Idea of the day

I was just putting the lambs to bed when I had an idea of something to do with a Wii controller. I found a way to hack into them but I wanted to think of some kind of creative thing you could do with them.

I wondered if it would be nice to get the wii controller to become a puppet interface. The position of the vertical controller controls the head and the position of the nun-chunk ( the other bit) becomes the controller of the arm - you end up with a muppet ( one controls the head and one arm ).

Using come body dynamics ( attach the body to the head and let it follow the head and arm ) via a physics simulation you could build a simple interface.

Perhaps this could be an interface which lets you record and play back so you can control many characters or perhaps you could have an interface where you are connecting to other people over the internet and you have a kind of strange Skype theatre.

software and space

I've been getting up to date on Agile development and what has struck me has been the interesting link between the team and space. Trying to do this remotely is partly about trying to overcome space - something we inhabit in a very tacit way. Makes me want to map out the conversations between people and how they sit. 

Could this be reproduced by some kind of 3D sound system? If not why not? 

Cockburn Alistair 2001 Agile Software Development Chapter 3 

http://ww5.introcom.net/~nkcho/article/AgileSwDevDraft3.pdf

Including an interesting bit on Information Radiators 

Follow the sun: distributed extreme programming development
Yap, M.  
WDSGlobal, Kirkland, WA, USA;

This paper appears in: Agile Conference, 2005. Proceedings
Publication Date: 24-29 July 2005
On page(s): 218- 224
ISBN: 0-7695-2487-7
INSPEC Accession Number: 8834446
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/ADC.2005.26
Current Version Published: 2006-04-03

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/TSE.2002.1019481

Rapid Software Development through Team Collocation

July 2002 (vol. 28 no. 7)

pp. 671-683

Stephanie D. Teasley

Lisa A. Covi

M.S. Krishnan

Judith S. Olson

Table top stuff

I liked this work from Microsoft. I like the basic notion of a camera looking down looking for objects and tracking them integrate them.  Simple possibly easy to do. Notice they had a high resolution camera.

Tim Kinberg visit

I last met Tim at the last (2009) CHI conference when he was running a workshop. He did some nice work with Alan a few years ago looking at people. 


notes from his talk 


The case for crystalline computing


 -UBbicomp/HCI/CSCW was at HP for a while. Just set up a company
Embedding computing in cities. 
SENSE, 
   - detect
SENSIBILIA,
  - what can be percived 
 Sensibility
  - respond to  


Embed virtuality 
Vast amount of digital signage on it. - Physical, explicit embedding 
Invisible embeded - augmented realist. 


WebSign (2001)- HP. 
Augmented reality  - will it ever work 
Anti-VJ projecting stuff on to buildings. 


Tim is interested in embedding hyper-links into the real world. 


Cooltown - web presence 
Google maps - 'favourate -place' redoing with 2D barcodes
Interacting with links ( remember this, do this, explain link). Ended up having problems with IR, it bounces and diverged. 
Made this work by embedding infrastructure (RFD tag reader) in the work and gave the tag (link) to the readers.


Puazza Mattenotti, Udine tracked people talking on phone ( looks nice)
Then all the stuff about the strange names that 
Technology strategy board - grant  http://www.innovateuk.org/
Krstls - location specific content ( info tied location exclusively ) 
Amscreen 


Crystalline computing is the opposite of cloud computing  

the sensor net is back on line

Yah! Proper research here we come!

Carpet in cloud up

The carpet is In and running and the cloud is up but hidden until we get the network going( networking keeps breaking down and we are not allowedto fix it) so
So we get snow which stops people coming in more later

The cloud

And hour into the lift and things looked very good . Then we discovered Richie had miss calculated the thickness of the struts and are now in a period of slowness as we improvise fix bits. Richie wants another trip to B&Q to sort things out perfectlyi. I want to get on with time is running out.

On the brink

Well the week has gone by pretty quik
Over the weekend we are putting the cloud up and the carpet in.
Richie flying in tonight , rope purchased, balls removed, software on cloud done, software on carpet done. Carpet tested on bare floor.
Paul and N. Doing some last minute stuff on the carpet.
Must remember to bring in camera coffee and sandwiches tomorrow.

In the end will it be worth it? The snow is keeping people out of the building. Note to self stop doing experiments in January.
Basic networking is still biggest problem still down still not working still no one to fix it.
Another experiment from hell?
Only one way to find out

The day of the cloud approaches

OK on friday was a good day. New H-Bridges turned up from America and I left while the great guys from Electronics came over to replace all the h-bridges and multiplexers. Looks like they have the internal power supply working. I was talking to RIchie today and he seems confident that he has got more motors working, which is good. 

I'm pleased not because its necessary but because it might mean we can run the experiment for longer. 

Hopefully R. will concentrate on getting the experiment observed. 

Notes in the end we went for a direct mapping from absolute number to height. The taller the the more people are using it. The idear was to have something that looks like its moving all day ( you will always see a change). This way you always see the number of people in the building the eb and flow of the day. Could be good. 

Sixth Sense.

The Sixth sense stuff is a good example of using gesture + microprojectors to do something funky. Just don't listen to the music.

On the you would expect 'a crack team' to be less lame front I found a rather pathetic vision of the future on the BBC here . Everyone hides behind 'naturally its impossible to tell the future' but 10 years is how long it took to get high definition TV from the lab into the TV store. I think what most of what they said is laughable which is odd given that some of this is from paid 'Futureologists'. i think we all spend to much time thinking of next month to think of next year.

void

I'm in the xmas void. between xmas and new year. Used to be one of my creative times of year but now Its just child care child care child care.

Did you know that there is no UK equivalent of Mint ?  http://www.mint.com

something for a smart up and coming UK company todo now that logging in to your Bank is becoming  so pathetically difficult on line.

This from HP labs looks fun.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2009/oct-dec/cense.html

also another truism but I don't seem much of these games on the  on the iPhone yet, which is odd I think its rather obvious.

'Location-based games will spread, littering the landscape with puzzles, monsters and easter eggs,' 
from 


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6874009/Technology-predictions-for-2010.html?utm_source=telegraph&utm_medium=TD_Technology&utm_campaign=Technology2412

Low day

Very low today ( long story) I have noticed that the sensor net had collapsed over the weekend.
This was due to memmory allocation problems in java/processing. Need to restart the server at intervals to cure this.

I've got the last of the balls that came off after the crash back on. 5 are not working. I was hoping to work on the solution at home over Xmas but it looks like the motor controller is dead. I can't even get the PIR sensor to work ( you need a bread board and I am now at home ).

The pressure is really on now. I've got to get a small grant application in, reformat the CHI paper as a work in progress then do the other grant application in , put the cloud up and run the experiment  not to mention do this couple of days of 'extream' exam writing for M255 and atten to full days of a sand pit event. January is going to be such a crap month + I'm not looking forward to two weeks of child care with out a break over the next couple of weeks.