Ceiling interaction at TEI.

Cool looking celing interface TEI.

http://instagram.com/p/Vj5e6mTX9l/

Meanwhile Philips have introduced a LED bulb the colour of which you can control from your iphone. I would love to have a way to control it programatically ( and have rooms gets bright red when your late for an appointment. )

http://www.meethue.com/en-US

http://www.lighting.philips.com/main/connect/tools_literature/lighting-apps.wpd

Starfire - vision of the future (in the 80's)

I love visions of the future. They get it so right and wrong at the same time. This one comes from Tog's (http://www.asktog.com/starfire/ ) website and covers the Starfire interface for Sun. Lovely pre-internet version of the future.

Ignore the haircuts.

Paper acceptance for Neurodiversity & HCI

Dear Nick Dalton,

Thank you for submitting to alt.chi 2013. After careful review, we are pleased to inform you that your paper Neurodiversity & HCI has been accepted for presentation at alt.chi 2013.

Please submit your final, camera-ready version on PCS by 17 Feb, 2013. (More specific instructions will follow on Wednesday.)

We encourage you to incorporate reviewer and juror feedback, as much as is feasible, into your final version.

Sincerely,
Amanda Williams and Daniela Rosner
CHI 2013 alt.chi co-chairs

WO-OH!!!! (wa-hay as they say here)  - I get to go to CHI-2013 which is the big human computer interaction conference.

How "Bullet Time" Will Revolutionise Exascale Computing

How "Bullet Time" Will Revolutionise Exascale Computing | MIT Technology Review

This is quite an over claim for a visualization. I quite like the notion of slowing time down and moving round it as a visualization method but I'm not convinced it's better than doing a normal interactive visualization of some sort. I guess the claim is more about creating something interactive from pre-rendered movies.

Still this sounds like something which could form a good research project - checking the utility of this method against some other method for user preference/accuracy/ insight.

Measuring insight would be the interesting problem.  

Technical Overview - Native Client — Google Developers

Technical Overview - Native Client — Google Developers

This allows you to compile C/C++ as a kind of in web browser app. I could build some very cool things with this ( If I had the time).

My job in simple words.

Can you explain your research using only the most used 1000 words ? 

Mine was

My work is the world of tomorrow.  My work is to help people become more able, to have stronger ideas, have stronger minds,  stronger memories, stronger voices. I do this through the use of computers. I think about how  humans talk to  computers. The computers of tomorrow will not be on your desk. They will not always use words to talk to you. You will have more than your finger to point at things.  I wonder about how we go about doing that. I like to make up a questions which ask why people find things on computers hard to use.To do this  I put computers into things like floors, walls, chairs, cups, things from the everyday world. My computers hide in things and watching us move them and they learn to work with people.

[ Translation I do human computer interaction research specifically ubicomp research ]


Others and I made some art stuff from 24 hanging balls ,   it shows people how many people use the stairs and how many use lifts. The plan was to see if we could use things and pictures to change peoples minds.   
We don't have computers to help people work together when they are in the same room. I have also looked at how people use a table made from computers and lights to help think about this. 

[ transation we built a ambient display sculpture to see if we could effect peoples behaviour regarding stair useage ] 

My student and I  made a shop where lights hid under bottles of red drink. The table would change the color of a light under a bottle to show how liked a drink was. If some one picked up a bottle the lights would show which drinks other people picked who liked that drink.  This is about taking good things from on line book shops and putting them in a real shop.

[ Transation - Phd student Gonzalo built a ambient recommender in to a wine shop ]  

My next work will look at helping people to wonder around large hard to go places and stop them getting lost. People who go to hospitals and other big places like that  can get lost easily. I want to ask about how to we get lost, how do we think about getting lost, what to we mean about hard to find our way? This both in the world of the real and the world inside the computer. Is getting lost in a computer just something we say or is it real getting lost?

[ translation - This year I'm looking at how we navigate from a ubicomp perspective ]

I also talk about people who can not read and write like me, or people who can not read faces, or people who can not sit still. They say they are not sick,  they are not wrong, they have good points. They can be strong but we only give money to doctors to find sick things  people have. They  not to look to find good things about these people.  I wonder what happens if we try to look at people's good points. How do we  go about making things for these people.

[ translation - I'm intreasted in neurodiversity, I have a number of nuerodiverse students  ]

I always need people to play on my things I make, this helps me learn how people use things and what is wrong with them ( the things that is).
[ Translation - I always need people for my experiments ]
[ Try it your self at ]

http://splasho.com/blog/2013/01/17/a-bit-more-about-the-up-goer-five-text-editor/

New public home page

I have just been given permission to put up an outside facing home page for myself.  Try me I'm interactive. 
http://users.mct.open.ac.uk/nd2563/

Surface-Isovists

They are back....

this time it's processing.

Screens in the Wild

UCL and Nottingham are having some interesting work on large urban screens in the public realm.


Screens in the Wild

Please steal these ideas

Its a new year and people like starting with predictions for the rest of the year. I thought I would start with not predictions but products that I'd like people to rip off and implement. This is mostly to show that if you put an idea online it doesn't mean to say that the big names for coming and steal it from you.

1. The first is the ability to buy advertising from Facebook based upon someone's status in the network. I would like to be able to focus my advertising  towards people who have more connections and are more influential than others. Come on Facebook this is one of the few ways you have some unique value.
2. I would like to find where you could put it into do not disturb mode but for a particular period of time. For example go silent for an  hour or two hours this way you can walk into a meeting turn your phone off and then after meeting and your phone was automatically switched back on. 
3. Currently unlike Google Mobile adverts are unintelligent. Most advertising online looks at what you're doing and reading and alters the adverts appropriately. This is one of the big major advantage of Google advertising in my opinion. Currently mobile adverts are still fairly dumb. I expect that adverting sdks  will allow the mobile developers to plug-in what you are doing and use that to driving adverts and more effective way. 
4. A book shop which lets you gift a e-book or kindle book

my prediction for this year is that 'skeuomorphic' will be the new word of the year. 

The Future of Interaction Design | UI Fuel

The Future of Interaction Design | UI Fuel



This is quite an interesting view of the process of interaction design and where is is going.

Lenovo Debuts 'Table PC' That You Can Play Monopoly On

Lenovo Debuts 'Table PC' That You Can Play Monopoly On

Table top interfaces go more mainstream with this attempt by Lenovo.  This is 27 inches wide and comes with a digital dice. I thought that something like Monopoly would be a good start for the these kinds of interfaces. Bascially they still don't have a universal solution to the multi-angle user interface problem - its running windows 8.