Despite United “Airlines” best efforts to prevent my attendance I’m at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, and twittering about it. And I just ran into the inimitable Ian Bogost, who was just visiting us in Sydney. Now try to tell me that geography still means what it used to mean.
SIGGRAPH 2009
August 6th, 2009Postmodern Virtualities
June 10th, 2009An automatic summary (from the Mac OS X summarize service) of Mark Poster’s Postmodern Virtualities.
And if that’s too long, here it is as a tweet.
Sixteen slides
May 1st, 2009A summary of where my research is up to (PDF), with some notes on metholodogy.
Ad-hoc workspace sharing prototype
April 28th, 2009I’ve been IKEA-hacking. There’s a great community that does this for real – do you think mine counts? I’ll explain first.
I recently posted an idea for ad-hoc workspace sharing for under $US 500/person. The idea is simple: get one of the new LED-based micro projectors, tape it to a webcam and point them at a surface. Then everything the camera sees can be projected back onto the same surface, or more interestingly to a remote setup along the same lines. Now two people at different locations can share a workspace.
When figuring out how to prototype this, I then thought of the ubiquitous angle-poise task lamp. Apparently Anglepoise is actually a brand, which I did not know – it’s the true original, designed by George Carwardine in the UK in 1934. It’s this lamp that Jac Jacobsen found in a shipment of sewing machines, licensed and redesigned in 1937, resulting in the classic Luxo L-1 luminaire. Some version of this architects’ lamp then inspired John Lasseter to animate Luxo Jr., the short film that became the spirit of Pixar.
Now, I’m going for low-cost, ad-hoc and ubiquitous. I’m not going to use a $200 Luxo L-1 or Anglepoise Original 1227. Not unless I find a new source of funding, anyway 
In any case, it’s more appropriate for me to use the most low-cost, ubiquitous version of this superbly functional modern design: IKEA’s TERTIAL. $18.95 from my local IKEA in Sydney, $8.99 in the US.
The height is perfect to throw a 30cm/12″ diagonal display from the 3M MPRO110 Micro Projector, and if you remove the lamp assembly the projector fits beautifully in its place, with room to spare for a webcam. Here’s my blueprint and a shot of the design in situ. If you make one too, we can try them out.
Next is to design and implement some user interaction methods. One quite nice thing is that the field of view of the camera is wider than the lightfield of the projector. This means that we can use the projected area for direct manipulation of things in the mediaspace, and use the area around it as a gestural interaction zone for anything that effects the mediaspace as a whole. Some sketches:
Dear Alain de Botton, here’s why we don’t tweet about Descartes’ Second Treatise:
April 12th, 2009There is no Descartes’ Second Treatise.
(I’d have called this post Notae in Programma Quoddam, which is funnier, but only four people would have got it).
I must first confess that I thoroughly enjoy Alain de Botton’s works of popular philosophy. I love his writing, his way with words and ideas. Tragically however, he is a living philosopher that people have heard of. He is therefore being asked to comment on various contemporary matters, pretty much at random, without regard for whether he’s thought about them properly. Even worse, he’s being asked by Britain’s Sunday Times.
My own research is into collaborative technologies. I’m mostly interested in interaction design, and don’t know as much about the social side as some people, but I can spot a clanger when one is pointed out to me in a none-to-subtle yet hilarious and scathing parody.
Ad-hoc workspace sharing for under $US 500 per person
April 6th, 2009BT-1 Wireless webcam: $US 149
and
3M MPRO110 Micro Projector: $US 300
= $USD 449 (= $AUD 626) plus something for shipping.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt1_4Hr_-FA
Tape them together, point them at a surface in arm’s reach, set up a screen-sharing videoconference with someone else with the same setup, and you can share a projected workspace. Cheap, fast and adaptable.
Eight slides
March 20th, 2009These slides are what I’m using to summarise my project these days. I’m not much of a one for bullet points though, so if you’d like the text you’ll need to come along next time I do a presentation. Or, you could start with the about page.
Reading Susan Greenfield
February 24th, 2009Susan Greenfield’s latest book is interesting, but it’s jam-packed with assumptions that I can’t agree with. As I follow each chain of logic based on an unsupported premise, I become more and more exhausted. So I’m afraid I’ve only read halfway through the book so far. I suppose that she might blame this on my short attention span, caused by too much time in front of the Commodore 64 in my childhood. Nonetheless – I can’t quite accept that someone so accomplished and brilliant could write an entire book without something of value in it, so I shall persist.
Meanwhile the press has got hold of the Cliff’s notes. I fully expect that we will now be witness to a “debate” in our own (Australian) media between various people whose entire understanding of this issue is gleaned from the British press’ misreporting of half-understood press releases containing excerpts from speeches made about a book that obliquely references actual research.
So below is my response to the Daily Mail’s scintillating ‘Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist‘.
I’m halfway through Susan Greenfield’s book; and although she’s a scientist I’m still waiting for her to introduce some science to support her assertions. It’s full of sentences that begin along the lines of “I often wonder whether” and “It is hard to see how [...] this [...] will not result in” (both of those examples are from your article above).
Baroness Greenfield’s stature as a scientist and public intellectual make her comments worth considering. However if I may put this the way that she seems to prefer: I often wonder whether assertions of correlation made without evidence of causation might perhaps be claptrap.
Ahem.
Ouch
January 29th, 2009Really, ouch. However I am now a big fan of the Sydney Hospital Hand Unit.
OZCHI 2008
December 24th, 2008Quite a cohort from CCS went to OZCHI this year. It was my first, and I got a pretty good overview; I presented a paper, attended a workshop and participated in the Doctoral Consortium. That last was particularly excellent. Paul Dourish, Margot Brereton and Wally Smith generously gave their time to help a roomful of PhD students make a little more sense of our personal maelstroms. All of them helped me considerably. I cite Paul rather a lot, and I’m kind of a fan so that was a buzz as well.
Naturally I twittered constantly, so my stream-of-consciousness impressions of OZCHI 2008 are archived for eternity, along with everyone else’s.
