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.
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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.