ConnectingTheDots

Globe Genie and Virtual Travel

Near the top of my wish list of devices that I want someone to invent soon is the human transport beam.  As a taste of how awesome that could be, Globe Genie is a simple virtual version.  Hitting a Shuffle button moves you to a different Google Street View around the world.  The shuffle doesn't favor big city tourist destinations, often landing on mundane open roads and suburbs.  On the opposite end of the travel speed spectrum, this Google Map road trip was another experiment in virtual travel (they inched along roads across states by pressing the arrow key forward).  Both projects spark thoughts about the extent and limits of our virtually travelable world (e.g. sight-seeing temporal moments as current) and the regions still unaccessible, even with virtual transport beams. 

Reshaping the World: Shaun White Skateboarding Game

As it does every year, this year's games for change festival left me reinvigorated and eager to build out ideas.  "Good" design is a constant theme for this field that's faced with creating appropriately engaging experiences about tough topics, often with small budgets.  Embracing narrative techniques from other media and creating ambiguity + meaningful choice was advice echoed by many designers. 

Among the many thoughts I'm still mentally digesting is the question of when its effective to design social impact games that are not literal.  Commonly, a game about the environment has players interacting with digital assets that simulate and look like the environment; a game about global conflict puts players in the shoes of archetype political sides.  When is it more compelling to play with the underlying dynamic (e.g. resource management) in a different way? 

With that train of thought, the recent Ubisoft Shaun White Skateboarding game caught my eye (nice write up over at Kotaku). The game world starts in a city controlled by the "Minestry", everything safely regulated, no fun weirdness (the world skaters see and want to change).  In this generic world, by skateboarding the players can express themselves, influence, and physically reshape the world around them.  360 flips and other tricks make stores more colorful, people lose their suits, rails connect to reach rooftops, chunks of the street transform into bowls.  By remolding the world into a skatepark, players eventually overthrow the MInistry.  Subbing out skateboards, players discover their influence tool, test it to greater degrees of sophistication, and see their ability to produce a different world.  

Punk'd Augmented

While hunting for a popsicle in Central Park this balmy Saturday, I encountered some bewildered tourists intrigued but confused by this  .  Ironically, it was part of a mobile interactive boardgame  meant to raise awareness and engagement with Central Park.  Ended up verbally explaining the concept of QR codes, rather then demonstrating, as for some reason my reader wasn't registering the code.  (My favorite exploration/"deep mapping" project remains one of the pioneers Yellow Arrow.)  

Confusion isn't likely a design intention of the Central Park game's creators, however confusion (leading to self-examination) is the primary objective of an augmented reality PSA (almost like a technology enhanced Punk'd/Candid Camera) in the Netherlands.  Using an interactive billboard to augment a live, crowded street curb with a violent incident, onlookers see a "mirror" of their own reactions to a violent act being committed in front of them and gawking vs. action to help the victims. 

Augmented Realities: Eyewriter

DIY interfaces like the Minority Report mimicking MIT Glove Mouse are fun, but projects like the Eyewriter are truly augmenting peoples' realities.  The Eyewriter is a low-cost eye tracking apparatus (glasses + led + camera) and custom software (open frameworks sourcecode) that empowers people suffering from paralysis to have an expressive outlet, to draw using only their eyes. 

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Re-interpreting Code: Twitter to Embroider & Html to Create Music

  Code is often invisible and (perhaps with the exception of programmers) rarely perceived as beautiful.  Pa++ern and Codeorgan create playful interactions with code, and remind us that codes are human constructed symbol systems that can be re-purposed and evolve over time.  Pa++ern is a programming language for embroidery that can be sent over Twitter.  The code is purposely short, an entire program can fit in the 140 character limit of Twitter.  Moreover, aside from the embroidery generated, the language is designed to make the appearance of the program itself looked pleasing.  On the audio end of things, codeorgan is a Flash app that turns any web page into music. An algorithm translates the text within a URL page into a musical composition.  All my websites sound different; not sure how to interpret that.  

Inspired by our Social, Emotional Web

I have a minor graphic novel addiction.  Aside from a growing bookshelf, a growing amount of minutes are being sucked into illustration blogs.  The increasingly social and emotional public trails left on the web have been a source of creative inspiration for a number of artists -- from lovely visual interpretations of missed connections posts to a museum of humorous takes on celebrity twitters.  It was also on Twitter that a loose collection of Brits with mutual love for the Magnetic Fields decided to add to the images out there by illustrating all 69 love songs.

Chatfe: Equalizing the Chance for Interest Based Conversation?

Is it more awesome to be a guy or a girl online?  If ideal experience means ease of attracting strangers into conversation, the above graphs (left = guy, right = girl) of a small experiment on Skype suggests that I should be happy I'm female.  But if ideal experience means connecting with someone new for a substantive conversation, maybe its not so great for either (notably most of the dots on the right graph are from the opposite sex). 

Last night, the guys who started Chatfe opened with that idea as they talked about what influenced their user interface design.  Aiming almost to be "the opposite of a social network", the platform serendipitously matches like-minded individuals for conversations.  Instead of making a profile pretty, playing the numbers game of building your network, and updating one-liners, the focus is on adding topics to conversation queues and indicating windows of available talk time.  If two users' topics and time match, after checking that each side is indeed human, the system calls both party's phones to have the conversation.  The voice-centric design (aside from mitigating potential creepy behavior) experiments with the hypothesis that the nature of the conversations will be different from those mediated by text.  Chatfe is in Beta, so whether/how their bar chart will look different from the ones above will soon get a chance to be tested.

Helping Haiti: Missing Persons Aggregator

With the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti blanketing the news waves, everyday citizens are wondering how they can help.  Governments are sending money and troops; and coders that care are rising just as quickly to direct action.  Although not yet styled, a few of my friends are presently building a site for people to post and find Haitian missing persons information.  They're now focusing on scrapers for data on other sites to centralize as much as possible.  It will hopefully be updated every 10-15 minutes.

Be Extraordinary

The new year has me cleaning out my cluttered iPhone of underused apps.  One of my favorites from 2009 that will remain on screen 1 is The Extraordinaries.   Fusing crowdsourcing with volunteering and mobile life, the app (and website) enables people to easily take on miny missions for organizations, causes, and people they care about helping in their spare time.  Ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes, while traveling or waiting in line, users can complete concrete micro-tasks like tagging a museum's digital archive.  35K+ micro-tasks have been completed for 50 organizations.  Most are image tagging, mapping, or photo collecting related, but imagine folks will continue to explore other creative customized uses.

Mixed Reality Golf: Enhancing Big Urban Games with Mobile Devices

Dropped in for playing/testing of a new iPhone game at Conflux this weekend. Created by co-founders of Come Out and Play, Gigaputt turned the East Village into our virtual golf course.  Laid over real-world maps, avenues were transformed into fairways as we picked out our clubs, followed our wayward balls, and raced to complete holes.  While I've been seeing many location-based apps in development, the type of interaction designed is typically still pretty solitary: announcing "hey i'm here", rating a venue as liked or disliked, or tagging with a personal photo.  As a multi-player game, Gigaputt engaged us with changing our surroundings and reacting to each other (not to mention the confused strangers on the street).  It was also nice not carrying around heavy golf clubs, and the hint of that matrix-like downloadable supplement brings ideas for other kinds of possibilities.    

While not networked, on the theme of augmenting physical surfaces with digital info, recent demos like Pattie Maes' (MIT Media Lab Fluid Interface Group) talk at TED on sixthsense, again points to a near future of designing experiences that go beyond twitter-like data seeding and that moves towards enabling behaviors with data as the enhancer and natural biproduct.  (A few more fun interfaces to browse like an interactive mirror and public lasergames here.) 

Playing with the Google Logo

Since its simple font and primary color days, Google's logo now experiences regular visual morphs.  This playfulness creates attention and conversation around what folks probably don't normally actively discuss, company logos.   Notably, for those following the recent series of mysteries surrounding abducted Ls and Os, the plot has now been revealed (a birthday tribute to H.G. Wells).  

Netflix Challenge Prize vs. Human Computational Games to Improve Relevance

 The nail biting "end" to the epic Netflix Challenge has been widely covered over the last few days. Cited as an example of prize economics and the crowdsourcing of innovation, the contest drew over 50,000 contestants.  Catching particular attention was the characteristics of the top teams and how they were formed (BellKor--a cross-company, international group of statisticians, machine learning experts, and computer engineers--and the Ensemble--a last minute merger of other former teams). Similar to the instances of collective intelligence that have occured in pop culture (e.g. highlighted in Convergence Culture with fans of Survivor), communities formed to closely collaborate on Netflix's complicated and apparently tantalizing problem. 

The Netflix Challenge had a big prize, clear question, and clear end goal for contestants.  In contrast, human computational games usually have small incentives and indirect end goals, but have also been applied to improve the search for relevance.  One of the first popular human computational game was the ESP game, where people tackled image recognition.  Leveraging the same premise (the >200m hours/day spent on games could be used to solve tricky problems), Microsoft Research wondered how a game could be used to answer the question: "Given a web page, what queries will effectively find this web page?" 

What they came up with was Page Hunt.  Players are shown a random web page, and must guess the query that would find the page in the top few results on a search engine (LIve Search).  If their query word(s) ran and matched the top URL results, players got points.  Microsoft in turn got data elicited from players, providing metadata to improve algorithms for pages, for query alterations/refinement, and for identifying ranking issues. 

For example, using bixtext matching to learn from their game data, they found top scoring query alterations (iht=International Herald Tribune, jlo=Jennifer Lopex, capital city airport = Kentucky Airport, etc).  Another resulting finding was that as the length of URL(in characters) increases, the page becomes harder to find.  

The Netflix Challenge attracted brainiacs to persist for nearly three years.  As perhaps a hint that shorter, smaller incentives can also spur productive mass activity, Page Hunt was fun enough (designed with time limitations, points + bonus points, leaderboard, and taboo queries/constraints) that 47% of sessions were from people who played twice or more, and 16% from those who played five times or more.  A research paper on that experiment to use games to improve search here. 

Cell Phone Magic

Magicians are exploring a new prop, cell phones.  In single, unedited phone cam shots, perceptions are foiled with ironically low-tech tactics.  One popular trick has been the disappearing Samsung HD phone ad challenge with associated reveal.  One man has branded himself as a virtual magician and recently taken more hi-tech twists. His deft card tricks are enhanced by augmented reality (supported largely by free tools).  For me, there is something less mysterious about the technology enhanced part.  As with most 2.0 things, this 2.0 magician also wants to know what viewers think.  

Akoha: Seeding Kindness with Social Games

When I first heard about Akoha, I loved the idea.  I eagerly signed up to be a Beta tester and was excited when my set of mission cards arrived in the mail.  Still love the idea, but have been thinking about why instead of being part of the leaderboard, I've only played one card. 

Akoha is a MMP, mixed reality game.  The game centers around accumulating Karma points via real world missions of kindness (for example +125 for "Thank Someone", +100 for "Make Someone Smile", +200 for "Donate an Hour of Your Time") linked to coded cards.  This player probably reflects the ideal user experience and impact Akoha was aiming for.  

What made the game sticky and immersive for her, but not for me?   The primary adjective Akoha uses to describe its game is "social."  Theres two key dimensions to that: the social behaviors required to play the game and the social network of "friends" players accumulate during gameplay.  For me, that second aspect of social was too challenging to help motivate the first.  I felt like a lone player in the social game.  While there were many players in Canada, there were few players in New York.  To play I had to recruit friends or strangers (most missions required physical proximity to complete) - which is also part of the beauty in seeding kindness.  However, when "the work" of finding playmates > the reward of playing it's more difficult to get to the sweet spot (critical mass of friends and missions played to feel the impact, the addictive part of play). 

Since then Akoha has added a dynamic Community Map showing where players and missions are happening.  It's still a little clunky (requires several zoom-ins to find specific locations of interest) and could be more efficient in visualizing search interests, but tools like it are a step towards creating a means to finding friends, feeling connected to the larger community, and seeing impact.  (Looking at other social, location-oriented games like foursquare, one could also imagine interesting ways an Akoha mobile app could encourage play.)

The reward and reputation system also impacts stickyness -- motivates embedding play into everyday social experiences vs. singular novelty play moments (especially for those with busy lives).  What do "Karma points" mean to players?  Is simply accumulating "Karma points" compelling?  Found this interesting thread of user feedback about wanting more of an addictive factor.  The users had quite a few good design suggestions (e.g. adding levels, mastery identities, mission combos, time-based rewards, currency that tied to real world donations).

If the thousands of cards played are any hint, I do think games like Akoha have huge potential.  Influencing behaviors and tapping beyond existing social networks are powerful dynamics, especially for improving global causes.  Bridging the digital and "real" world is also a challenge we are just beginning to tackle.  All said, I'll be staying in the Akoha game and learning from how well people play it forward. 

Making Twitter Meaningful

The viral Twouble with Twitters has gotten some acknowledging laughs.  Funny men Jon Stewart and Colbert have also recently joked about the seemingly useless time suck and stream of information.  But as Twitter grows, so has the number of people experimenting with how to build on top of the simple interface -- creating applications to help filter and facilitate community meaning making. 

For me, some of the more interesting uses of Twitter have been for friend/crowd-sourcing human answers, rapid reporting around an event/emergency, and directing attention towards causes.   Squidoo recently release TwttrStrm to help folks gather answers to one spot.  An example of what that might look like is the summary of Hacking Education Twitters (pulling hashtag #HackEdu).  Focusing on a particular niche, ExecTweets is a new site aggregating tweets from business executives.  And more like a general Twitter search engine, Tweefind pulls tweets about certain keywords according to popularity rank (akin to Google page rank).

Will also be interesting to watch as folks get more creative about designing a "need to follow." In LA, Kogi, a hybrid Korean BBQ/Taco truck, has put a twist to its Twittering.  If you want their taco, to find the van you must follow their Twitter.