Back to work - surface is coming

Being with Paul is so inspiring at times.

I've got a fairly bad day today finishing a student exercise. This is the first draft so I am going to write this, send it out then have a meeting then rewrite it, end it out then have a meeting rewrite this, send it out then have a meeting, have a meeting then send it out again. Given the acreage of corrections its hard to get started and more importantly its hard to want to do it well given that everyone feels obliged to correct what is there anyway so no matter how well you do something you will still have to re-do it.

Still its a small price to pay for the chance to do some interesting research.

Back to Paul. What I like is while the last experiment is a blast he is so encouraging to go out and do something . I mentioned a couple of things - one about place and another about text based adventures that he was positive about. Just the kind of lift I need at the moment.

The other big news is that the Microsoft surface is ordered. I'm wondering if it would fit well in the office behind me. A good chance for me to go out and get a book on #C.

Computer languages I love that experience of catching the next language. It comes every 5 years and somehow reminds me of the Olympics.

This new one Field sounds cool I like the notion of inbuilt editors. From Paul looking at some Ballet dancers research. I would like to play with the python syntax to. Lets see if I can do multi touch with it. This or Scratch I can't decide.

bad day

Today was a bit of a blow out of a day. I had to do a presentation to the faculty about what is ubicomp. I was filling in for Y at the last moment. The down side was that I couldn't get anyone to do the experiment in the morning. Then Amelia was ill so I had to go home in the afternoon.

So over the two days we go zero people through the experiment.

So I'm not wild about this...

lost weekend

I've been writing a student exercise and began thinking about one writing a single user adventure now titled interactive fiction. The idear was to use hashmaps to represent each room, these would be read in from an xml file.

The things I wanted to do was create an audio game - use speech synthesis to get the text to be read out so you could play it on an iphone or something with your vision else ware.

I was chatting with Ruth and we both agreed the narrative and characterisation and mostly dialog in games is in my experience quite pitiful. So the notion would be to bring this to the centre of the game so you would focus your efforts on it.

So one thing irritates me about interactive fiction it all appears to be written in the first person "You see this, you see that". I thought it would be good do something in the third person ( Lara picks this up, Lara looked round the room to do this).

I think the second thing I liked the look of was introducing a companion who would travel with the main character to get more description out of her/him. In the case of doing a tombraider like interactive fiction I like the notion that someone goes with Lara and they don't get on.

"You want me to jump of this ? are you crazy, do I look insane to you or something".

Looking at the sites on how to write interactive fiction this appears to be a no no - it is thought to interfere with the game begin run by the player.

So looking around and after an excellent wikipedia article on audio games, strong disabled access notion. I'm not against this but I think with mobile audio systems a strongly audio game would be good. Most of the audio games require good use of live stereo sound to get positions.

I checked out the iTunes appstore and after a copy of advent (ure) there is nothing strongly audio game is ( lots of audio in games but nothing audio centric).

http://www.audiogames.net/page.php?pagefile=articles

Ruth and I thought it would be fun to have an augmented reality game where you operated like an adventure but you do this in the real world. So you create an alternative London but set in the spaces of the real one. Naturally you can still walk into any public part but inorder to go from one space to another in the adventure game and get an audio description you have to solve a puzzle(unlock a door, carry an item or something). I quite like this. I guess to be sure of it being interesting I would have to look at a lot of similar augmented reality games. The HCI lit is full of them for some reason.

I should really get on with some proper research but I might come back to this at a later date. No in the end i realised this was too complex for the M255 students to handle.

very cool

more links

Flat cables .

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000YFBQEU

http://www.ramelectronics.net/showPDF.ep?pdfName=tips%20and%20techniques.pdf

http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi?product=BARS#NFLS-x30

Narrative and games

I was thinking about the solitude of the average platform/adventure game.

I was thinking it would be good to have a second character. At this point you could have lots of interaction between them building up the tension. So for example you could walk into a fairly normal space but then A says 'You look worried', B says 'I've got a bad feeling about this..'

I guess the idea would be to build up the character and the environment by having large amounts of dialogue. The dialogue would be pre-scripted, so the player simply triggers this dialogue by moving from one space to other, doing something, finding something, finding someone, or just spending to long in some space. With a modern DVD (forget blueray!) the potential for having huge amount of general dialogue is significant.

I was thinking about proto-typeing this and thought about how one might implement a character engine. One cheap way might be to pull together a text based adventure. One thing which might be interesting would be to use the speech synthesis options on the mac to create an audio games machine, almost no graphical user interface.

Thinking about it why do most adventure games work in the first person ( you walk down the path , you see a snake.. ) Why not an adventure game more like a book ( Lara strode down the path, lara noticed the snake). I quite like the idea of something that you could capture the text output of which would generate your own a 'book'.

The two other elements I like in an adventure game - use a block world/SHRDLU like interface so you could issue simple instructions ( get red block ) and then the system generates (Lara puts the blue block from the treasure chest and puts it on the ground, Lara opens the treasure chest, lara gets the red block..

I also like the notion of using a language where much description is generated using grammars so you get a little variation with the same central theme. Bu then i like the notion of a patter matching more prolog like language to express the whole thing in.

Perhaps I could do something basic in processing

predictions

OK I predict that within 5 years somone will make a facilty on a mobile phone/smart phone that will put your phone into meeting mode ( off ) but this will come back on automatically after 30mins,1 hours, 90 mins, 2 hours.

eduroam note

Hay I'm sitting in UCL using eduroam to talk back to the OU. I'm quite impressed worked with the iPhone too!

Some weirdness with sending email from iPhone but it looks to be working now. Strange how difficult it is to extract any internal information from an application. Trying to figure out what is broken is so tricky.

Of earcons and technology transfere

10 Papers about auditory display to start with

http://www.icad.org/node/395

At the ACM http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=1101530&type=issue&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=63935125&CFTOKEN=60674422

Mia D. stopped by to tell me about the technology transfer officer.

http://intranet.open.ac.uk/strategy-unit/offices/innovation-enterprise/

www.open.ac.uk/research/innovation-and-enterprise/

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/innovation/fundingkt/bpc/forms.htm

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/cmsweb/downloads/rcuk/innovation/bpc/proposal.pdf

Kathryn Dunn was mention along with A.Hardy ?

DANA Centre

Paul found this link to a vidieo of the DANA/Science museum gig

You can see me with my table, Yvonne and Jeffs table not to mention Paul/John in the background, well its everyone, Dayphone, Jen's table

Surface Tension: Interactives and workshops from Dreamtime Film on Vimeo.

Cloud watching.

Spoke to dave this morning. He is rebuilding new spindles and will drop some round as he builds them. We would like to have the cloud and the table working for a visit by VC on November 10th.

I'm watching the cloud move.

on threshold 2000 out of 4095

going down 1/3 grey OK
going down 1/4 orange OK.

Orange 4 eye look to be coming out.
Going up

Up grey 3 slower then 1 on full power. I've tried changing the min power to 2100 ( >50%) but using a very quick increase to min voltage followed by slower increase to full power.

LCD multi touch $2990.00

We have been talking about a large multi touch LCD display as the basis for the table industry. With this you could put your feet beneath it ( and treat like a real table ). 30 inchs isn't bad.



Not with a border.

talk Siân Lindley from Microsoft

Play and Wayve

The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga's Homo Ludens http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/rodriges

Roger Caillois http://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Play-Games-Roger-Caillois/dp/025207033X

Salen & Zimmerman Rules of play http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rules-Play-Game-Design-Fundamentals/dp/0262240459/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1255521359&sr=1-2-fkmr1

TellTable

Constraints good for creativity

Marget Boden

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creative-Mind-Myths-Mechanisms/dp/0415314534

Broadcasting within a tiny community.

Limited period of time - implied people planned more intensively.

So context provided structure.

Bill Gaver Ludic engagement with no rules

how ever here the constraints helped with creativity. Constraints might be outside (cultural/social )

the Wayve help to be bbuilt by the Technology partnership

ten little fingers

Lovely animation. I would love to try this interface even better if I could do some user evaluation. Makes me want to do a user interface with with two mice. This is really a bi-manual interface.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

QRCodes

I was chatting with Mike and mentioned I fancied building an erring or broach on Ponoko which would be an engraved with a QRCode.

I thought I could use a processing library but it turns out the library needs a perfect image. I couldn't find an Mac application that worked but I've down loaded an iPHone application that looks OK ( works against the screen)

I've found to problem which is the image has to be the quite big. I wanted something which could capture an image of a face ( + earrings/ broach ) then pull out the image in much worse conditions. i.e something like a party picture or an image you might grab of someone.

OK so two problems with QRCode firstly it needs to be big secondly its a binary image which is hard to encode as a physical image cut into something. I thought about doing something with rectorvision glyphs. But they are hard to cut too ( the image is bits within bits within bits )

So I've been wondering how difficult it would be to design a low bit rate glyph which only had one body with a number of holes. Perhaps a good masters project except the students never want to do interesting projects.

cool link of the day

http://www.environmentallights.com/shop/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&keyword=infrared

Yvvone gave a good talk this morning. At the end I met Meiron Williams who had built his own table as an MSc project. He had found an excellent location to find predone IR stip LEDs.

Using iPhone app this is the smallest image I could get.

I've been trying to make some QRCode jewellery. I've experimented with a code for QRCode reader but the processing one needs perfect images. I've been looking for others but they mostly seem to be on mobile phones and iPhones and I just get the run around from download sites that 'claim' they have one but don't.

The public wireless doesn't work with the iPhone here so I can't experiment on it.

Looks like If I do want to do something with tangible calculator then I will have to use rector vision.

Or invent my own - paul suggested multiple colours (R,G,B). hard to engrave.

Visit from the Vice chancellor and a little bird

I came in this morning thinking that it would be quite, quiet. I normally have the ground floor of the JLB2 to my self and I've taken to unplugging my headphones and listening to music via the speakers since there is no one else around to bother and I don't get sweaty ears.

You can imagine my surprise when I found not one but three people around, even Jeff turned up later. It only took me a second to realise that the VC was coming in for 10 minuets at 12:45. and this ment a higher then normal turn out.

It was during this time a bird flew on to my desk. I no not from were. Quite odd. It was so tired I managed to pick it up and carry it outside ( picture proof above).

Martin Bean comes over as nice enthusiastic person I quite like him. Not many people turned up to see our illustrious leader of the OU. So I think the VC must have gone off thinking that the computing department must be only 20+ people strong and very productive for it. To be honest most of the people present were the admin staff so I guess the VC thinks we must be leading the world with such a high proportion of female computing lectures.

I spent the afternoon testing my new IPhone app. It takes about 30 mins to do the touch swiping test. I did it once using the simulator and the mouse and once using the touch pad.

I've also requested a meeting about the cloud on Monday.

Yvonne is currently in Disney land at Ubicomp conference.

Looks like I will be second supervising G. I must meet up with this industrial sponsor which might want to come in as an industrialist on the signage project.

Leverhulme app submitted

Got the OK on the numbers and finally pressed go. Feels good and I can't change it now but strangely it only gets to the OU central people to recheck the work they just did. Still its in the que.

Verification

I see a lot of programming work with statements like ( by redoing software like this it would be possible to do formal things with it ) . For example functional programming languages make this big claim that using this you could make something 'provable'.

This is the first time I've every seen something actually proved and its of some use. I think the next thing they should attempt is a garbage collector. I wonder how they handled multi-threading ( I guess that's what took 6 years )