Month: January 2005

A thousand million flowers

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Filthyflowers

^ A panel from the wonderful, uplifting end sequence of The Filth

Paul from induce/deduce posts a playful idea today:

“In the midst of 2 recently announced games involving cultivating vegetables in Japan or your own garden in France, I want to try to put together the recent ideas I’ve had of a massively multiplayer GPS mobile phone green game.

Goal: A community of players working together to compensate the real pollution and eyesores of a city by planting and taking care of virtual flowers and other plants on a virtual data layer superimposed on the city.”

It’s a wonderful concept, and resonates with a lot of the work I’ve been doing over the last few months on social play, and the human fundamental drive to play.

Paul lists some aspirations for his idea:

  • “ability to play on the move, for as little as a few minutes to as long as you want,
  • makes you actively go out of your routine way to discover the city,
  • dynamically links the real world with its virtual overlayed layer in space and time too (some object are only available in certain regions or during certain times of the day, phase of the moon or season.
  • is not a battle.
  • encourages community building.

Sounds fantastic, and I hope he gets it off the ground – heh.

It would be wonderful to look through one’s phone screen at the city and see it as Greg Feely does at the end of Morrison and Weston’s “The Filth”: teeming with digital flora tended by thousands of familiar strangers.

Wikipedia: Shirky / (Tufte x Wattenburg) = ?

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More ding-dong on the authority of Wikipedia recently, with much of the debate swirling around Many-2-Many.

Clay Shirky posted something that caught my eye there today, which is to side-step the argument with information design.

He proposes a ‘dashboard’ for each entry, allowing the browser to make his or her own mind up to the veracity of the information by making transparent the contributions and changes to that entry over time.

This, to me, was precisely what Martin Wattenburg was exploring with his History Flow project for IBM, but using visualisations to allow one to assess the ‘shape’ of the entry’s evolution quickly.

Teaming this up with Edward Tufte’s Sparklines concept i.e. visualisations of supplementary information inline to the main text led me to mock-up something that gives the user Clay’s “trust profile per item” married with Martin’s visualisation effect to give a quick idea to the user of the entry’s history.: Historyflow sparklines.

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The Claaaw!!! I mean… THE CLAAMMM!!!!

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Andrew Losowsky has posted the full, unedited version of an article he wrote for The Guardian last year on Eyetoy and embodied interaction, including comment from Ludology.org’s estimable Gonzalo Frasca and an interview with Richard Marks – who pioneered the tech behind Eyetoy for Sony – and what he’s doing next: The Clam…

Some excepts:

"EyeToy relies on the most basic interface ever invented – the human
body. Graphics may get photo realistic, but there’s nothing real about
bashing X to run faster, or clicking the mouse to jump. If your
character needs to run faster, run faster. If it needs to jump, jump.
The interface gap is suddenly made all but irrelevant. Look at the
screen. You see you? That’s you, that is."

and… The Clam!

"The Clam a single U-shaped squeezable piece of fabric you put in
your hand and when you squeeze it, it changes in aspect ratio very
fast. So you can use it as a mouse cursor. You squeeze to click and
drag, and then let go to release. Because you can monitor the direction
of the aspect ratio, you can also use it to rotate objects."

"His lab has developed a simple photo storage/manipulation program to
use The Clam with – and it works so simply, it seems almost too
obvious."

And finally:

"Touch is one of Sony’s four Interface Research Areas (the others
being Inertial, Video and Audio – the EyeToy has an in-built
microphone, by the way). Tilt-based gaming, through handheld games such
as Wario Ware, are also becoming successful. And there’s potentially
much more within our grasp.

"If you look at mobile phones now," says Ron Festajo, "practically
every one has a camera. You can take photos and use it as an input
device. It’s very exciting."

People understand cameras. And cameras open up all kinds of possibilities. The revolution is already upon us, comrades."

A great article, and a good intro to the already-happening-ness fun of tangible computing.

Tsunami WAP help

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Priya Prakash, who I used to have the privilege of working with (She was part of the awesome design team I got to work with on iCan) has come up with a useful wap hack to help those affected by the South-Asian tsunami disaster.

This from Smartmobs:

Tsunami Helplines is the mobile WAP site for all the emergency numbers and has been specifically designed for mobile use. It has been put together for easy mobile access in situations where people have no access to computers and don’t know who to call for medical aid or for fieldworkers wanting to find out consulate/local hospital/authorities emegency helplines to give to victims/relatives.

The Tsunami Helpline WAP service is at: http://www.priyascape.com/helpline/index.wml for WAP browsers.

Good on you, Ms. Prakash.