ConnectingTheDots

Fabricating Ourselves

When 3D printing meets Kinect meets humans' love for Polaroid portraits, we witness how Insta-selves could be a future common crowdpleaser.

With custom software developed using openKinect and openFrameworks, Be Your Own Souvenir by Blablablab let people pose and generate action-figures of themselves.  Three kinect sensors captured 360 degree scans of each person.  Meshlab used the combined input pointclouds to create a Poisson reconstruction (cleaned via Blender and Skeinforge) before sent to print. 

Also using Kinect, the Fabricate Yourself project by Karl D.D. Willis captured peoples' forms and turned them into peices of a giant jigsaw puzzle (related paper on interactive fabrication).  

With the price point of 3D printers going down, imagine we'll be seeing more varients on these tangible representations of self.  To my friends designing that mega candy store, I think 3D printing of visitors into candy statues would be a hit. 

Tableau: Wanting Digital to Be Physical (and Rustically Hip)

Tableau is a nightstand that bridges the physical and digital.  It drops photos it sees from its Twitter feed into its drawer for its owner. Similarly, images placed in its drawer are posted to its Twitter (scanner/printer discreetly inside).

Tableau's maker, John Krestner, calls it an anti-computer experience. Seems like many people and projects are craving rustic wood and the physical charm of pre-internet days. (Not so oddly mirroring the vintage aesthetic currently trendy in brooklyn bars). Phtopl.us is another tangible interface project that favors physical photos and wooden devices.  The Photo Plus machine plays back digital audio stories about physical photos (simply tagged using unique QR codes to recognize each photo). 

Jumping back to Krestner, he may have a market when he commercializes some of his supermachanical projects.  Made of leather rather than wood, check out his beautiful Proverbial Wallets that provide tactile feedback on our electronic money transaction and balances.

Do Not Be Programmed

Two recent books You Are Not A Gadget and Program or Be Programmed raise a common call to action: we must not be complacent about who designs and how they design technology experiences. Lanier (among other points) cautions about lock-in and encourages designers to create novel alternatives, not just mash-ups or pulls from Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Rushkoff points to the few who can actually respond to Lanier's challenge, drawing a contrast to spoken and written languages like English -- for the first time the majority does not know how to write programming, they can only read/listen. 

Agreeing with many of those ideas, I'm also optimistic after attending events like last night's NYTech Meetup.  Curated by Evan Korth, the theme was about building an inventive tech community, and specifically how to deepen ties to academia (something I've recently been working towards), where there is some pure space for experimentation.  Some projects that caught my eye (coming from both young hackers as well as professors) offer different interfaces and ways of architecting information:  

Zooburst! (NYU): augmented reality pop-up books

The Ghost (NYU): dynamic user-programmable MIDI controller in guitar form

Touch Tone Tanks (Brown): multi-player game projected onto walls that uses conference number and mobile phones as controllers to move and shoot

WordsEye (Columbia): text to 3D image storytelling tool

SMS AppStore for the developing world (NYU): creating 140 byte constrained apps, for medical records and other needs, servicing low-end mobile devices

Squidball (NYU): motion capture games for crowds

Not showcased last night, but circling back to the topic of technological progress, codecomputerlove made this "pong game" awhile back, half in html5 and half in Flash, which visualizes that debate in a very literal way. 

Agreed: The World is Full of Interesting Things

For some inspiration,Tom Uglow has a compilation of creativity.

100 + examples of projects that pushed at evolving audio, visuals, physicality, and more. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One link to many links through his google doc the creative internet

 

iPad 3D Light Forms

The folks at BERG and Dentsu are exploring screening surfaces and playing with the popular 'glowing rectangles' that inhabit our world. They invented a new photographic/stop-animation technique for making media.  Software models of 3-dimensional typography, objects and animations are created and cross sections of the models are rendered like a virtual CAT scan to create a series of sliced outlines.  Those are played back as movies on the surface of an iPad and extrude 3-d light forms as the iPad moves through space.  That movement is recorded through long exposures (multiple exposures in composite to create a film like the one above). More on the method here. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.) 

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. 

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. 

Smart Grid Augmented Reality

Still feeling the novelty value, finally printed out the GE Solar Panel Marker and tilted around a mini hologram of big technology in my hands.  The marker once pointed at a webcam unfolds a green scene of wind turbines or solar panels.  Limited interactivity beyond viewing at different angles (my blowing didn't succeed in triggering much wind power).  Even more fun is watching the reactions of others trying it.  For the extra curious, they share the FLARTtoolkit source code.

A few other companies have also used webcam based AR in their ads, like the Mini Cabrio (black and white magazine ad displaying a 3D model car).

 

Quest to Learn Opens: Games-based School

Helping to spread the word about a project I've been involved with, Quest to Learn. 

Inspired by the media-rich environment that kids are now engaged with outside of school (according to a recent Pew report 97% of teens now play digital games) and the underlying design principles of games, the school was created to reimagine and foster the type of learning that is possible today.

It's not a school where kids will sit around playing commercial videogames, rather its a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences.  A key focus is on the ability of games and other forms of digital media to model the complexity and promise of "systems" - the type of thinking skills now required to succeed in today's global environment.  Read this "Day in the Life" of a student narrative and visit Quest's website for a more complete picture.

The school is currently looking for both teachers and students (in New York).

Net-Map: The Process of Visualizing

Especially for those with 100s or 1000s of "friends", it can be challenging to know your network.  Various visualization tools have been created to help people keep track of their universes: from Vizster (interactive sociogram for exploring the community structure of sites like friendster), to more recent Fidg't (using Flickr and LastFM tags as "magnets" to similar members), and the myriad Twitter visualization tools (exploring networks by tweet geography, topic, volume, etc). 

More often than not, these digital visualizations are ready-made by developers or graphic designers; users view or play with automatically generated mappings of their network.

Net-map is a low-tech tool that focuses less on the end product and moreso on the process of creating the nodes and links of influence.  The interview-based social mapping tool has been used in rural communities of Ghana and Chile to help people understand, discuss, and improve situations with multiple-influencers (netmaptoolbox process photostream).