Game play (theory of fun)

We just finished playing some of the Christmas games. It brought me to thinking about the theory of fun book. It seemed interesting I think that the theory of fun book has it partially right, game fun is based on learning or possibly not learning but developing a strategy for game play. Perhaps engagement (rather than fun) carries on while we can gain new strategy.

Flock

had an idea of a new programming language over lunch.

Flock

In flock everything is a graph.
So
A = 5 ;

assigns a graph with one node ( with value 5 ) to the Flock called A.

A graph consists of nodes + (weighted)edges.

A node can be an atom ( int,float,string,char..) or another graph as a 'value' or label.

A flock can have a disjoint (unconnected) graph.

Naturally everything can be represented with a graph of one sort or another. For example
A = 'map.gig'.loadAsImage();
makes a gridded graph with each A node being a pixel and the links are the way to get from one adjacent pixel to another.

alternatively a linked list is a linear graph. A hash table is a graph.

In Flock method can be assigned to
a) A Node
b) an edge
b) The entire flock ( single message shared over all instances)

Flock methods can be used to implement parallel programming by using a special method to call the method from the flock in parrell.

A large flock may be distributed invisibly across a number of computers. Hence a message may be transmitted from one sheep/link to another down an edge and actually be transmitting over the network.

More hardware

Went to IKEA and got table + box for new table interface. Need to go again and get mirror and change legs. I need more light in the box but we need more IR lights + filter for the table

M801 project Ideas

M801 Project Ideas
It takes me about a day to write one up. I thought I would dump my current idea list up.

1. People as streets. Trying to produce flat representations for non flat graphs. Get students to try to develop mechanisms to layout arbitrary graphs as axial representations.

2. [IN] Cognitive Maps ( Sketch Maps ) for long term user interface analysis. Get people to draw maps of the user interface for commonly used programs like Word or Excel ( or 3D program or IDE ). Use reference to sketch mapping ( Lynch).

4. Sketchy display of user interface elements to facilitate GUI requirements engineering.

3.Future Finder.Containment layout algorithms. How to layout rectangles in the most efficient way while not spending all day doing it.

4. ReCctor vision - implementing something in reactor vision. Embodies displays.

5. Algorithms for GPU. Thinking about concurrent program what kinds of mischief can we get up to. Searching sorting anything that isn't a graphical rendering algorithum.

6. Advanced documentation. Implement a doclet to add visualisation and getting started to java doc code.

8. CSP - a like ASP or PHP but embeds C into HTML text. Runs compiler that produces a CGI.

something edgy, something collaborative, something borrowed, something blue

From the last shareIt meeting. We wanted something
1. Edgy
2. Easy and quick to do. ( no new expensive hardware)
3. Something we can do more collaborative/shareable (real time collaborate) research with.
4. Something playful but not an art work.
5. Fairly simple reliable.

here is my next idea

On the way down the the ShareIt meeting I was chatting about thinking about another kind of floor saver application. When we entered the building I realised what I wanted.

As you enter many buildings you see bits of paper stuck up with 'meeting here this way'

I wanted to make a floor stickies (RM's rather brilliant name).

As you enter the building and through out the building you see rectangles projected on the floor like sticky notes. As you walk on them the pages move and reorder to keep out of the way ( fun with crowds) or stick to you if you don't move for a bit. Some playful interaction between two people as the notes move to avoid both pedestrians. Messages can be either simple text or and image (downloaded).

To avoid annoyance messages can only live for 1-7 days. So the floor is never casually out of date(unlike paper ones you have to go and take down).

These are messages ( some including a direction arrow) that anyone in the local department intranet can add via web page.

Edgey factor.
Posts are anonymous, for example if you took pictures of peoples desks you could put them on floor stickies until controversy or boredom takes over.

Modes of collaboration: from inhabitants to visitors ( Dave - Third floor for mike ),
for inhabitants (Paul gone to Cafe see you later).
for one to many inhabitants ( meeting of OU visions group 2:30 all invited).

Pages show a walked on count ?(soft implementation of gates).

Shareable tech - capturing pages or moving/arranging.

tacky research question - is a floor sticky more noticed than a bit of A4 stuck up some where. How event aware are people?

real research question is about looking at how people adopt/ma-adopt(misuse) technology. Do a survey of what people might use a technology for in the abstract then try again a few months later. Also a probe into open space collaborative technologies ( the research question arises from the result ).

Any thoughts ?

YouTube - Tracking fingers with the Wii Remote

YouTube - Tracking fingers with the Wii Remote
I have an idea in my note book about using this kind of interface as an interface to control a television user interface. So to control the TV/Video/DVD/ you would just have to raise your hands and build a simple gesture recognition to do the controlling. ( open hand to stop, drag/waving to start again) possibly using something like the amazon zoom interface to search the plane of TV channels ( zoom in to watch it).

Thinking about it again might be possible to do with Mac/ built in Camera and blob tracking in IR. Quite like voting mechanism so that multiple people could drag/vote on what to watch.

Masters thesis

Odd thought on the OU Masters thesis, we should give 3 thesis as a part of the masters thesis pack. The first TMA would be to mark these sample thesis against the standard marking schedule forcing them to read them critically but also providing a benchmark against what and how to write. The effective writing package they have at the momement is to generic to the point of obscurity.

odd idear about tracking physical documents

odd idear,

Special printer driver that sends paper off to be prininted but also marks the paper with machine readable barcode. This code tells the machine where the document that it was printed from WAS. Perhaps internal database to keep track of document.
So if you have a printed document holding it up to the screen camera would then make it open on the desktop.

reminder about reminder

I just had a quick odd thought. How about a reminder system that produced a scrolling message in the menu bar ( at intervals). This would mean you don't have to dismiss the reminder (specifically) but you could click on it and then control it.

perhaps a haze of reminders floating as screen saver.

Start of new week

Awful night up at 5:00 with Amelia could not get her back to sleep. Took long time to get kids off to school ( ruth off in Cambridge doing via so had to do everything my self).

Now in an feel crap. Finally told why the MSC project was rejected (just need to do small edit to resubmit it).

Also have just got the form (3 pages) you have to fill in to ask permission to apply for external funding. Thats been floating around in the either for 3 weeks now ( might have to check the time thats just my impression).

Finally about to go off and do the first ShareIT project meeting.

Guess I'll be back doing version 7 of TMA this afternoon.

java nuisance of the day.

Strange how the string class ( which is final) has methods that do very neat find and replace.

YET the stringBuilder class - that is something that is mutable only has simple find and replace operatoins.

So if you wnat to do a find and replace on a large string java WANTS you to make a huge copy not operate in place. Perhaps the garbage collector needs more work.

back to TMA.

Expose

I just noticed how Expose (F9 on mac keyboard) lays out the rectangles nicely.

I wonder what the algorithum is?

sheep

intimate technology

Spend most of the morning talking to Jeff (its addictive) whacting videos of some strange art projects. Jeff thinks you can get a large whiteboard/screen which work with multiple pens.

WE chatted about a pen based table interface - capturing writing as text input. Can't make a pen or paper clip work on table. Jeff appears to be into methodologies more than technology( I see them as linked - technologies imply some kind of way of using them). Jeff mentioned the success of the open space technueqe.

Two things I was inspired was to make some flexible (white translucent rubber?) screen to project on to or possibly use a tactile surface( vevlet,silk) to make the table top surface with. Using guages to measure 'pressure' perhaps. Not sure.

Another demo used breath measureing devices in cloths to make one more aware of breath and how we might use that to signal to others.

I would have combined the cloths and breath together using a corset to both be the device and measure. Jeff mentined some work on weaving circuts into cloth. I like the going back to jaquard loom - does history move in cycles or are we in some strange temporal/conceptual orbit?

back to boaring TMA ( 6th revision now).

Jeff recogmends

As under used book
Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Paperback)
by Lisa Gitelman (Author)

Panel show idea

Jeff has turned up (Huray!) seems to be a small hurricane of ideas wonderful.

I was chating with Paul this morning about new kinds of projects I could apply for.

I mentioned I had always wanted to augment a TV Panel show. The idea would be to give each particpant around the dicussion table a accompanist. This accompanist would take what the particpant was saying or might say and then get a URL or picture/movie that might augment the talking head with some more visual stimulus. Visually the particpants would have a screen behind them displaying some of the visual information (images behind the head constantly changing in response to what is said, or possibly statistics )

In parralle the particpants would have a tree the would have branchs and leaves constantly arange its self around the key items of conversation this would be a visual plot/summary of that which had been spoken about.

Mean while live conversations would have a compressed list of statemtents emailed and texted into the program.

Paul was quite encoraging saying perhaps I should try to apply for research money to do this. After all we have the BBC on
our door step it might be a way to get some research done.

Ambient display where am i prototype

I have my ambient prototpype p and working. I'm going to be running on my desktop for a few days before posting it outside.
would love to make a better phyiscal presance.

Already had some intreasting comments all quite postive. Paul asked for one in his room I would like to link to Rabbits so we can have some concept of co-awareness.

Smart Cycle Physical Learning Arcade System - Fisher Price Learning Toys

Smart Cycle Physical Learning Arcade System - Fisher Price Learning Toys

I When I bounght my Bompton bike ( 10 years + ago ) I spoke to the guy in the shop wondering if this (near chirstmas) was a very busy time of year for him. He said it used to be now parents prefer to give something which means the child is not potentially on the street ( near cars). Since then I've known a number of parents who would much prefer to buy a playstation (so they know where the kids are) to a bike. I mean I never had a 'play date' when I was a kid, again this is about maintaining absolute knowledge of ones child in relation to road traffic and potential kidnapping.

I think we generally have the view the wrong way round, we think kids have been seduced by video games to lead more passive lives in their bed rooms. Conversly, I think parents wanted to keep their kids safer (in their bed rooms) and used the carrot of the video game to get this done.

The smartCycle is an interesting blend of everything I like and don't like. I quite like the idea of a bike interface to a machine but then I hate needlessly educational devices.

parental rant over.

games

going to be a busy day with TMA's and going off to Ikea to buy tables to convert into smart tables.

had an intreasting talk with paul this morning about video games theory from the theory of fun point of view.

We talked about making both the childrens and adult projects more 'fun'. I saw that what might tie the adult project together is that people need to talk creatievly, brining seperate ideas/stratagies to the table (almost literally) then allowing them to merge and be selectively put together into some kind of consensus. We touched on the idea of a general bussness 'game' allowing a number of bussness elements to be gamed. I also thought through the interface to a disaster planning game but paul says a number of people are doing disaster planning.

thought about ordering an external darwin server ( with webdav ) to facility inter site commiuncation on project. I think Jeff would appricate putting his smalltalk wiki on the server. Rumour is Jeff (the programmer) will be around on 5th of November.

still can't get blogger spell check to work.

research strangeness

I had a research meeting an apprently there is a form I have to fill in to get permission to apply for external funding to do research with.

Central OU also likes to coordinate funding bids accross departments, so that only one group or another ( I guess) can apply to research to one call for funds. I was thinking of apply to do funding from a walking and cycling call for funding and they had to wonder if it was 'what we did' or should we leave it for another department.
'You don't want to go to the workshop to discover other people from the OU are there do you?' I was asked.

Date dyslexia,

I was chatting to Anneli and she mentioned how she misses things because dates/times arrive to her but they don't get into her diary ( the problem being is that it is everywere).

I thought about an application that would fish for dates in your email as it arrived and then tried to figure out where it should go in your diary. ( Dinner tuesday - would make a good guess then let you change it).

Problem we both identified was the idea of doing this with sound - people tell you on the phone or in person when you don't have a version near you.

Perhaps a printable version which could use image recognition from photo capture to read back modifications you made to the paper version.
---------------
Just noticed the new version of mac Mail will fish for dates out of your mail for you.

Technology and objections

I went with Ruth to look at some cybercars in Daventry. I mention them to some of the people I work with who you know are computer scientists but the first reaction I got was. 'Won't muggers run out stop the cyber cab and then mug you in the cab'. I got this a couple of times.

Now I don't want to approach the issue directly - after all you might same the same thing about cyclists or indeed car drivers (if somone comes along waves you down smashes the windscreen are you going to be able to drive away?) - what makes me intreasted is that this was peoples first reaction.

I was looking at some big LCD displays used in an underground station and thought. 'If I proposed that the first recactoin would be whats to stop someone smashing the display then running away?'

I remember the response the PRT system got when I presented it to the students at the london bussness school they thought PRT was a more unusable than a perpetual motion machine (they called a free energy device) someone else had proposed.

Now I guess the probem is should people be blind to possible problems ? One of the victorian objections to rail travel was that traveling at such speeds as 30 miles per hour would make peoples head explode.

I guess people are just not that good at dealing with uncertainty. I said to Ruth about the cybercars is that with the new London Heathrow terminal that they will just have to be able to see them in action for a few months before people can 'adjust' to actual technology rather than anticipate problems.

For me the question is that it appears that certain technologies appear to be less critialcally assessed than others ( the Ultra/PRT system against the perpetual motion machine for example). Is this universal could this be experimentally assessed in some way - perhaps giving people a group of technologies and asking what they thought but how to allow for the same imagined problems? Perhaps the same technology but presented in diffrent ways to diffrent people?

We are on the move like an idea who's time has come

to quote the great man himself.
We have a phd student who looks super cool and a nift programmer coming all the way from America starting as soon as possible. I have a really cool idea about the whole thing.

More OU junk

I have a constant distress over the internal communication process of the O.U.

Take today I had an email in my inbox with clicked on a link which went to a website that downloaded a word docuent that had a text that had pratically no formatting and so could have easily been embeded in the text of the original mail.

I think what I find distressing is that this has ended up with a large number of copies of a random worddocument on many people's harddrives for no reason whats so ever.

I've emailed them to add to my collection.

What is SSR more OU terms

SSR is Student Support Review

"The project team for this review asked faculties and student services to set up modelling teams to investigate various propositions, so our team has done some modelling."

Makes you wonder what this means ?

I provide the acronyms as I uncover them as a servce to other OU people.

Currently thinking about large screens again

Had and intreasting chat int the group about how to do an experiment. I had the idea of an alien reactor that needed controling.

Paul pointed out that a number of screens on a wall arre just one large screen with dark lines. To be multi screen implies that they are not in the same orrienation.

I need to clarify my thoughts on this - I'm going to make a large multiscreen and single screen demo to help refine our thinking on the matter.

Ever though how little help there is for direction manipulation interfaces?

A Component Framework for Direct-Manipulation Editors

Ever though how little help there is for direction manipulation interfaces?

If you want to write an on form to fill in it is easy to use a dialog box. BUT if you want to say have something that gets dragged or selected you have to go to a much lower level ( mouse down ,mouse up and so on).

it struck me as very strange that you can get a standard tree component but not a direct maniuplation component. Strange that both the PC and the Mac have a 'finder' - a direct file manipuation program.

You might expect that this should be included in any basic GUI tool kit and I wonder why not.

More strangely most of the standard GUI systems have a Drag and Drop - the interaction of direct manipulation between two applications mostly the finder/file system with an application. So you get fragments of a direct manipulatoin tool kit but not a frame work for the whole thing.

Why not - is it hard to do why am I expected to build my own draggng icon application but not write my own button class. Is it some kind of programming problem or is it cultural ( i.e programmer cultural) ?

As I pointed out to Paul this is important - Direct manipluation turns up in an number of good applicatoins (iMoive,iTunes, graph editing applications, drawing programms, 3D programs ) but it is the life blood of tangables and table top interfaces. If there is some usablity reason why you should NOT make a tool kit for direct maniplation then we need to know what it is and why shareable interfaces look like they will be highly direct manipulation.

Intreasting software failure

Odd thought. I'm looking for an algorithum which will do a convex hull algorithum on a set of data points I wanted to create in my data set. I've done a search with google and found a few very hevery weight system and a few examples. what is intreasting is I cannot use any of them. I have code already and this is strutured in a particular way. This makes deriving my code from one of the hevey weight systems difficult or impossible. You know they will have some complex build process and lots of 'utility' class that will have to be loaded up not to mention the inheritance problem. the smaller examples are just rough code outlines sutible for examples but not final versions.

So my quest to use a previously written package is thrwated.

I guess the only thing to do is to create something which works as a component and can be added simply to something else - an intreasting exersise if I have time.

thought about teaching

Naturaly there is a lot of thinking about teaching here. One thing I noticed was this big move recently to move towards a process called 'reflection'. I don't see the process of reflection as being a huge contribution to the educational process and certainly not enough to justify the additional work load involved.

There are only ad-hoc mechanisums to consider work load when proposing new concepts in teaching it is treated as a peripheal aspect to education. I think their is a lot to be said to intoduce time and its utilisation to the core of pedigocial theory. This way a development that reduces the time it takes to learn something would be given more signficance than it currently recives.

I thought of a good way to produce not quite the null hypothosis for reflection. I would give students sample thesis/essays to comment upon/mark. This would work for a number of reasons.
1 - Given examples of good and bad work students get a better idea of what they are doing and how far they could go.
2 - Promotes the concept of promoting a coherant argument through the work ( sadly missing )
3 - Needs some understanding of the topic matter requireing research

this is in some ways the exact opposit of reflection and I quite like the idea of using the original mark given as a way of testing student...

looks like the blogger spell checker is not working.

I'm back

I'm back I was chatting with simon over lunch and he appears to be getting close to something. I think we both think that things are ripe to change the use interface paradime from M.V.C to something more synthetic.

Simion's been talking about some new interface envrionments in small talk. but I think it might be nessasry to make a new language for them.

Object messages

I wonder how many times we right pass along messages like

boolean isEmpty(){ return someinternalmember.isEmpty(); }

in those cases were we want to expose some functionality of in internal class without exposing all the methods of the member ( in effect making it public).

perhaps one day we will have

@expose member.isEmpty,member.add, memeber.remove

This line will add 3 new public messsages to this class which are just forwarded on to the member class.

you can tell I have another day pumping out the java TMA ?

sightings in the mists of the sea of ghosts

Its been a strange turn of events. I was speaking to Bashar and explained why a computer programmer was so passionately interested in developing user interfaces. I think he got it when I said that it was the development of the first graphical user interfaces that helped drive the development of the first object orientated languages.

I was recording a podcast yesterday when afterwards richardwalker and simon got on to the subject of annotations in Java. He also talked about all the code that a good GUI builder adds to let you simply add code into you objects.

I just had a odd thought. If I started with a blank sheet of paper and wrote down what I wanted in a simple graphical user interface could I think of a way of creating the facilities for a languages that would make the description that small.

Naturally for me I want the interface to say four things.
1. What the interface 'looks like'
2. What the interface does
3. The text for the user explaining what the interface is (help file/user guide).
4. The text for the programmer explaining what the user interface is doing ( programming documentation like java doc.)

I feel like Admiral Hopper (inventing cobol)

Modern Lighting, Furniture and Home Accessories at Generate

Modern Lighting, Furniture and Home Accessories at Generate: "The 336 , designed by Robert Stadler (of the French design group Radi Designers), is a mirror able to receive SMS messages sent from a mobile phone. The messages appear as luminous text, running on the mirrors%u2019 surface when one gets close to the mirror."

quite cool. I like the idea of information on display. I wonder what else you might put in a mirror.

mirror mirror on the wall... whats for tea ?

TED | Talks | Kevin Kelly: How does technology evolve? Like we did (video)

TED | Talks | Kevin Kelly: How does technology evolve? Like we did (video)

Asks intreasting question - what does technology want? I like the idea of thinking of technology as a thing...

Odd thought

I like having the mail program beep when new mail arrives ( I have enough will to not always go over and have a look). But I have a problem with knowing what beeped.

I think programs that make noises in the background (which is good) should have a 'why the beep' button/menu ( like Mathematica did but in a diffrent context).

dana centre - about us

dana centre
- about us

I do complain about the science Museam. It is neither a Museam nor about Science. One of the things I find urksome is that there is no place for technologists to see both technology and other technologists. This was one of the plans for the original Science Muesem as a meeting ground for the people makeing new technology.

I the Dana center I noticed this.

The dana centre is a stylish, purpose-built venue in London (UK). It is a place for adults to take part in exciting, informative and innovative debates about contemporary science, technology and culture.

how cool.

Netbeans plugins

If I was a plugin writing kind of person I would write two plugins ( or doclet).

1. A documentation plug in that would have a stronger narrative element ( that is a starting point). this would complement the kind of documentation you get a moment but add to it.

1. Starting point
@purpose ?
2. tutorial ( hyperlinked code examples)
3. examples ( more code + hyper links )

At the moment I love java doc but the resultant documentation is usless for getting started.

The second plug in would be part of the bug tracking system.
@bug ID [ message ]
would attached a bug from the bug tracking system via document hyperlink. when a bug is fixed then it can
be part of documentation/code base

@TODO anyone ?

Experiment

Paul had an intreasting idear. Take the matrix of distances we have of people against each other.

We have 50 odd people so we get 50 * 50 matrix then * 12 for 12 experiments.

This would give a set of distances most likely normally distrbuted.

So IF we take he distances of one person ( 1 * 50 * 12 ) then perhaps we can do a Z test or something like it and then get a measure of how random that person is. So if everyone puts A and B together then we should find A,B or all of A's distances are not a random sample of the distances between people.

Ted speeks

Intreasting observation about Google being a new command line ( type data and it does not not finds it) but google is command lines done right.

Nice bit on the new physicality in interfaces too.

Ipod lecture

I'm currently in a nice presentation about podcasting from Apple. Has link to new tool from apple called podcast prodcuer.

sounds like it is all happening. I suspect Apple is talking to the Open University to put a lot of current content on line. There are 16 universities on iTunesU.

Everything is currently moving very quickly. I have even found a fun new list of things to download.

Table top interfaces

Another week of experiments.

I've been wondering what kinds of things we can do with tabletops (sharable/multi-interaction devices in general). That would be better then a laptop and a projector. Things were everyone doing someting could help.

I was thinking that we need to think about cases were all participants try their own thing out be we get to see them simultaniously. Like giving everyone the same pictures on the same table BUT everyone has their own layer. This way we can experiment with diffrent designs and try a multitude of things out coming to some common understanding.

I'm try to talk to Bashar about tabletop interface related to software project planning.

University of Sheffield - Steve Whittaker

University of Sheffield - Steve Whittaker

Intreasting lectore by Steve Whittaker on memory. He says that most of the work done shows that while people might spend a lot of time saving memories they don't use them that oftern. For exampe me metioned research the 43% of book marks are not revisited. or that most corporatations show little document reuse and that having recordings of lectures don't help students scores.

Intreasting. Did show off cool device that records sound and lets you take notes. The idea was that the notes index the sounds and so clicking on an old note jumps the audio stream to that point ( when you made the note). I always wanted to do something similar with a button on a recording ipod. That is it always records but marking makes the last 5 mins stored.

Also showed cool zooming text tech. Basically the way to get significant words is to look for words occuring more oftern than it does in general lanuage. Does produce some quite cool results.

Mentioned website where people have labled significant locations ( something to do with BBC and first memories... I can't remember).

Fourth experiment just completed makes us 30% of the way to statisitcal salvation.

Still the memory stuff makes you wonder why you bother to blog at all ?

|The Future of Digital Interaction

|
The Future of Digital Interaction A nice blog website also blogging the rise of new types of interaction mechanisums. Quite cool.

Experiments three or four.

Today we had another experiment this morning. Just Eva and my self running it and I think it went well. They got through the basic layout which is a good stage.

Some complaints about the mouse being jerky, possibly an effect of zooming in on the large table.
Worth thinking about.

I need to look at the videos to check on how people got on with both interfaces.

We need about 12 experiments and getting people involved is getting hard as summer comes.

interface idea of the day - photo Q&A

I was in a very excellent talk on monday about creating smart 'companions'. One of the passing comments was that old people ( the target market for the companions ) like to sit around and talk about the photos in front of them. The idea was that the companion would start converstions with 'who is that in the picture'.

Naturally the table top people are up to their necks in photo sorting systems.

I wondered what it would be like to have some image processing software looing for areas of skin colour in the image. The software could highlite the person (area of pixels to the machine) and go 'who is this?' the user might then fill in the missing information. The idea is that the machine could then use this as a prompt to get more information. For example if the machine had ment this person before it might also know other information about them. For example it might guess who they might be with or where they might be from.
'Uncle Dan used to live in Manchester didn't he? Where was he when this picture was taken?' - this might extract out the location of the photo.
'This is on holiday in Blackpool'
For the next photo the machine might say.
'Is this also in Blackpool?'

Now what I thought would be quite cool would be to look at the distribution of colour and then try to guess who might be in the next picture(s). So matching colour might indicate the same person.
'Is this also a picture of Uncle Dan?'
'No that's Julia'.
'Sorry. 'This is Dan, thats Julia but who is this in the corner?'

more as it happens.

pictures of the first experiment

We did these experiments a few weeks ago but I thought would get the pictures up now. Here we can seen the team of victims (sorry subjects :-)) around the touch table discussing the stratigy they want to use on their layout. It would have been nice to get a hands on shot but no luck.






This is a bit of wider view showing people using the mouse based interface and you can see the video cam in shot too.

Not bad I had to program the mouse orrientation interface at the last moment. The user interface is still highly unfriendly and needs work.

next week off to dimond touch work shop ( uhg too tried ) .

AmbientClock

AmbientClock Finally a decent ambient interface. Sounds like the kind of thing that only works in the US but appart from that it looks functional enough to use.

WINNER 4G

I'm at a conferance at the moment (CNSR) quite intreasting. I am currently in a Keynote about a system called WINNER a 4G system. The talk is about adaptive shareing the frequency response for each transmittor. So we have different transmitters shareing spectrum of frequencies but the signal can be effected at different frequencies. So adapt by sending test signals ( pilots ) and then alter data transmitted to send more information in the parts of frequency that have stronger singnals.

my idea would be would the outputs of the pilots give a sense of the environment you are in ? Might the software make the available to give a sense of where the transmitter is ?

I like idea of picking up this spare information and using it to help identify the location/orientation of the device ( and so the user).

After the talk I spoke to the guy and hay they had considerd it(groovey).

Java Advanced Imaging: Class PerspectiveTransform

Java Advanced Imaging: Class PerspectiveTransform
I was working on try to package up the touch table this morning and found that DT uses this class. I guess they use it to trasnslate to and from the screen space. This is quite cleaver this is a wonderful way to handle mapping a simple direct X,Y coorindate grid into the screen. Works out quite well when using the video projector with some underlying access mechanisum.

for example I was thinking of having a camera track some markers and then project onto this envrionment. The question would be how to handle possible distortion from not vertical projector/camera coords. Solution now is simple use tje perspectivetrasnfrom to do the translatino for you and use the converto/from methods. I will have to think up some cool uses for this.

Still I should be thinking about getting the talk done for the conferance next week.

table and mouse state of play.

hi all.
After a weekend of furious coding we now have a semi viable experiment system.
What is working
- you can have 1 or 3 people using the Dtouch table.
- they can move around and drag people around.
- wires follow people showing linkage.
- data is entered with as many academics as we can find.
- log files can be created ( R == record and stop record )
- hitting the M key gives the experimenter a Marker incase they spot something interesting and
want that in the log file ( can also be used to sync with logs)
- hitting the K key keeps' or makes a snap shot of the current work.
- hitting the O key opens the previous snap shot restoring layout to previous state

The multiple mouse system is working
- we can plug in up to 8 mice in hub and via multiple powered ups limit of 255 mice !! !
- basically repeats the same experiment
- zooming via scroll wheel.
- hitting the O key opens the previous snap shot restoring layout to previous state
- have enlarged table with MDF to give a mouse pad area (under screen).

Not perfect but enough to do a dry run or a rehearsal

Not done (yet)
- be nice to have just 2 icons to double click on rather than using NetBeans.
- log files are not namable - they need to be dragged/renamed between experiments.
- need to check the interaction to see if it feels comfortable.
- secondary network ( course teams ) needs reformatting.

problems/questions
- noticed that people might want mice to move with their orientation. Someone standing
on left hand side of mice might want his/her mouse to move 90 degrees to the
screen/text reading orientation.
- need to check if people are comfortable leaning over the MDF mouse zone.
- one pad is down
- need more mice with long cables
- some problems filming screen - the building plan is too bright - perhaps should invert it in photoshop?

notifications
I'm not in on Friday its a PHD day ( can swap with Thursday if have to), then off next week to conference. Will leave how to do it details plus be available for skypeing e.t.c

Many mouse - good but not bannana.

I can't get the dimond touch stuff and the Manymouse stuff to work at the same time. They work seperatly ok, and even ManyMouse.init() and manyMouse.getDeviceName(int) works but when I try to run two seperate threads then ManyMouse.poll returns nothing each time.--- all on a PC of naturally.

All very irritating so close ot the experimental deadline.

Jinput is so much crap.

I've had a pretty bad day and to add insult to injury I've had a rubbish time trying to get jinput working on Mac OS X (intel). No matter what I try I always get the repsonse
'Cannot launch Java application'
'Uncaught exception in main method:
java.lan.UnsatisifedLinkError no libjinput in java.library.path'

belive me I tried putting all version of libjinput-osx.jnilib and libjinput.jnilib into every concivable location in may system path.

/Users/ME/Documents/Open University/Research/jinput/Tester/build/Debug:/Users/ME/Documents/Open University/Research/jinput/Tester/build/Debug/Tester.app/Contents/Resources/Java:/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/JavaApplicationLauncher.framework/Resources:.:/Library/Java/Extensions:/System/Library/Java/Extensions:/usr/lib/java

i've tried this with all possible version of jinput.

in short cross platform my ass.

table top.

I have been working on the building arrangement design interface. That is the table based tool that allows members of the department to assign locations in the new building. To get accurate click and drag I had to use a higher level of the dimond spin java interface - which makes the zoomin/zoom out less slick ( irriation) but lets you click and drag with ease.

Most of the work has been collecting the social network and normalising this against the list of people with their names and pictures. The department has a list of pictures but no simple way to map from names to image with out a lot of arcane Ajax /Lotusnotes ( good example of being far to clever).

I'm getting close to having a decent system with simple start at the data set. the main problem is getting the table ready for expeiments in time to do the table conferance.

Yesterday Yvone made an intreasting throwaway comment about not doing a paper version of the same thing as the paper version would be better. The important part being that the display of social network would not exist in the paper version. This got me to thinking what about an interface using a projector and the feducials/bloby barcodes? You would have cards to represent people ( with pictures ) and then use the fedicilas to get them tracked and project on the rubber lines/ extra info. Mentioned this to Paul and he thought projection from under the table would be good ( simpler for the trackker too ). Yvone suggested doing this for the seminar in june - letting people plan the optimum layout of places to sit over lunch.

What ever happened to Virtual reality ?

I've been thinking about Virutal reality recently. I realise that a long time ago ( the late 80s ) Virtual reality and the internet emerged about the same time. Initally there where both technological phenomena, they appeared to the general public as the technological zeitgeist*.
So why did the internet go on to be such an important technology and virtual reality has all but ( nearly said virtually ) disappeared?

I think I might lay the blame on Jaron Lanier the Tim berners lee of VR. for it was he ( Jaron L. ) that created the highly poetic term 'virtual reality'. Not that it was his fault entirely the previous term was 'artificial reality'. Either term has the R word ( reality ), and this had two problems. Firstly people know what reality is like, it doesn't have any lag and the resolution from where I am sitting terrific. By using the R word we get people overly exited, you get people who have never tried using VR wondering if VR was going to be so real that you might slip into a VR and not notice.

Well if you had never written and email you might start to wonder if using e-mail might be so like writing a letter that you might not notice you had written and e-mail with all the problems that might bring... Thats the problem with metaphors people bring a lot of baggage with them.

The internet on the other had was a wonderfully blank term. People never understood the internet until they had used it. We used to work near one of the first cyber cafes ( remember them ) called cyberia. I remember walking passed them day and night seeing people checking the whole thing out for the first time, you could breath the excitement.

If Tim Berners Lee or some other random visionary had called the internet 'All human knowledge' or something suitably catchy, if some SiFi author had created an reputation on computer that you magically stroked and knew the answer to any question you had in your mind ( are you listening Willam) or they had something similar as a plot device in Star Treck, then people would have gone to a cybercafe asked what there uncle Albert had done in 1963 and walked away disappointed (remember no google).

Instead the internet let people walk away intrigued by what the internet did have ( which at that point wasnt' that much ) but it had possibilities.


Naturally the other argument was that the internet had more possibilities than virtual reality but many of the internet's possibilities lay with the fact other people where using it. There are quite a number or augments to be had but I do think that the management of expectation has a some contributory negligence.

here is a to a new technology of 'synthetic data spaces' or something ( please feel to suggest something )

zeitgeist* spirit of the time.

VIRGIN EARTH CHALLENGE

i found this link on half bakery. VIRGIN EARTH CHALLENGE it does sound quite cool. Makes you wonde what the rules are

TABLETOP2007 - The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems (October 10-12, 2007 Newport, RI USA)

TABLETOP2007 - The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems (October 10-12, 2007 Newport, RI USA)

I thnk we are looking to put somthing in for this. sonuds cool.

sheep

Software engineering - whats on my ipod?

I was checking out this website Geoff Mullery is giving a talk in May. Scans very intreasting I normally have problems with software Engineering - it generally isn't and is normally the cover for anti-engineering ( ie either craft or excessive formalisium ). I wonder how many people I have insulted in that line. For example if you ask an Engineer how long it will take to cut through this hill then generally you can get a reasonable result. This dispite the fact that strange stuff might lurk in the hill you want to cut trough. Ask a programmer and your getting guesses and ambitions, craft not engineering. Anyway rant against software engineering over.

This Mullery guy looks to have had some wonderful failures under his belt. I'm definitly putting this on my Ipod to listen to.

product reherals.

I was reding this page on project perfect. The bit that got me was.

'In most cases, clients are unable to specify exactly what they want in the beginning until they see the product. It is also often difficult for business users to visualize how the new system will be until they see it.'

This for me is a reminder that we need to specify with user interfaces. That is the use(s) should see what they want. Another quote was qute intreasting.

'When the users do see the new system for the first time, changes may be needed because any new applications will be initially unfamiliar to users.'

I've seen/heard of this a number of times in a number of diffrent contexts. One example was a company making very large digital displays they thought could be on the outside of the building and allow central office to send new messages digitally ( sale on all electrical items 50%). When they came to test the system they discovered the probelms - it was hard to get an electical supply all the way up where the sign was and more importantly most shops didn't have a digital link to the central office.

What makes many new products work is not how it was intented to be used but how people appropritate the technology. People oftern use technology in away not envisaged by the original programmers. Hotmail was desinged as remote mail for executives to discuss making new products out side the company, it ended up being used by the digitally disposeesed ( originally backpackers in cybercafes).

Typcially products are designed, made, tested, installed, followed by training.

Perhaps we need to think about product reherals - pretending the product exists and then seeing how we might use it or intergrate it into the context. This would give the users time to get used to what is coming and allow them to adapt things to use the system. It would also allow the developers and managers a chance to see future delivery problems and alter the design appropriately. What counts are rehersal depends upon the product - if we have a user interface tool like interface builder then it might be getting the users to reherse using the sytem. The key element is getting everyone thinking about the product before it is dumped on the desk.

perhaps this is what is happening with agile programming.

Ambient compiler

There was some thought about how to improve the teaching of programming at the OU. I had an odd thought.

Why not have a 'compiler' on line? that is your code is stored on the server and then you access the code from a text box on a web form. One of the form buttons is 'compile' which does some ajaxy magic which then sends the text back to the server where the text is compiled. The error messages are then stuffed back into the html code. When the user clicks 'run' the code is executed on the server and the result is piped back to the output a new window on the client.

Ok why do this? The problem is how to automatically evaluate the work of students. I suspect most people think about how to take the 'product' ( final source code) and mark it ( together with supporting info). This requires trying to understand the process from the source (alone). That process is one which requires someone experianced not only in the lanaguage but java and process I belive that would be impossible to automate. The degree of success of this depends on how much you belive in automatic teaching.

Well if you have the code on the server then you get a stream on log files that indicate who the code evolved. the problem is to find out if the code genuinly the result of the pupil or the result of some creative 'cutting and pasteing'. As such providing the code matches the desired output then if the production process appears normal then the pedigogical results must be achived.
http://try.flex.org/ example of one line compiler of a flex language.
http://nirvana.informatik.uni-halle.de/~thuering/php/latex-online/latex.php Online LaTex compiler.
Online java upload based compiler

i like the idea of a website where the documentation and compiler text box are surrounded by other useful links ( chat room?). not perfet for hard core coders but good as a beginner space.

Pad++ and the zooming user interface with adaptive rendering!

I've just got the adaptive code working for the amazon interface. I was looking around and low and behold the other people who have done time centric rendinerging where the people doing the original zooming interface ( Ben Bederson, Jon Meyer ) .

Pad Papers

I think what I have produced is novel enough that I can do a paper about it - this in in Java there stuff was C plus plus /C/TCL. I wonder what happend to the Pad plus pluse interface. zooming user interface appears to be such a natural thing.

Software Development Kit for Nokia RFID application developers now available

Nokia - Software Development Kit for Nokia RFID application developers now available - Press Releases - Press - About Nokia

Perhaps I am just playing catch up but it looks like you could wave your phone near an RFID tag and have it 'read' the tag and so do something with it.

cool.

Pictures from the amazon table

this is a picture of the amazon table -on of the multi touch table projects I am working on. By putting you fingers on the table and pullling them appart it zooms in to the Amazon landscape. By pulling your fingers together you zoom out. IF you keep zooming in you eventually get to see thebooks. This appears to be quite natural.





this shows the books section - on the web version clicking on the books goes to Amazon.

perhipheral vision.

I have been wondering if it was possible to use a seperate perhipheral vesion system as a way of creating a deeper sense of immersion in a system.I mean in a desk top or or laptop.

Use for spatial audio idear

I was talking to Paul about the ipod shuffle and he mentioned that he thought that it was hard to have a screen less interface. I quite agree with him and said I wondered why. I have always been intreasted in try to produce an audio interface but would like to get beyond the phone interface of ‘press one for action a press 2 for action b. wait for a long slow list to get to the option you want’. With icons, location and text you can be reminded and skip to the option you want pretty quickly. The subject moved on to Simon’s excellent audio interfance and we came up with the idea of multiple speakers all talking at once.

Imagine you have a pair of head phones, you have a key pad with say five buttons and the machine wants you make a choice from. The idear is that all five voices sit speaking out aloud. Each voice gets its own speech position in space and you use your listening in party auditory system to identify the one you want. So imagine one voice repeating ‘option one to revise your document. option one to revise your document.’
Another voice repeating
‘Option two to create a new document. Option two to create a new document….’
And so on for all five voices.

The spatial audio (position in stereo field) would help which of the appropriate buttons to click/press. The distance to speaker plus variation in speakers (male, female, old, young, accents) would act both as further ways to separate out the voices (perhaps).
Clearly there must be some natural limit to the number of voices you can differentiate but perhaps 4 five would be useful. Worth testing out.

Multiple mice part 2

http://icculus.org/manymouse/

The other thing I have always wanted to build was a 3d editor with multiple mice. So to make a cube you pulled the mice appart each mouse would be the approrparate corner. This would require scroll wheel mice to be the part.

Actions like cutting would become very simple - you click on the think you want to cut and use the other mouse to do the cutting. You could also use one mouse to move the viewpoint while useing the first mouse to hold/move the item in question.

Multiple mice (part1)

I have been checking out.

http://icculus.org/manymouse/

or

http://jusb.sourceforge.net/?selected=about if you have a Linux box. This allows multiple keybords to.

I always liked the notion of the open meeting tool - a way where groups could have conversations but not have to take turns to speak. There would be a large screen on the wall and the chairman would ask for opinions like should we do this or do that. People could speak but others could annotate with their typed opinions - these could be ether named or anonymous. Could be done if you could collect the input from many keyboards.

I've sat in meetings where something has come up and some senior person says 'that reminds me of the the time...' (ok case of pot calling the kettle black here but bear with me). This tends to move the conversation along making it impossible for people to go back and readdress the question.
Meanwhile some underling has important information 'I know this is possible this has been done already by our competitors' or has some alternative suggestion but is too nice but to speak up.

more random thoughts next week.

sheep

fun with GML Diamond touch driver for the mac.

On Friday I ended up spending most of the day working with the GML mac driver.
http://iihm.imag.fr/projects/gml/
The driver let me write a mac version of the PC merl program ( kind of a Diamond Touch debugger). Looking at the output we began to wonder if it was possible to pick up 2 or 3 individual fingers. With this you could draw a line between two fingers or use it to roate a knob or shape.

Anneli was determined to figure it out and kept me thinking about it while I should have gone off and got some admin work done.

I will test the Mac Merl program for a bit and possibly release it ( I need to contact the GML people to see if I can relase their library with it).

Web CGI idears

I bumped into AT who was building a CGI interface in C++ and complaing over the extra 800k the C++ cgilib adds to each CGI script.

I suggested the idea of doing a Ruby on rails with C. I have two suggestions

1. An XML/HTML document format that mixes HTML with C code like this ( filemycgi.XCGI )


[HTML]
[TITLE] HELLO [/TITLE]
{bODY]
[TABLE]
[% int i ; for( i = 0 ; i < 100 ; i++ ) { !%]
[T-D] [!% printf("%d i"); !%]
[ !% } // NEXT !%]
[/TABLE]
[/HTML]



each CGI would then be run through COMPILER which would take the HTML and embed it as printf()s into a c source code file then pass the C file to gcc with a small library. producing the mycgi.exe or a.out. This way when you run the CGI you get a high speed response and a pre compiled language. Even the CGI source can be removed to make the code work.

The system would come with a number of libaries that would make working with a database and other files work. Possibly even a template re-writing system.

2. Second and slightly diffrent idea.
Have a pre-adaptive system. In essance you set up a watcher that scans the file system/database/time/ to pre-build html files then write them out to disk.

It would work like this. In your watcher file.

Database "urbanist" on localhost with user 'watcher' and password 'bobo' has trigger 'triggerone'
change to table products -> doreformatproducts.watcher ;

Database "urbanist" on localhost with user 'watcher' and password 'bobo' has trigger 'triggerTwo'
change to table users
-> donewuser.watcher < { (select * from users where time > last_time } ;
-> last_time = getimeseconds() ;

file template.css hashchanges -> doformatproducts.watcher ; // this generates producs.html

// touched is any ateration.

file products.html touched -> email( "sheep@mywerbsite.com" , products rechanged ) ;
// backward changes sidebar.html depends upon template
file sidebar.html <-( directory /usr/web/html/www/mysite/folders changes ) dosidebar // generates sidebar.html

file sidebar.html touched -> ssh it to sheep@website.com:password // moves it to website on outside firewall.

change can have multiple dependaces and multiple actions
// time acts like
time every day at 1:00am -> doformatproducts.watcher ; // update products once per day.
time every week -> doformatproducts.watcher ; email("me@myself.com" , "products changed " ) ;

so conceptually a combination of cron,triggers and file updates with make.

odd proxy thought of the day.

Another couple of times my machine has been hanging to display the page while it gets an image from an avertising server ( hint store them locally guys).

I just had the idea of a local proxy server ( possibly a permachine proxy or local grou better ) this would look for requests or adverts and banners. The concept would be to replace these with calls you make up special banners for you. For example you might find an avert repalced with 'bob you have a meeting in 20mins'. Or info on your disk usage ( 2 years 3 months until hard drive is full or Email from ruth arrived in 10 mins.

I quite like this combined with the RCA products avertsing features for things you already own.
'Want to make you images look older look for sepia in your copy of Photoshop'.

I've already had thoguhts on a local P2P proxy. Everytime you machine asks for an image or static page the UDP request goes out to the local network to see if anyone has it. This way people share cache space with out complex proxys.

Perhaps you could combine this with a web only style suggestions 'you looked at this and you might want to think about that web page that someone else looked at at the same time'.

Finally you could also include the southhampton addtion of suggested links. That is it looks at the content and adds links to enhance the content ( although there should be something that does that statically for all web pages ).

Cool idea of the day - Aura.

I was talking to Paul about the marks from Reactable We talked about what would happen if you had a badge or tee shirt with that one. I came up with the idea of a 'magic' mirror. A large TV monitor showing the feed back from a Camera acting like a mirror. The mirror feed back would be augmented by text boxes showing either events or post it notes surrounding you like an Aura. IF there where two people looking in the mirror you could see each others notes but also you would be able to 'give' a note to someone else.

So for example you walk down an corridor and see your self in the mirror as you approach. The Reactable software spots your badge/teeshirt/handbag/tattoo and surround you image with calander reminders. You bump into some one and tell them about this lecture you are going to later. You can wave your hand in the air or touch the screen and use it to drop a copy of the note/meeting into your friend/colleges aura. Then as your friend walks away the note floats away with him.

Definitely something where a large shared public (ish) display would work. Naturally you would have to only leave public notes up on the screen or make them more general.

Programming Languages.

We where talking about M151 - new course indevelopment at the open u. I said I think there are programmers out there that want to keep abreasts about new languages out there. Supose somene says I've been to three interviews and they want t to know If I could program in a language called Flubble* where can I go to learn that ?' What I found intreasting was that three people asked me later on what this Flubble lanauge was... (so I told them I just made it up )

*I just invented this on the spot as an example.

On the subject of languages. things I would like to see in language X

override void mymethodthing( int x | ( x > 0 :"no negative array arguments ") | ,  Object o | o != null && o.valid() ) 
{ 
   //being method 
}
 

this would mean that when someone called this method like this
thing. mymethodthing( -3 , this ) ; // this is the calling line.

that is the line | ( x > 0 :"no negative array arguments ") | is an assert sayign the first integer argument is non negative.

there would be a COMPILE TIME error or a RUNTIME error on the calling line ( not the sub routine ). After all the subroutine interface clearly states the limits of the method/function and you have just crossed the line. the problem is with the calling code not the method ( which has clearly stated the assumtions). May be more asserts could be used to augment code generation. More programming concepts later.

Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X

Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X I'm always looking for a new language to check out.
I also wanted a language that better integrates a database ( or some kind of shared information store ) and webpages. I was sitting in my office when I heard the Head of Department singing the praises of Ruby on rails saying how quickly you can make interative sites with it. It was a day of meetings today so I only had a chance to scope out the language when I got home. Firstly it is preinstalled on the latest version of the mac OS ( good sign ). It’s the kind of language lisp would have been if someone had defined a reasonable interface for it (closures but generally objects + methods ). I did like the way you can add new methods to pre-existing classes ( loved it in objective C too).

So I might play with it on my work mac when I need to get something webby working on the Mac @ work.

zooming interface - first mulitple person demo.

First demo of the tablet to HCI group.

I think it went pretty well a fair amount of useful input ( try using colour) could you use this to look at large who-knows-who data sets. Could you use the zooming to control unfolding a to-do interface.

I spent most of the morning try to get the demo working but the PC has problems with running the video projector AND the externa VGA big screen. I think we need a second monitor.

The VC is coming to visit in march and it looks like the tablet is on display.

Need to come up with better second screen interface.

Where Am I

I have created an online calendar showing where I expect to be here.
WhereAmI I wonder if anyone will have a look.

SIMILE | Timeline

SIMILE | Timeline I was looking to see if anyone had done a kind of wiki time line of history and found this wondeful bit of code. Lovelyinterface nice and slidy.

makes you want to build a personal calendar or something.

AISLiverpool - Watching the boats go by.

AISLiverpool - Watching the boats go by.

This link is quite cool - a real time plot of where a lot of big ships are around the cost of the UK. makes you want to do something with ( animate ? ) the data. nice example of a cool use of google maps too.

Don Norman's jnd.org / in praise of good design

Don Norman's jnd.org / in praise of good design
Found Don Norman (He of design of everyday things) home page. Oh he is so cool we like him.

getting some exposure.

British R&D Show sounds good but a bit early for me this year.

Applications are invited by Dr Brian Iddon MP (Sponsoring Member and Member of the Commons' Select Committee for Science and Technology) and SET for BRITAIN from *Early-Stage and *Early-Career Researchers in the UK to participate in the Annual Receptions for them at the House of Commons on Monday, 19 March 2007 (Lunchtime and Evening Presentations).

2007 is the ninth year for this highly successful and popular annual initiative where Britain's researchers present posters at Westminster on "frontier" science, engineering, medicine and technology research and compete for prestigious national medals, awards and prizes.

Function Point Analysis - Function Points - Web Counting

Function Point Analysis Consultancy - Function Points FAQs - Web Based Applications,
Training,Counting, Estimating , Productivity and Auditing

I had an email over my desk about function point analysis. I tried to remember as much as I could but decided to google it. I get the impression FPA onyl has a general view of HCI - making HCI a late add on rather than a fundermental aspect of a computing project.

A little bit of examination later and I dug up this link to FPA an websites. I wonder if anything doing on UBIcomp and FPA or is that too close to Ubicomp as engineering?

video conferencing doesn't work

By strange coinicdence I was exposed to a number of people saying how video conferencing doesn't work - well enough to consider using them over flying even for people who think global warming is important.

It made me wonder what happened to all the research in to video conferanceing and multimedia over IP. Either they found out how to make it work and havn't managed to get the right stuff out. Or they found out how to make it work and know they can't make it work. Or they havent managed to figure out what went wrong. My vote is for the last option, its an interesting example of how everyone one know's it doesn't work but cannot put their finger on why - its a non discursive problem.

I did have a fun Idea of how to find out what is going wrong.

Take a group or groups forbid them to meet in real life ( they might live in the same building or room). then organise them to meet in a meeting room for meetings.

find a measure of the performance then begin to introduce restrictions. For example put up a partition in the real meeting room forcing everyone to look through a smallish screen sized holes at each other. Keep adding more problems ( (2) speeking through microphones to remove directionality) until the real meeting has as many problems as video conferencing. By examining the problems you have to introduce to make the real world not work you should have a good idea of what items need to be fully solved for a digital version.

Equator Website Weight Furniture

Equator Website Weight Furniture
the thing I noticed was Key Table ( file under already been done).

The Key Table gets a sense of people's emotions from the way they dump their stuff onto it. Much as slamming doors are a crude measure of mental state, so the table uses the transient onsets of a new weight to gauge mood. Reactions to emotional entrances are triggered as mechanised frames swing pictures off centre to warn other inhabitants to tread carefully.

diamondspin found!

I've wasted a lot of time trying to get Jbuilder and CVS to work together. Even http://www.tortoisecvs.org/ failed it can only handle a CVROOT on the same machine not as a remote drive. I'm guessing but I think the OU don't have a Pserver or a Kserver... although I could be wrong. I don't know enough about the servers to know what kind of unix boxes they have yet I could SSH to. I need to go and talk to more people. Still all very fustrating.

From the mac I CVS checkedout the source code to the zoom family tree stuff and then began to find my way though all the code. All very fustrating, the code that exists to run the diamond touch stuff never came up on my google searchs. Paul had some examples which ran in Java ( harray), and I was trying to figure out how to use them. Over lunch ( was is positivisum) mention was made of a diamond touch subsystem. After stuggleing with 3( count them ) diffrent java IDE's I eventually found something i could maniuplate. A little low level but hay that's cool. Y&P and the new woman Eva left for high tea while I hacked into the code which began to work!

I then got the pure zoomView to work and now just need to use the background thread feature of zoomView to pick up the touch and box events I have a couple of days doing PHD stuff but hope to have something primative on friday.

when i got home Yvonne emailed me a very excellent link to the diamondSpin people. Diamond spin hopefully if enough people linkt to it then it will appear in Google.

I think it might be possible to hack the diamond hardware and project up from a projector to some gound glass this would remove the hand shadow problem.

More cool tech.

Ruth spoke to the guy on the train and he was selling ( i guess ) these things. They have a pen that looks at special markings on paper to figure out where the pen is on the page. The idea is then you can use this to record paths of what people have written on a page ( without scanning it in). A kind of real pen/paper interface for stroke recognition system.

Ruth is moving back to a physical note book. She can't find an online calendar than she can use without power/laptop on the train *. Intreastingly I am booting up a new physical note book primarly for all my on line passwords ( back up via photocopyer). I keep saying to people that as a programmer you are always competeing with paper. What makes paper note books work - light weigh zero boot time and zero recharge/discharge time and nice interface to drawing. Down side - no delete, and more over no find.

I love to play with the evaluation kit. maybe if I get the big display working next week.



* the laptop is hevey and ruth wants to be able to go in with lecutures on her ipod.

OU DVD so cool

I was watching the very excellent intro to the OU user interface design course. It was so wonderful it even had the bit with Tog putting salt into his coffee and falling into the literal basment. I must have seen that years ago and it all stuck in my mind. It was so cool if a little padded in the shoulders. Hay and the academic consultant was Simon the guy I share an office with now is that enough to freak you out or not?

Look back I think I have problems with the basic premise.

The essential background premise of program one was that you had a known user and have to provide then with some specific activity. Sounds basic and it is kind of right.

This does make things easy but it also ignores a second segment of development that is creating tools and facilities. For example did the inventor of the wordprocessor go out and try to develop a tool for writers? If someone asked you do something like this would you end up with something as general as a word processor. Surely the user testing with a number of authors would lead you to making a less general tool and produce something overly tailored to the task of the author.

As for facilities imagine creating a website to look a train time table, one might get side tracked talking to the people who look up train times and book them at a station. Clearly you can do a lot of the process of story boarding, not to mention testing. I still feel there is a difference working with people (experts) who know what they want what they do and non experts who aren’t sure what they want.

This is what used to be called technology push and market pull. Infact I think the best products sit nicely in the middle, think Google, eveyone wanted better searches and the google guys had the right social recogmentation technology.

For example take the process of designing a dating website. This might begin by noticing a number of faults with either other dating websites or dwell up on the problems that prevent a dateing website from being started. Perhaps you think what about a website where you enter in all your friends email address and the machine looks for a match between yours and someone else. If the machine finds a match then it emails the intermediary. The intermediary then answers the question is A suited to B. This would you think over come the perceived danger of meeting a deranged maniac. This would be a example of technology push with a sprinkling of market pull.

I guess the central problem is where the innovation happens. When the user interface designer is approached with a proposal then the innovation has already happened. This has defined the problem and the client ‘knows’ the solution, even if it is the wrong solution.

How might I start ?I think I would find some well known software disasters (Child Support Agency, Bull Ring) and find the ones where the wrong user interface killed the project.

may be I'm thinking about it to much, or many be things have changed.

Still just my own stupid impression be intreasting to see what people are going to do to revise it.

Am I insulting enough people here?

mesureing stress by keyboard.

I was having a chat about thinking of generating poetry to create memorable passwords with Paul. This moved on to thinking about measuring identityby using the way we type ( the pattern of time between keys ) as the measure.

Paul made the observation that we might type diffrently when angry or stressed. So the observation that we might beable to do a simple stress monitor by looking at the way we type. Quite a low tech way to augment a machine to measure users 'state'. down side is the training period.

I suggessted using the accellerometer in the laptop to detect taps against the side ( as I am stress punishment). Or have a soft club you could use to hit things - this would be measured and sent back to the stick.

languages

I wondered what the ideal language to develop graphic under interfaces in is ? Not Fortan Vs C or what ever. I was wondering if something like a functional language would be idea. Ok clearly a functional programming language is totally wrong as we need to maintain 'state' between the events. OK they did invent Object orientation to help out but languages like java and C++ need so many odd looking syntactical clugdges to make things work.

Do you need something like anonymous functions ? I would hope not. Objective C did do a good job in many places especially in saving documents to file but the reference counting conventions are evil.

Still its floating in the back of my mind.

What is this.

Welcome to my note pad on my new Ubiquity reseearch.

here goes.