September 25th, 2009
So apparently Rupert Murdoch thinks he owns the idea of an Electronic Programme Guide that uses a grid layout, as he bought a company with a patent from the year 1999 to that effect. And for the last decade this company has been extracting fealty hither and yon, in the form of license agreements to anyone who wants to put up a service to tell people what’s on telly, and suing them if they demur. And now Freeview Australia seems to be having some trouble securing a license.
It looks like this is the Gemstar patent.
The reason I write is that I was working for Optus Multimedia, a division of Optus Vision back in 1998, and in that year I made an EPG in a grid layout, for delivery on the web (including a WebTV version).
So without further ado, here is some prior art for EPGs with a grid layout, from May 1998.
Note: grid layout, customise button for changing order of channels, and tiny WebTV-compatible resolution
Posted in Interaction Design, design | No Comments »
September 19th, 2009
I’ve been obsessed lately with form factors for interactive devices. To the extent that I’ve been carrying around models of tablet computers made of foam core and acetate, just to get a feel for how they might fit into life.
It might be considered a little silly to carry around blocks of shiny foam that don’t do anything. Nonetheless. And @timbomb tells me that I’m conducting a phenomenological investigation, so there.
So why these sizes?
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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
September 10th, 2009
OK, I just have to point this out. We seem to be experiencing a mini moral panic, because two girls trapped in a drain called for help on Facebook instead of dialing 000. Now, I have kids and I would want them to dial 000 in that situation. But I’d also want them to try facebook, twitter, or whatever other social networks they were connected to.
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Posted in politics, social | 3 Comments »
August 31st, 2009
[With apologies to Bruce Sterling]
Take a look at the wonderful Immersive Workspaces from Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red. Wonderful because it’s a great piece of work and a real breakthrough, but also because it’s not done yet. That is, if its goal is as stated “a complete collaboration solution”, and “the ultimate destination in real-time collaboration”.
Immersive Workspaces - avatars view slides in a virtual meeting room
You see, what they’ve built looks like a great solution for real-time communication and coordination – but that’s not the same thing as collaboration. Let’s take a look. I’ll wait here while you watch the the video.
The system provides the following task-oriented headings: News, Team, Meetings, Actions, Media, Journal, Stats, Admin, and Go 3D. This is looking like the next generation of groupware, with that last link promising a sprinkle of social avatar-chat sugar on top, courtesy of Second Life.
The use case shown is called a “collaboration session” – but let’s look at what the participants (Laura, Adam and Sakura) actually do.
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Posted in collaboration, creativity, design, virtuality | 1 Comment »
August 26th, 2009
Taptaptap make iPhone apps, but they’re not an old-fashioned development shop. Times have changed.
We have no central office and everyone involved is in a different part of the world.
They’re a cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed team. Which raises the question:
So how do we work efficiently on our projects?
They tried asynchronous work but then started getting better results with synchronous chat sessions, sending images back and forth. Then breakthrough – they introduced a shared workspace, which they describe as a virtual room. It’s one-way and ad-hoc, but it’s working. And there is definitely a design opportunity for better creativity support tools in this space.
Posted in Interaction Design, collaboration, creativity, design | No Comments »
August 6th, 2009
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.
Posted in conferences, games, place | No Comments »
June 10th, 2009
An 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.
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Tags: generative, theory
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May 1st, 2009
Posted in research log | No Comments »
April 28th, 2009
I’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:
Posted in CCS-blog, Interaction Design, collaboration, creativity, design, mixed reality, research log, virtuality | 3 Comments »
April 12th, 2009
There 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.
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Posted in collaboration, personal, politics | 2 Comments »
