On occasion there’s something on my mind but it’s not quite worth the effort of crafting one of the perfect jewels of deathless prose that you, dear reader, are accustomed to finding on this here blog. In days past you would have been mercifully spared such ephemera. No longer. In the sidebar you can now peruse my twitter stream. One keystroke and something under a hundred and forty characters later, there it is. Of necessity more tightly phrased than this – and that’s the point. I like twittering, but I love reading my incoming feed.
Archive for the ‘collaboration’ Category
iServe – why you *do* need a web server on your iPhone
Monday, August 4th, 2008As usual, Mark picks up the clue stick while I’m still distracted by the shiny.
Structures of Participation in Digital Culture – online for free
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Or they’ll print and bind you one for twenty bucks, pretty good deal. lots of goodness here though including Game Engines as Open Networks and History, Memory, Place, and Technology: Plato’s Phaedrus Online.
Design Transformations at CHI 2008
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008I arrived in Florence last week fairly alert, considering the time difference from Sydney. I’d done the right thing and stayed awake for the last 20 hours of the flight, crashed at my hotel on arrival in the evening and got a good 10 hours sleep before the opening plenary.
It was worth it. I hadn’t heard of Irene McAra-McWilliam (Head of the School of Design at the Glasgow School of Art) before but I’m a fan now. Her speech was uplifting. She wove a tapestry of design history and theory, to come elegantly to the conclusion that designers in a connected world have a responsibility to enable others; to come to some problems not with a solution but with a box of tools.
This is just what I hope to do with my research into creativity support tools, and it’s what I’m seeing in my studies of creative place. I don’t need to design the perfect virtual studio; I need to design an environment with the right parts and the right affordances, to enable inhabitants to configure the perfect studio for their task.
Web3D 2008 Paper on The Design of Virtual Place for Creative Collaboration
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008I managed to put together what I think is a reasonable summary of my unpublished work so far on virtual place, in time for the Web3D 2008 deadline. The writing could of course always do with some polishing, but my main concern is that Web3D tends to be an engineering-focused conference and my paper is on human factors and design. However it is the venue that I want to get into – it’s the engineers that I want to convince! Otherwise we’ll just keep seeing virtual worlds built without real consideration of what it is that is being built – why this set of affordances? Why these cultural choices? So here it is; all anonymised for review but anyone reading this blog already knows my research so no point being coy about it here 
A Pale Shadow of Reality: Virtuality as a Second-Best Option
Friday, March 14th, 2008This rant kicks off with a Tech Republic article on telepresence that was linked in the February ‘08 Litmus. I’m reading Litmus because the lovely people at ACID have been kind enough to chip in on my research, and they went to the trouble of putting it together, so it’s clearly something I ought to be doing. Fortunately it’s an interesting read, at least to someone of my peculiar interests.
The linked article on the other hand, while being bang-on to my research topic, only serves to annoy me. It’s not that the article is wrong; it’s more that it expresses a widely-held but misconceived view of what telepresence is for and how it should be developed.
The headline sums it up nicely: Telepresence: The next best thing to being there. This reminds me of the early Virtual Reality hype. The idea is that the aim is to perfectly replicate what we already have – perfect photo-realism! Stereo vision! Touch! Taste! It’s what Baudrillard might call the simulator’s obsession with reality. And since we’ll never quite perfectly simulate reality until we have Gibsonian neural interfaces, then whatever we make will always be second best.
No need to draw this out. I am tired of this obsession. Reality is interesting, but human minds do not need to be tricked into a full sensory illusion in order for a technology to be useful. Text is immersive, when well written. Bodies moving in space is part of it, but it’s not the whole ball of wax. We construct our everyday mixed realities as we inhabit our own minds while simultaneously modeling the minds of those around us; considering our own context and the other contexts available to other people and systems that we are connected to. And not only in the moment; we include the potential availability of other connected realities, for example when we plan to pick up the phone when we get off an aeroplane.
Telepresence is its own thing; augmenting and interoperating with our other modes of communication and interaction just like the telephone and the post. It does not need to perfectly mimic reality, any more than virtual environments must be “virtual reality” (in the sense of realism). This conflation with realism is why I don’t use the term VR. I prefer VE, or even Ivan Sutherland’s “virtual worlds” when talking about a self-contained virtual place. But really the key for me is that unless you’re planning to wipe your users’ brains and create for them an entirely new self-contained context then you’re never making a new reality, you’re just making something that will be part of the rich and multifaceted realities that we already inhabit.
iCinema
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008I stumbled on this nice interview with Matthew McGinity about the T-visionarium and other iCinema applications. Note to self: consider 10M diameter by 4M height for the panorama cylinders in the prototype CVE.
Here’s a link to the video – not embedded because ZDnet’s embed code is dodgy.
Creativity from users
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008I tend to think about creative communities thriving in a demanding milieu; like Shakespeare’s community of playhouses around the Globe. In this TED talk, Charles Leadbeater reminds us that users themselves are creative; citing for example the user-driven collaborative invention of mountain bikes and the telephone conversation.
Loose Construing
Monday, February 18th, 2008Listening to the novelist and lecturer Sue Woolfe talking about neuroscience and creativity on Radio National, she brought up the role of loose construing in the creative process; and it does seem that this is the equivalent in individual creativity to what might be called a “brainstorming session” in group creativity, but with the benefit of not having to express every idea and connection in language.
