March 2006 - Page 2 of 2 - Near Future Laboratory

Armitage On Controllers — Are These Controllers What We Want To Inform Game Design? Huh?

Tom Armitage gave a great talk this morning at Etech titled “Is Controller Design Killing Creativity.”

I loved his concluding take-away:

Are these controllers what we want to represent videogames?

Why do I blog this There were some remarkable insights in this explication of the relationship between the input device design and the games they control. I like this stuff. It’s fun to think about the conditions of possibility for a video game design based on the game controller. It’s really a design constraint. Why is that the case? I mean, I know why â€” but how can the controller not be a critical path in this sense?

Etech Presentation

So, when I first tapped this into Ecto a few days ago, I had just given my talk at O’Reilly Etech on Pervasive Electronic Games. I was burning a few minutes before the EFF presentation and jammed it in, went to upload a PDF of my slides and I couldn’t create a new directory on my server. I tailed /var/log/messages and saw a bunch of disk errors. Erra.. Long story, short ext3 was buoyant enough to keep enough integrity, more-or-less, to keep me humming long enough to do a fresh backup, but I basically spent two days rebuilding my system. Horrid. It’s behind me, now.

(Thank you Timo for the use of a few of your lovely photos!)

The final title that I tossed together shortly before the talk was Pervasive Electronic Games: Theory Objects For Social Play.

Terribly fun presentation to give, if a bit unnerving given the brains in the audience. My main point was to figure out how to describe pervasive games as a way of creating, understanding and researching social interactions and the relationship between we and the worlds we inhabit.

What was I trying to say?

* Games are theory objects that can reveal and shape human interaction rituals

* Games can be an approach to research as a way to understand and create new kinds of social practices

* Games can become ways to knit together, create and play with social formations

* Games are (also) about reworking our expectations about social behavior and conformity

* Games can be casual play

* Games do not have to emphasize complicated “cool”, but ultimately illegible technologies

* Consider it a game design challenge to work below normative, existing technology “high-bars”

* Seamfulness â€” Matthew Chalmers, et. al.’s approach to confronting the pot-hole strewn mobile networks â€” is the design approach to consider creating pervasive networked experiences. The frustration induced by but one network failure is enough to sully even the most beautiful game.

* Get us to look at the â€œrealâ€ inhabited world in new ways

* New perspectives lead to new considerations as to what goes on in the world and how
we can make the world more habitable and sustainable.

Demo
I demo’d Clckr!..and it worked for a bit, then blew up because I’ve never tried it with more than 2 people at once. But, it worked for a minute, despite the shoddy network at the conference. And when 30 people dialed in, it kinda balked. Given that I haven’t provisioned the tech for more than a few people, that’s actually encouraging!

Technorati Tags: etech06

Internet of Sticks — Now There's No Excuse Not To Get Your Spime On!

Fabien just IM’d in this bit of codeable candy â€” the TrackStick. What is it? It’s a stick that knows where it is. It has some Spimey characteristics — it tracks where it goes, and it remembers where it’s been. That’s pretty much it. The Track Stick records its own location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude at preset intervals. With over 1Mb of memory, it can store months of travel information. All recorded history can be outputted in a variety of, you know â€” quasi-open formats like RTF, XML, HTML and the Google mostly closed format KML.

The Track Stick will work anywhere on the planet Earth. Using the latest in GPS mapping technologies, your exact location can be shown on graphical maps and 3D satellite images.

The Track Stick’s micro computer contains special mathematical algorithms, that can calculate how long you have been indoors. While visiting family, friends or even shopping, the Track Stick can accurately time and map each and every place you have been.

Objects That Blog Usage Scenario â€” No. 1 (Making Things Legible)

I have been pondering with Nicolas and others a series of usage scenarios for Things (networked objects) that could make the aggregate effects of themselves legible through the great disseminator â€” the Internet. That is, turning things that are invisible and perhaps incomprehensible into the visible and semantically impactful. Since one of my set of stakes in this whole topic is finding design and engineering strategies for encouraging the creation of more sustainable and habitable worlds, I have been focusing on environmental topics to work through some possible scenarios, while also using that topic as a way to become more articulate about how precisely Things (networked objects) and objects that blog might participate in the social web.

Right now, being a slightly reluctant Los Angeles resident, I have focused on these millions of tons of gasoline chugging and toxin exhausting vehicles that race around on highways and streets. You can’t escape them, and you’d be hard pressed to escape participating directly by bringing your own hunk of steel into the mix. It’s so plainly insane. Xeni Jardin helped me find the lynchpin in my early reluctance to buy a car â€” she said look at it as having an extra room in your house. I screwed my face trying to imagine what extra room I would want, decided it was a laboratory and the decision became a little more palatable.

My car is my laboratory â€” what is my current experiment?

The experiment now is to think of the vehicle as a miniscule sensor node â€” like a small speck of “smart dust” that travels down certain predictable routes, disseminating data about where it is, where it has been, how much fuel it has consumed, estimates of how many kilos rubber dust and carbon monoxide and everything else are floating around out there to be breathed.

But not just for my car. For very, very many cars. The “results” of the experiment would be real-time macro-scale RSS content feeds with gdlib generated graphics charts and structured data that can be feed into lovely and semantically impactful Processing and Flash renderings, etc.

The vehicle blog is what it would be. Or the Interstate 405 blog. You could subscribe to a feed and see the aggregate accumulation of this data. It would all be public with identifying traces scrubbed. Or perhaps not â€” I’d like to see what UPS/FedEx/CSX/USPS â€” all the big trucking fleets â€” contribute to this mix. It’s not at all about placing individual blame, but about recognizing the cost of what appears to be “clean” Web 2.0 transcations. Every add-to-cart at Amazon has a cost that exceeds the value of Amazon Prime (I’m a member) I like the no-brainer transaction of Amazon Prime that allows the impulse book buy usage scenario: Oh â€” I “need” that book right away! Add to cart, complete transaction, done. I pay only for the book â€” no shipping charges! Who wouldn’t? Or..who would do that so freely when you can actually see the accumulated environmental cost of shipping three separate packages each with one impulse-purchased book, rather than one package of several books ordered once every two or three weeks.

So we could see how much fuel is consumed and how many thousands of kilos of pollutants are wafted into the air and slide down into the acquifer every minute.

Is this a stretch of the imagination in terms of actually executing it? I mean, think of the cost of kitting out even 100 cars to do such an experiment? Forget it. Great sentiment, but â€” really, this would be hard to do.

Not really.

Several months ago I agreed to participate in some kind of experiment my car insurer was running. They had some operation ship me a device called “Trip Sense.” It plugs into the data port under the steering wheel and just sits there. It’ll sit there for months. It’s accumulating data about my driving. (I’m hoping they cut me a break on my insurance, frankly. I drive very little compared to the typical driver pretty much anywhere â€” 10k miles and I’ve had the car for 17 months. I’m the “nice old lady from Pasadena, only I’m not old, nor a lady and live in Venice.)

[wikilike_img src=http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/images/Main-GPS-EM401.jpg|align=thumb tleft|width=265|caption=The EM-401 GPS module from USGlobalSat based on the SiRF II chipset with built-in antenna. Tracks up to 12 satellites with superior reception in urban environments. Includes one 1.75” interface cable. $71.95 at Sparkfun Electronics|url=http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=575]

[wikilike_img src=http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/images/Main-GM862-Python.jpg|align=thumb tright|width=260|caption=This is the recently released Python programmable GM862 module from Telit. Now you can harness all the power of the GM862 without the need for an external microcontroller. Simple Python programs can be loaded onto the GM862 controlling the GPIOs and issuing global cellular commands. $119.95 at Sparkfun Electronics|url=http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=279]

It would be trivial to have these little rigs kitted out with a GPS module and GSM telecoms device and it would turn the car into just one of the Blogjects described above.

DIY Blogject that matters.

Why do I blog this?Backfilling the project catalog of impactful objects that blog.

Technorati Tags: blogjects

Mobile Phone Usage Idiom — No. 2

I didn’t think I could get two of these in under 24 hours â€” and lead to them from the same colleague, but Francois diligently commented on the Flickr page from one of the images for Idiom No. 1 with another design challenge.

Francois points out that he uses a piece of transparent tape on the back of the business card from the operation that he gets SIM cards from to keep his quiver of SIM cards â€” handy? un-lost? clean and un-bent, un-folded, un-mutilated?

Who’s got the mobile phone SIM card version of the bandolier?

Whly do I blog this? The mobile phone, oftentimes, has this disconnect from the practice of communicating while mobile. That is, some designs for mobile phones assume a kind of practice that is about telephony rather than mobile communication. Some designs are great, others are awful. And it’s not just the user-interface, but also a consideration as to what people do with their phones. I’m not flash-banging all phones â€” just pointing out the wonderful possibilities for design based on close consideration of what people do with their devices. In other words, given the chance, I’d love to do what Jan Chipchase does, only I’d be lucky to be half as good as he.

Mobile Phone Usage Idiom — No. 1

Francois is just freshly back from a trip to India to kick it with that sub-continents introduction of the Aspen Institute â€” I guess they’re franchising or something.

He recounted (and performed, as evidenced in the photo above!) a parenthetical story that just won’t stop knocking around in my head. In areas where owning a cell phone is not routine â€” for economic reasons, predominantly â€” it is not uncommon for a stranger to ask another stranger to borrow their handset to make a call. This happened to Francois on a trip somewhere and he, being a nice guy, agreed and handed over his phone. Only he thought this stranger was going to just go ahead and make a call. Instead the stranger dismantled Francois’ phone â€” removed the back, spilled the battery out and popped out the SIM card and then popped his own SIM card in there, reassembled the phone and made a bunch of calls in rapid succession, hanging up on each one after the first ring or two.

Two things are going on here.

First, this whole practice of doing a kind of semaphore call to get someone to call you back. That’s interesting â€” I’m not sure precisely what’s going on here. Maybe the code is to get the (mobile) person to call you back on a predetermined fixed line. Otherwise, it seems a burden to the person who loaned the phone out â€” what? they’re going to wait while you receive a bunch of calls and chit chat?

Second, while we know well that SIM cards are like personal data bases â€” names, symbols, numbers, etc â€” this practice in which the dynamic of SIM card behaving like selfish gene (find me a phone..find me a phone..) is really neat. Not only the idea of carrying around a SIM card so you can make calls without having to own a phone, but it is also neat from the perspective of an interesting design challenge. How do you design a phone that accommodates this kind of behavior? And, would the mobile phone ecosystem support such a usage idiom? I mean, Nokia and Motorola want to sell phones and carriers want to sell minutes. If Nokia and Motorola design a phone that makes it possible for more people to easily swap in a SIM card without the risk of damaging the device (by continually stressing plastic bits and getting dirt and dust inside), they may in fact sell less of them. Maybe.

Let’s say they knuckle under and design a phone for a market that has this specific need. What would it look like? Would it have a SIM in it that has a reserve of space to handle it being temporarily written with additional information so that the person borrowing the phone uses some sort of near-field device to temporarily write their SIM information? Is it a mechanical fix â€” a sliding drawer or an adapter that is more exoskeletal?

Why do I blog this? I just thought this little story was too cool not to recount. I’m sure more travelled folks than I have plenty of such stories. But thinking about how to design for these kinds of usage contexts is fun, anyway!