Virtual architecture idea of the day.

Virtual architecture idea of the day.

1. Get two cameras to view scene in a remote location - in real time.
2. Using something like a Kinect find out where people are walking past a large display. 
3. Warp the two images so that the moving person sees the virtual location change perspective as they might expect to do so when walking past a 'hole in the wall'. 
4. does this give the impression of hole or is it seen as some kind of visual break down?
5. Does this make you feel like the other place is more there than the flat case ? 

Data outage

I came in this morning to find that the server had crashed ( out of memory ) over the weekend. I've restarted the server.

We now have the feed back on the paper ( I must finish reading ).

Families and Sense of Community

**** Augmenting refrigerator magnets: why less is sometimes more http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1182475.1182488 


***Promoting awareness of work activities through peripheral displays http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/506443.506527




**HomeNote: supporting situated messaging in the home http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1180875.1180933


Far too many things on my mind.
The whereabouts clock: early testing of a situated awareness device
  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1125451.1125694


Keywords I like virtual presence and fostering a sense of group belonging. 


***Busy families' awareness needs     10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.09.006


Resilience in the face of innovation: Household trials with BubbleBoard doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.07.008


**Homes that make us smart 10.1007/s00779-006-0076-5


Desiring to be in touch in a changing communications landscape: attitudes of older adults http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518962


Nice A comparison of reading paper and on-line documents  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/258549.258787


The iterative design and study of a large display for shared and sociable spaces
10.1007/s00779-009-0242-7

Goal

Well I spoke to Yvonne and said I could have functioned with 15 and prefered 20. Paul said he would like 30 so I put up 4 posters and sent out another begging email.

As of this afternoon we have 31 responses (yes!).
I'll keep posters up and process all the data for Monday next week.

ON the bad news front the floor pads have not been delivered and I need to reorder them ( DHL failed to deliver they had the wrong number ).

Ambient displays

Paul finally saw some of the analytical tools applied to the Jenny Lee Building.  I think he was quite impressed. 

Definitely thinks there is a short ( one week ) study to do with 4 displays each positioned in a different place which possesses a different spatial property. 

Netiom sensor

Well I managed to find the 7805 Voltage regulator and today (despite terrible headache) managed to get the electronics for the third sensor working. 

For some strange reason I'm getting strange signals popping out from the sensor (not timed not triggered not sure why.

 

With the PC from home and more wire I should get the server working in the meeting room on the far side of the building. With this I can begin upgrading the network to start talking directly to the main machine and so get the visualisations working

on the good idears front

Paul had a fantastic one which is too exciting to blog about - I must go and check the physics people out to see what they can advise/loan. 

Jeff had a good one to we where discussing the source of noise on the the DTouch table. He said it was electrical noise over the power I said it was background radiation. I pulled the laptop powercable out to prove it and when I did so the noise disappeared from the DTouch signal. Looks like if we could suppress the noise on the power-supply we could get much better recognition without getting into clever signal processing. 

Jeff reminded me it is less than a month be for UIST so I better get a move on with the floor stickies too.

Slow computing

Odd conversation on the bus. We where talking about the days in computing when your compiler would take a few mins to compile and you had to pause and reflect. Or the times when a computation would take a day or two to run. There was something about the sense of liberation that begin forced NOT to use your computer but still feeling like you where working gave you. This required big computation and a non multitasking computer. At my university they had a period when all the computers where switched off on Friday the 13th to stop a particular virus. Again it was quite nice to have a day without machine, no email and no guilt. 

I used to get my students to send in essays in text format so I would get my Mac to read them out - while I listened I would tidy my office and desk and wish I had more regular essay deadlines so I could organise stuff more than twice a year.  

Generally you hate waiting though. Apple have announced a new Mac with a 64 Gb Flash drive. Lower power plus I'm told very fast on the boot up, Someone mentioned a Linux lap top that boots in 2-3 seconds and how this changes the way you think/use the machine.   

People take time to boot up as well. I often wondered what would happen if the operating system took a picture of the desktop just before you switched off and then used the image as the start up screen image. Giving you a chance to pull your thoughts together put your mind back in the state it was in - with the image possibly greyed until it was ready for interaction. Moments later the real (same desktop would return). We do need more automatic open window in open application mechanisms ( Safari 3.0 has restore all last windows which I like alot). 

So sometimes we need speed and hate interruptions - games, while working to a deadline and when having the machine disappear completely and getting a desktop back would be good. 

Like most people I think I was taken by MW's ubicomp paper where he mentioned peripheral or ambient computing a necessity when 1000s of devices are vying for attention  but this appears to be something which hasn't emerged. Doursh had a paper saying this was effectively an economic impossibility - how can you sell a new device that you buy and forget for example mobile phone/ipod. Computing as pumping, heating or electricity, but look at the number of services that have fallen by the wayside - pneumatic air, the failure of widespread garbage disposal in the UK (we recycle/compost). 

Yvonne has mentioned thinking about slow computing - taking things like slow food campaign ( the opposite of fast foot ) which has been applied to slow cities and thinking about what slow computing might mean. 

well thats my 10 mins of reflection over time to get back to doing a paper. 

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 ?

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.

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.