.S.: this was the last of a series of article covering the Strangely Familiar, Unusual Objects for Everyday Life exhibit in Turin, where the first year students of the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea had to come with prototypes of devices that rethink everyday digital devices so as to provide more meaningful and poetic interactions.
All of the devices are interesting, but the Message Table was the only one to give me this sensation of redesigning a paradigm of use from scratch.

Even if you're not an expert in eye tracking, the results of this research about hot-spots in google interface published by Enquiro shouldn't surprise you too much:
User fixations (where the eye “stops”, thus acquiring data) concentrate in a triangle shaped area at the top left of the data portion of the screen, thus including top sponsored ads and the first few positions of the organic results.
The other noteworthy thing is that sidebar sponsored links get very little attention (so mind that if you are planning an ad campaign), while the article doesn't say anything about scrolling. One of my ideas is that is better to be 9th or 10th than being 6th on a result page. That's because on google you have to scroll to the bottom of the page in order to go to the “next page”, or just to see how long the gooooogle is (just to quote Donald Norman once more), and being 9th or 10th will position you very close to bottom page commands.
Oh, and I like this quote:

Clicks happen pretty quickly. It just shows that search marketing is a real estate game. It’s all about location, location, location.

Thanks Onino for the link.

A while ago Leeander posted an article in Italian about natural interfaces. It really hit me, and in my little effort of bringing quality Italian discussions to the international blogosphere, I offered to translate that article in English. At last, a few days ago I eventually made it, and now it is available on leeander's blog. If you're interested in topics like Interaction Design, Natural Interfaces, or even Apple, that's a must read. No excuses ;)

Something new coming on the front of Interaction Design from the video game industry: The Act by Cecropia is a coin-op "filmgame" about emotion, controlled by a single knob.
I really like the idea of an input detaching from the usual "puppet" metaphore (go here, go there, do this and that); it's also quite a natural approach, in the sense we are used to the gauge metaphor in many daily situations (vary the light, regulate tap water flow, tighten or loose screws).

Players have to help Edgar to get Sylvia's attention and persuade her to dance with him. By turning the knob, you control how direct Edgar's approach is. Go too far, and Edgar will pounce on Sylvia, causing her to walk off in disgust. Be too timid, and Sylvia gets bored and leaves. Use a delicate touch, and she responds well. Since time keeps moving forward, it requires a good sense of control and timing.

Good good programmer, here's your jelly-bean!

One short paper featured an edible positive-feedback user interface for programmers. Dan Maynes-Aminzade of the MIT Media Lab constructed a debugging interface that monitored malloc, realloc, and free calls in running threads. When memory was malloced, a jelly bean was dispensed into a tall, sealed transparent tube. When freed, the jelly beans fell into bowls, to be consumed by the hungry debuggers.

Maynes-Aminzade's equipment provided a tangible depiction of memory allocation and potential leaks in a program, with effects beyond a simple visual display. The temptation of those jellybeans also encouraged programmers to release all their memory as soon as possible. On the other hand, it might be that greedy programmers ended up writing equally memory-greedy programs just to get hold of more beans. And what of the impact of gourmet jelly beans? Or the possibilities of using cake in a similar construction? Clearly, more research is needed.

Do you know Kung-Foo? Show me!

A few days ago I was posting about the new Heineken campagin that makes use of op3 technology for machine-readable codes .

Today I read on we-make-money-not-art, of this new technology based on color codes:

While Europe and the US are still wondering about QR codes, those square-like “barcodes” that contains the URL of a website, ColorZip has developed ColorCode to allow mobile phone users to download anything, from text to music, to video, to drinks in vending machines

ColorCode are apparently a success in South Korea, and are about to be introduced in Japan. May I just say that this type of codes is, well, not really the top in aesthethics (to say the least)?

Ok ok, just the usual Italian stylish though, I'll shut up :) Anyway, I reckon the opportunities this kind of technologies (ColorCodes, shotcode, even QR) are really something we'll have to cope with in a little time:
with camera cellphones being more and more widespread, chances are we'll soon be able to order pizza or sushi through a quick “click” at the menu, and pay directly through the phone.

While Amazon is testing a new interface, apparently leaving their usual "flat" layout, trend in blogland is to go for simplicity at all costs.
Tom Coates of plasticbag fame worte a few weeks ago about his redesign, while Ben Hammersley has just reset his Dangerous Precedent (to the point there's no "archive browser" tool around).

Big thing, trackback is gone in both of them... killed, as they say, by spam. Everybody agrees that it's been instrumental in the building of the blogosphere, but the spamload appears to be simply not sustainable anymore.
The matter is that, at least for me, handling comment spam is much more of a burden than trackback's... so I'm quite worried that this course of action could lead to a downfall of comment system too. Well, actually worried is not the word. Curious. Excited. We are clearly close to some turn of the tide, and I can almost smell new (or old?) technology ride the new wave.
Are we going back to plain "output only" weblogs, and let technorati&Co. link tie the Conversation together for us?
Are we going to see more and more complex ways to fight spam?
Are we going to create new, undreamed of, ways of weaving a conversation?
Are we going to surrender all of this, and go back talking to people around tables in pubs?

Ajax applications feel more like desktop applications, except with the real-time internet data part that you get from being on a web page.

Pac-Man seems to be the favourite target for experimentations in new gaming concepts: after the live action PacManhattan (a large-scale urban game set in New York City and created by Dennis Crowley), and a few other variants, now Terranova reports this Human Pacman project, where

Players equipped with a wearable computer, headset and goggles can physically enter a real world game space by choosing to play the role of Pacman or one of the Ghosts.

The Terranova article ends with a couple of interesting guesses that made me smile:

Toru Iwatani turned his pizza thoughts into Pac-Man in the 1980... so that slates the trial run of augmented reality WoW for 2030 or so?  Any thoughts on how pervasive gaming relates to the MMORPG genre?  Is pervasive gaming techno-LARPing?

Well I think it could be much closer than that, and probably RFID+cellphones will make it even easier and less cumbersome than having to deal with cybergoggles.

A friend called up a few days ago asking me how to integrate livesearch (which I had more or less working here since December) in his own MovableType blog.
I answered "no problem, just let me organize the code". What a fool!
Remember: never answer "yes" before double-checking stuff, especially if that stuff is something you made for yourself.
By the way, this has been a great chance to rewrite the whole thing. And learn MT's PHP API while on the way.

You can test the result in the upper right box. If you type something and wait a few seconds, results for the search should start listing in a floating div.

The code and a (very) brief explanation are on the wiki.

Basically it uses MT's PHP API (and some standard tags too) to hook into the database (thus without the need to duplicate authentication info), select the active blog, retrieve the favourite archive type (for permalinks) and inject the query. Nothing too complex, but enough to taste a bit of this dynamic template thing and scare away the monsters that dwell in the darkness of ignorance (a poetic way to explain that things always look more complicated than they truly are).

So c'mon, please, have a try and let me know your thoughts.

Nicolas blogs about an HCI Lab (Stanford) research about how to discourage drivers from speeding. Early brainstorm resulted in some drawings.

Well, I never thought of it in these terms, but it makes sense that maybe the lack of realistic feedback such as vibrations and sounds is what made early videogamers want fastfastfast car.
Now that you can count on more realistic feedback, also videogame speeds are slowing down...
After all it's the same concept that makes jet's cloches turn harder and harder as speed grows: without this kind of feedback the pilot could instinctively try harsh maneuvers leading to disaster.

I was looking at Last.FM in search for some new music and find out that among the new features they added in the recent site facelift, every user now is entitled to a journal inside the site.
The interface is quite intuitive and greatly benefits from ajax technologies.
Basically the editor is just a simple markup, plain text editor with a button bar for the basic styles.
First eyecandy is the fact that buttons (say, Italics) open a drawer-like div where to insert the needed data (i.e. the text to be italicized).
Other nice ideas: there are shortcuts to create links to songs, tags (yes, Last.FM uses folksonomy to categorize music), artists and albums, and when a link is so created, the referenced object automagically appears on the side column. Kind of automatic bibliography.

Update: well actually I was forgetting the bad news... and it is that I couldn't find any feeds (RSS or whatever) visible on the site... what a pity!
Luckily enough, dear old lasttracklistened feeds are still accessible on the audioscrobbler site (so you can still see here or here what I'm listening to, if you care).
Strange choice, why allowing easy access to the playlists and not to the journals?

The guy with the kilt and curly hair is featuring a new look. On the web also (with design by Barry Frost).
Among the hotspots I spotted on the spot: black is the new black (and orange is the new black too); the schwag is gone (or hard to find) and so is the lazyweb link (wait, wait, I found it! It's on the bottom of the projects column!). Cuban Crafters are still there.

At first sight it's definitely much more rational / pro / thirdmilleniumreadyandohyeahIllkickyourass; especially the homepage with all thoes nifty books thumbnails on one side, active projects and blog sample.
Maybe I miss a little bit that vintage touch of the old one though... ;)

Yesterday night I was at this PizzaOnRails event here in London.
The place was a really cool loft in Covent Garden, and there were geeks and there were developers and there were angels and enterpreneurs and there was free pizza, of course.
Oh my, did it smell like 1999!
Not so 1999ish though, as most people was talking Rails.

The conversation actually was really good and let me eventually have a peek at the local curious/developer's community, which is bright as I expected but far smaller than I thought (well, of course not everybody was there... Matt, just to say one, where were you? ;) ), definitely I'll look forward for more follow-ups.

Anyway, on the (rail)way home my mind was quite boiling up so when I got to the keyboard I started writing the basics of a little game that has been etching in my mind for the last week or so. It's really nothing exceptional (yet), but thanks to a couple of lucky guesses and quite some great inspiration from congress, I was able to set up in a night a minimalistic mud full with user management, permissions, character creation, movement/transportation engine, irc-like communication, buy/sell system, reputation, wereable items... and hooks already there for more funky stuff, all in more or less 600 lines of code.
All of which is, I guess, quite cool for a guy like me who's not even a real programmer.

But. But there is no demo available of this version of the game (well, there is, actually ...ooops!), and you won't see any as, this morning, a brand new Rails was unleashed onto this world.
And as I was skimming through the list of new features I saw my little new toy crumble to dust and be rebuilt from its ashes at least a couple of time: polymorphic associations, and RJS (Javascript written in Ruby) really promise new elegant and quick ways to get things done.

And after all, that was just a first prototype and the trashcan is the proper resting place of a prototype. Nice side effects of rails, it doesn't make me feel bad with throwing working apps in the dustbin, even moreso when I spent just one night building them (and then I know I can reuse most of the "dust").

By the way, the place for game tinkering will be http://play.codewitch.org, see you there after the next night of crazy pizza powered railing.

When I rented this flat in London, I found this bookcase as part of its furnishing.

I have been thinking about it for a while: on one side I'm no special IKEA fan, essentially because, even if I recognize some nice designs there, I feel it's quite difficult to give character to a house fully built around lego-like, all-too recognizable items.
On the other side, I wasn't so comfortable with the idea of getting rid of a bonus piece of furniture, so I started considering a new way of employing it.
In the end, the solution was to use it as an "inspirational" display: 16 items as 16 moments for 16 concepts and ideas.
Ladies and gentleman, 16moments was born!

It's no rocket science and definitely is something you can DIY whenever you want, the only requirement is some well defined, polished and possibly isolated shelf or display. As for my 16moments, it's a 150x150, black, "16 boxes" frame, and is the only piece of furniture in a 4 meters wide wall. That is enough to catch my attention when I'm around.
As for the moments themselves, at any given time each space is dedicated to a concept or item I'm interested in (or obsessed by) at the moment, and will be used to keep me focused or to give my guests an idea "at a glance" of my current context. Much like a sidebar in a blog ;)
As direct consequences:
. It won't be always full (at the time of this writing only 5 spaces have been used).
. It won't stay the same for long (e.g. I hope the "currently reading" space will change quite often ;) ).

The idea I was pursuing here is moving away from the traditional idea of bookshelf, where you just store all the items or symbols that connects you to specific (hopefully good) moments / moods and keep just the ones essential for your "here and now", and only for the essential amount of time (then they can go back to ordinary bookshelves).
You can think of it as a fancy kind of whiteboard, where instead of drawing or writing notes and sketches, you put items (and maybe those same sketches, but nicely written on a cute and properly folded piece of paper).

Finally, as I mentioned above, 16moments also has a virtual counterpart in the blogosphere. This is open to anyone who's just curious to peek at my context or want to comment or contribute to it. You can also follow the tag 16moments on flickr or subscribe to the moments feed via feedburner.

As for your unspoken question: Yes, this is what happens when you spend too much time wondering about inspirational landscapes, kaizen and context catching :P

Ok, let's do a simple exercise.
First, watch this video:

Then, take your copy of Snow Crash and read over those parts talking about social interaction and the importance of facial mimic in the Metaverse.

Finally, go back to your desktop, fire up WoW or Second Life and start wondering...

the whole point here is about having main facial movements identified and thus easily codified and available for transmission over a narrow channel.
Using this data, it should be fairly easy to animate an avatar's head with expressions matching those of the user and:
1. minimum use of bandwidth
2. maximum integration with the virtual reality context - i.e. a user who's presenting herself through a giant rabbit avatar will still have a giant bunny head, only with a transposition of her own facial movements.

They're talking about blogjects. Objects that can tell a story. Awesome.

You know, it's been a while since I've seen this meme on Pasta and Vinegar (add it to your feeds, do it now), but haven't spent the necessary time to consider it seriously until now. Pity.

Nabaztags for instance are cute incarnation of shining musical (rather noisy at time) bunnies, but just consider how many wonderful recipes a chef's pan could teach you, or how many wonderful stories a motorbike could tell.

Definitely count me in at next LIFT :)

P.S.: I loved the idea of blogging pidgeon. Ya know, the blogosphere would be soooo more interesting if I could read some more pidgeon blogs. Would be interested in comparing a new-yorker pidgeon blog as compared as a venice based one :)

(simple actions * scale) ^ aggregation = network effects - Lee Bryant

Social affordance... You crazy smart guy.

This is something cool, believe me. Sadly I realized just now that I didn't blog about it before. I'm making a statement now of not keeping any more draft in Ecto, and to post everything no matter the stage of completion. At least I'll try.

Anyway, if you're in Milan just go go go go to Bicocca and try to get in the conference. Loads of cool people over there. And say hi to Leeander for me.

Oh, and you may end up seeing my face and Lee's own, if I can the video mounted in time :(
Yesssss we like to live on the edge ya know... Update: ok, this time was just too much of an edge... we got the video, but not in time and at at the proper quality/size to be transferred and broadcasted during Frontiers. Crash course in self-mastering iMovie has been great though. Now I know how to do smooth transitions... swwwooooosh! This is the stub of the video, will stay there as a memento mori, I think. Full (better encoded) version soon available here... stay tuned!

I'm at the Hummous Bros of Wardour street, where I finally uploaded Headshift video contribution to Frontiers06. Boys, this has been long. Now I know that making a video is something ;)

And, by the way, this hummous is just awesome!

P.S.: while I'm writing this youtube is still crunching the movie... let's cross our fingers...

So yesterday on saturday I went and saw Generation, the Summer Show of Royal College of Art.
Ok, if you want the prototype of events that I find absolutely mind blowing, this is the case: from interaction design to design products, architecture, printmaking, and many other fields all mixed in a nice venue and with the opportunity to talk to the (sometime a little tired, other times really fresh and excited) authors.
Just three projects among all:

Availabot
a.k.a. put a doll of your IM contacts on your (physical) desktop.

Design for the Computer Obsessive

Provocative, simple idea but oh so smart.

Make/Shift

It's just amazing: self-sustaining shelves, no need for screws, thought for those who move often... and I want one of those in my house!

If you're getting excited and want more, have a look at WMMA's coverage :)

I just received a notification from Stefano about the availability of a demo video of his newly born tabulaTouch project. As he puts it on his blog:

I am pleased to announce the birth of tabulaTouch, the multi-touch sensing platform for tabletop interaction i've been researching from the beginning of the year at Natural Interaction.
You may notice a similarity with Jeff Han's project that made the net go "wow" in march.
Actually, my research started in the second part of 2005 following an intuition on the FTIR principle applied in Lightable, a pure design project that had nothing to do with interaction. I was assembling the table while Han's paper came out, you know, ideas are in the air way before we catch them.

Congratulation Stefano, having seen this project through most of its stages (even if from some distance) gives me reason to be quite proud too!

Keep up the good work, please open up the API and give me some social extension now to play with ;)

You may have seen this video on you tube in the past monthes; it demoes the features of a really cool multi-touch screen by Jeff Han. Sadly enough, without any form of comment.
In this new(?) video, Jeff Han explains some of the potentials of his "interface free" creation.

C'mon Stefano, now it's your turn!

Today headbunny, our office nabaztag, started announcing time with unexpected new sentences with an hilarious voice.

A good way to make it more "friendly" and welcomed than a long-eared clock.

Things that can make you smile out of the blue: it happens when you browse through engadget and find a link to a interesting project about london, underground, music... "cool" you think, and then go to the desisgner's page and find... the face of Arianna, supersmartgirl from Italy currently spending her time between brixton, lse and california.

Ciao and good luck :)

Phipunk seems to have been the first. Tantek made it a trend. The idea is really simple: twitter is a dump for your everyminute snapshots right? Well, claim it on technorati :)

I think it makes perfectly sense, since even if nowadays everybody (me first) seems to be just on a twittering high and continously writing mostly nonsense kitten-food like sentences, chances are people will start soon taking advantage of this "distributed watercooler" and keeping track of references and conversation will be paramount.
Twitter gives the affordance of a shared background noise, something similar to what we used to do back in the days (and quite often I still do) by keeping a window open on a popular IRC channel, just to keep in touch with the meme of the moment.

Also on this topic, here is a highly recommended post by Cathy Sierra on twitter, continuous partial attention and Flow.