playful infomagic

As of 12pm Dec 6 here, I am still unable to log into a freshly patched WoW, where one of the new features is exactly that, an easier and more sophisticated communication between the players. Most likely, it will not be comparable with what Fanning has been working on, but the trend is indicative: the army of virtual explorers does need and - I hope - will appreciate new tools/mediums to interact with each other.

PS: As of Jan 6, of 2007, I should admit that the rumors about "easier and more sophisticated communication between the players" have bees hugely exaggerated. Perhaps, the Burning Crusade, an extension of the existing WoW, will be offering something in this direction, but newly-patched version does not provide any new features. In fact, the new version made communication between the players seeking to team-up with each other more difficult, compare to the earlier version.

"Cisco enters Second Life" on Google Video

I somehow find the clip horrible; it does not convey any of the qualities of the SL, and is rather polluted with a heavy corporate talk. But well, n00bs have to start somewhere.

This whole new thing might, perhaps, motivate me to restart this long time dead journal; but we will see how addictive Second Life is, compared to we all know wowhat.

Source: Philips Design collaborates with Rivers Run Red to enter virtual world of Second Life®

"A teenage girl’s video clip on YouTube, about her breakup with her boyfriend, has been viewed over 155,000 times in the last five days", writes Ross Dawson in his blog Trends in the Living Networks.

He believes that the key reason of such a popularity burst is not her story per se, but the way she looked when presenting it- she was playing with features on Logitech web cameras that allow her to change her appearance.

Dawson directly link this to the phenomenon of avatars, representation of us in the 'virtual worlds". He does not elaborate much on the issue, just says that new technologies will be making it easier and easier to be "not you" in the Internet, or in any digital real in general.

I think it is an interesting, and important issue here. The need, and the practices of making avatars may look like almost 'obvious' for many people in LJ, as well as for many players of on-line games (myself, I have been heavily involved in the World of Warcraft recently). But I increasingly think that there is something very fundamental here, that one *must* build avatars to exist in these digital worlds, that they *only* become possible if populated by 'avatars' (here some hint why the majority of corporate 'communities' and 'intranet' keep falling short, and do not promote anything comparable to the live and agile worlds of 'open collaboration' and creativity of the Big Internet.

It seems to me that 'doing avataring' is a kind of new literacy. One must create and manage them to not only reap the benefits of the online mediums, but simple to enable their existence. Without mediation of avatar-like agencies these worlds became a parody, an hollow entity.

This is is absolutely blunt assumption I am making. No 'literature search' or proper googling done yet; may be it is banality for some people. I know, though, that this of thinking will feel a resistance in the 'corporate worlds' for sure.

Slashdot was started by two guys in Holland, Michigan in 1998 as what would now be called a blog.

"Everybody's talking about the participation age, but we've been living it for eight years," says Valerie Williamson, vice president for marketing at OSTG, the open source technology group, which operates Slashdot.

Is Slashdot the future of media?

Zimbra demonstrates an interface and ways of working of its new collaborative system, Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Many features, for example, tags and archiving, are very similar to Gmail, yet there are also new (and interesting) additions, like drug&drop-ing of the tags (in fact, of any objects in the content area).

I am still missing a more sophisticated management tools for the tags, like their structuring, or visualization. And of course all that is far, far from a real visual navigation tools (e.g., similar to the Raskin's zoom interface, or semantic maps).

What is very appealing, at least to the business clients, is that the system is (or could be) very integrated with multiple business applications, not only on a level of a calendar or Internet-telephony, but also with more sophisticated tools, like purchasing orders, or DBs etc.

Still, however, this is an email management system, rather than a true collaborative environment; I don't know how this can be linked to a wiki-type of applications, for example. But the presentation is well-done, and very appealing (to business suits, I mean).

smart_economy - new interesting blog I've recently discovered: "A forum for discussing emerging technologies with built-in intelligence or embedded smarts. The Smart Future is already here, just the last page hasn't been written yet!" (uuh, that I would debate a bit.)

There is a couple of recent pieces that are *very* interesting (besides many one which are 'just' interesting):

Smart Virtual Photostudio: Photographing your imagination - the ever important issue of capturing and expressing your 'crazy' ideas.

Future Technology Losers - somewhat provocative overview of the future 'loosers', which includes nearly all today's champions - RFIDs, smart houses, networks of connected devices etc. Based on the recent article from Wired, Some Technologies Will Annoy

"In this paper we discuss the role of silence within a virtual organising context. By drawing upon existing studies on virtual teams, we argue that members' silence may not always have negative effects on team performance and team relationships, but that silence is an embedded part of this environment as it reinforces the very nature of virtuality.  The paper raises issues related to the construction of silence in the virtual team context and the implications it has on team interactions." - The sound of silence: The case of virtual team organising, by N. Panteli & S. Fineman, Behaviour & Information Technology, Vol 24 (5) September 2005, pp 347-352.
This assumingly small article raises an important issue, I think. Current debates about 'virtual collaboration' are so much skewed towards 'efficiency & productivity' that the level of noise in any communication there is equaled to level of work.

To have space for silence means have some space for thought incubation and creativity. "Construction of science' is a method I'd love to learn more about.

I remember, from my early days of practicing psychotherapy, that managing silence was an incredibly difficult business, especially in a group environment.

There are practitioners who do it so well that the silence becomes the key healing factor, and a very powerful one. But they are exceptions, these masters. As a rule, both participants and trainers are afraid to 'construct silence' and do not tolerate it.

PS: I made the pictures yesterday, between the lessons in a 'center of adult education' (I *love* the name!). There was a kind of exhibition there, apparently of the students's works, but the paintings, hanged all around the building, did not have any labels with the authors' names or the titles.

LA Weekly publishes a large, interesting, and very *multifocal* (in fact, too multifocal) piece on the 'new-media-art' movement - Digital Universe. It is not so much an article with a point, but rather an overview of the recent developments and the *names* of people exploring what can be very broadly described as 'digital territory'.

I plan to follow few names/leads from the article, and may write separately on them later on, time allowing.

The picture refers to a (relatively old) art project by Michael Naimark, Be Here Now (1997)

Since I don't know how reliable the LAWeekly archives, I undercut an entire ( text )

Michelle Vondiziano tries on one of Lygia Clark's 'sensorial masks' at 'Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture,' a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tuesday, in Chicago.

The masks, which include aromatic seeds, are designed to push visitors beyond the typical visual art experience.

This exhibition revisits this seminal moment in Brazilian culture, examining tropicalismo as a true force in popular culture and a continuing source of inspiration for several generations of artists, writers, and musicians.

- Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture

Visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago walk around 'Wheel of Delights,' an installation by artist Lygia Pape. The porcelain bowls are filled with flavored liquid, and visitors can use disposable eye droppers to taste the substance and decide if the taste matches what they expected from the color.

Seen hanging in the background are a number of garments from the late 1960s and early 1970s, illustrating how fashion was influenced by the cultural movement.

Yet another concept from Philips Simplicity Show, this time from a very different domain - personal care. Would it make sense to be your own masseur aka physiotherapist? 'Soft Therapy' suggests 'yes', and very strongly.

'Soft Therapy'

"With more people spending their working lives sitting in front of a computer screen, the issue of relaxation is becoming increasingly important to ensure physical well-being. Medical researchers have recently been examining the role of the neck in relation to injuries to hands, wrists, elbows, arms and shoulders. They have also identified motion in the joints of the neck as a significant contributor to Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). Recent medical research shows that such problems can take a long time to treat, which is why prevention is far more effective in the long-term.

The solution is 'Soft Therapy', a wearable, cordless garment that is soft to the touch and that reduces tension in strained muscles and joints in the back and neck by means of infrared heat and vibrational massage. 'Soft Therapy' is wearable over clothing or directly on the skin. It uses infrared LEDs and massage to treat pain through heat and a massage motion. The concept can potentially make muscle-based pain relief as simple as putting on a shirt.

It features a series of soft keys on the front of the garment that allow the selection of one of three pre-set modes. The two arms of the Soft Therapy garment will automatically turn on when they are snapped together around the neck. Opening the arms switches off the garment. Each treatment cycle lasts no more than 20 minutes, after which the garment can be easily hooked onto its recharging peg on the wall, so that it is fully charged for the next session."

"Close the arms of Soft Therapy and they snap together in the right position, turning it on automatically. Open the arms and it switches off. Chose one of the three avaialble settings - a combination of a preset temperature and massage - by pressing one of the three icons. The garment 'remembers' the last setting and applies it automatically as the next sesions starts." - From Next Simplicity, 2005.


This summer I was half-paralized, because of one of the nerve was pinged by the neck verbatims; I could only dream about having such a device at those terrible time. It makes tons of sense, and compared to the inefficient (and ugly) stuff currently on offer, it is a simple beauty.


Other concepts

Tune In
New Bulbs
Chameleon
Air Tree
Mood Mixer
Momento

Oops, no, the final one for today will be 'Tune In', an MP3 player aka radar able to seek other Tune In devices in your vicinity, display them to your, and potentially hook up with the music they play.

This is how Philips puts it itself:

'Tune In'
The pleasure we find in music knows no bounds and unites people in a way that few other mediums can. While sharing music has become easier, it is also fraught with problems: from the legal issues of copyright, to the process of searching and downloading.

Philips investigated whether there was a way for the sharing of music to become more spontaneous and that could be done in a simpler manner. Its Tune In design concept does just this, providing a device wearable around the neck and allowing music lovers within a limited area to broadcast and share their music collections with others.

The heart of the application is a radar device that measures and displays the distance between a person and other Tune In community members. The location is displayed in the form of glowing dots radiating out from the center of the circular screen. Color-coding on the dots indicates the type of music being played in the immediate area. There are also four touch sensitive areas on the device, allowing the user to control their own music in the usual manner, such as play/pause.

Tuning into another person's music is as simple as pressing the relevant dot that represents them on the screen. By pressing again, the device reveals all the details about the track being played, while pressing the center dot returns the user to their own music." - Philips backgrounder on simplicity-led design

From this short description it looks like the concept leverages on the physical proximity only. I wonder why they didn't use, or at least hinted, to the 'content' proximity too, something like the content-defined 'neighbors' in the last.fm, for example.

Also, the concepts like that will (or at least can) impact the social tissue, the very essence of our everyday communication. And exactly because of that they can also face quite a strong resistance (beyond the campus areas, that is). Interesting, but 'not unproblematic', as they say in academia.


Other concepts

New Bulbs
Chameleon
Air Tree
Mood Mixer
Momento

Finally, one more picture of Momento. I understand (and admire) the concept, but this particular picture does not do good for it. It looks like that hand is just about to capture the pure boy :( There is something very 'Gulliverian' in it, in a bad sense.

And also, even this size is quite big for me (I'd go for something smaller, because it is not the size of display or a quality of the picture which is of value here, imo.) But these guys are sayingthat the ball is even bigger! Sad, sad.

These are just new pictures of Mood Mixer in action, from the same source; I wrote about this concept already.

I wrote already, albeit briefly, about 'new bulbs' from Philips. Thanks to the blog of one of the attendants of the event in Paris I can now show more pictures of the 'visionary bulbs'.

"Philips developed a series of design concepts that seek to answer the question 'why couldn't changing a room's ambience be as simple as switching on the TV?' These design concepts offer various ways to adjust color, saturation, tone and brightness with simple and intuitive gestures to create the desired lighting ambience.

'Constellation' (shown above) runs through a spectrum of light pastel colors when the 'finger' on the side of the bulb is tweaked. An LED at each intersection of the wire frame structure points inward, creating soothing patterns of geometric light effects on nearby surfaces.

( see more 'new bulbs' inside )



Other concepts

Chameleon
Air Tree
Mood Mixer
Momento