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Pause To Reflect
Lately it's seemed like a good time to take a moment and reflect on what project I want to do next. It was about a year ago that I created the picobuzz site. I was generally using that site as a way to get experience with "Web 2.0" apps and technology such as Django. I was happy that I launched it, but the expansion ideas I had didn't pan out and I have taken it as far as I want.
A couple of other things are causing me to stop and reflect:
- I read Tim Ferriss' book: The 4-Hour Work Week, which I highly recommend to anyone. I read it when it first came out, so this is not a new thing, but the result is that since then I have been questioning my life decisions a lot more. This is generally a good thing, but has a side-effect that it occasionally results in bouts of metaphysical waffling.
- More recent and significant: the financial market meltdown. The project I had been working on recently involved extending my picobuzz engine to aggregate financial buzz from sources like Twitter and create sentiment indicators. Thanks to the market meltdown(s), I lost not only my interest in the project but also what working capital i had. And it's not really challenging to read the market sentiment these days. I will probably continue to tinker with this in the background (because the markets will come back), but I don't think there is not much to do at the moment.
So with good reason (as well as my entrepreneurial ADD tendencies) I am looking to turn my attention to other ideas and interests. I am keeping my eye on ubiquitous computing developments but I feel that will be a slow development process. Also I think the interesting developments will tend to involve hardware which is harder to do as a parttime project.
Hence, I will likely stick with Web apps--something involved with meaningful content and social value. Check back for further developments.
rk
InfoWorld: 10 future shocks for the next 10 years
On its 30th anniversary, InfoWorld is not only looking back, but looking forward with this article. 10 future shocks for the next 10 years.
Sexed Robots
Sexed Robots is the title of a project by artist Paul Granjon. The robots are autonomous wheeled vehicles fitted with nylon male or female nylon genitalia. According to the project description:
They are programmed to explore their environment, occasionally entering a "in heat" mode, where they will try and locate a partner in the same state. If a partner is located, the robots will attempt to mate.
What's the point, you may ask? Well, other than art not needing a point--or at least a practical purpose--Granjon is interested in exploring the co-evolution of humans and machines.
If Granjon wants humans to interact with machines in this way, they are going to need to look a lot less like his robots, and a lot more like Summer Glau in the TV series: "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles":
Here is a link to the Make post on the project which I will include simply because of the title: "Bots wander around aimlessly and then mate." Don't we have enough things on the planet already wandering aimlessly and mating?
rk
Clean Web 2.0 Design
I recently ran across this Web 2.0 how-to design guide, which I found to be an excellent article on clean interface design. The guide is geared toward popular Web 2.0 website design aspects, but the principles are sound and generally evolved well before websites, 2.0 or otherwise.
The author Ben Hunt gives much credit to Apple for the current cutting edge of design goodness. I would have to agree given not only Apple's proven design track record in general, but also their website's design in particular, which employed advanced graphic design principles while others were still using <frame>s.
rk
Moving Into The Cloud
This post from Geoffrey Long talks about the continuing formation and use of the "Cloud" (as in Cloud Computing) but also gets the distinction between that and Ubiquitous Computing:
"...I conflated the terms 'cloud computing' and 'ubiquitous computing', but in retrospect I should pull the two terms apart somewhat...."
Geoffrey's discussion of his experiments to sync his information in the cloud to his local environment is worth a read and points out one of the many issues we will be wrestling with as cloud computing and ubicomp become more prevalent. Having just watched the movie "Live Free or Die Hard", where cyberterrorists threaten to hack and take down the information infrastructure of the U.S., I think the discussion of centralizing information is far from being done.
rk
Wifi Photo Frames
FrameChannel is a free web service that allows you to manage content on your wireless picture frame. From their website:
Once you set your frame up with FrameChannel and subscribe to channels of your choice, your frame will automatically update when changes to these feeds are made. For example, you will be able to see your new flickr pictures on your wireless frame as soon as they are updated on your flickr account!
Actually, you had me at wireless picture frame. I had been waiting for such a thing a while back and now it seems like a number of WiFi capable digital photo frames have emerged on the market. The company lists the variety of wireless and other picture frames their service can work with here.
The other thing that caught my eye is the statement:
Friends and family can contribute content directly to your frame, updating family photos in real time.
This feature is actually of great interest to me as it is an application I envisioned earlier this year when I was trying to help my father set up and use a digital photo frame. My father has always been mechanically gifted but has little desire to log onto a computer or the Internet. The prospect of getting him to further somehow transfer digital photos to his frame is just a non-starter. So the only option that left me with is occasionally sending an SD card of photos by snailmail. It would be nice, I thought, if I was somehow able to get his computer to transfer incoming photos to the digital frame automatically. It seemed like it would be easy enough to piece together the necessary software bits, but they would depend on having the necessary WiFi or Bluetooth wireless capability in the photo frame.
Fortunately, the emergence of WiFi photo frames from various vendors means I won't have to do this nontrivial hardware hack of a digital photo frame, and now thanks to FrameChannel I won't even have to write the software. I will definitely be shopping for a couple of these WiFi frames in the near future and giving FrameChannel's service a test drive.
Of course, the fact that FrameChannel has tackled the main applications for this just means that I am now free to consider less obvious Ubicomp applications of the technology.
rk
Human-Computer Interfaces: The Mouse Is Dead
"The Mouse Is Dead" is the title of this post by Mike Elgan at the Datamation site.
Despite the sensationalistic title, the post is well thought out.
Let me start by saying that, in my observation, any proclamation of any technology being dead is bound to be exaggerated and premature, especially for a technology that has been firmly entrenched. When I worked in the Paging Division at Motorola, the growth of the cellular phone market resulted in regular proclamations that the pager market was dead. Immediately. Like, sometime around close of business that same day. Despite that, we somehow managed to continue with years of growth before the market started dying out. But products and technologies mostly do tend to come and go.
For many people, the thought of computing without a mouse is inconceivable. It's a little easier if you happened to be there before the mouse was in common use. Yeah, I hate to date myself, but I remember having conversations about what input devices would catch on, other than the keyboard. There were alternatives, like the "puck", trackballs, stylus pad (familiar to at least some graphic designers) and even the joystick. (By the way, does anyone really use that nipply thing in the middle of laptop keyboards?)
But you don't need to look back in the archives or into the future to find alternatives. As Mike suggests in point #1, an alternative has been sitting there for some times as the trackpad or glidepad on laptops. Many people chose to override it with a mouse, or consider it a form of mouse, so it's easy to dismiss. But it's not a mouse, and the addition of gesture capabiity makes the trackpad a strong contender.
Then there's the iPhone (and iTouch). I currently still prefer the QWERTY keypad on my BlackJack to the iPhone touchscreen if I have to choose. But that's for text entry, because I have always been frustrated by text entry on touchscreens. For Web browsing, however, the iPhone touchscreen is a breath of fresh air on a mobile device (except maybe for one-handed use). In any case, the iPhone is driving home the point that other ways of interfacing are not only possible but useful.
I'm not sure I want a computer to read my brainwaves, and I'm quite sure I don't want to dictate out loud to my computer for extensive periods (or be anywhere near someone else doing it). But I could definitely see the utility of having it track my eye movements and pick up on my gestures (yes, that gesture too) in front of the screen.
In other words, in the same natural way in which people interact with each other.
rk
Bluetooth Sex: Intimate Human Computer Interfaces
Exploration of ubiquitous computing networks and human computer interfaces would not be complete without the consideration of sexual applications of the technology. I debated on doing this post, not because I had any moral issues but because I didn't think it had emerged yet or warranted more than its 15 minute worth of popularity. It turns out that I was actually behind the curve.
I was motivated to do a bit more research when I noticed the traffic stats for this blog, which I had left dormant for a period while I worked on another project (picobuzz.com). Yet, despite the inactivity, I am still getting traffic for a particular post:
iPod Bikini: 2nd Sexiest Bluetooth App EverNot that I was surprised to get some attention with that sort of title but the post wasn't so provocative that I expected to keep getting traffic a year later. So I thought I should follow up. In that post, I added a closing link to a product named "The Toy". I checked up on the website and the product is still alive and well.
The Toy is a personal vibrator worn internally. The "unit" is linked via Bluetooth to a mobile phone and controlled by text messages sent to the phone, which are transformed into different vibrations by The Toy. As an example scenario for its use, here is an excerpt from their website:
Monday morning - she leaves with The Toy inside...
She's given you the power - You alone control The Toy
I thought web browsing at work was a distraction. This just totally killed the productivity of two people. Check out the website for further reading. You know you want to.
The Toy is not the only toy of its kind (literally)--there is also something known as the Wiibrator. As you would guess from the name, the Wiibrator provides similar functionality for the Nintendo Wii. Yes, the kid-oriented system, which my grade school-age son uses to play games with excessively cute characters, has been co-opted for adult recreation.
As you can see from the link, the Wiibrator is not a product as such but a program that interfaces the Wii’s Wiimote and the PS2's Trancevibrator. That's right--before the Wiibrator there was a PS2 vibrator named the Trancevibrator, still available for purchase (page may be NSFW).
I think it is particularly relevant to note the date of the Wiibrator post (December 17, 2006) relative to the release date of the Wii as reported by Wikipedia. Specifically, when the Wii was launched in key markets on December 8, 2006, about one week later there was a hack to use it as a sex toy.
There is actually a field of research dedicated to this sort of application of technology named "teledildonics". Furthermore, you know something has arrived technologically when there is an open source movement for it--in this case appropriately named "opendildonics" which can found at wiki.opendildonics.org.
So what is the point of all this, other than"sex sells"? Should we be focused on developing sex/adult infrastructure and applications? Actually, the point is that we don't need to. People will use the technology for their own desires and applications--be they erotic or something else. We aren't compelled to encourage adult applications, but they will happen, and to expect otherwise--or worse try to resist--would be futile and unproductive. And as is often the case, they may drive (will) adoption of technologies.
rk
New Futuristic Series: Charlie Jade
SCI FI Channel acquired (because let's face it--that works out much better than their original stuff) the U.S. broadcast rights to the science-fiction series "Charlie Jade" from Park Entertainment and it's first episode aired this past weekend. The series has already aired in various other countries and apparently gained a cult following. The following is the synopsis from the series' SciFi Channel webpage:
While tracking her suspected killer, Charlie discovers a secret desert facility. A massive explosion propels him into a parallel universe that seduces him with its similarities and baffles him with its differences.
Charlie is soon drawn into a conflict that involves his home universe, the one he now inhabits as well as a third universe. The third world is pristine and pacifist … with unsuspected terror at its heart.
Based on the opening episode, the multiverse theme of the show is guaranteed to support a nicely tangled weave of plotlines as well as provide a steady stream of techogadgetry and futuristic 'scapes.
Rethinking The Interface: Minimalism
Ryan Tomayko has an interesting post on his blog where he discusses a minimalistic approach to web interface design. He apparently had an epiphany after watching Edward Tufte’s critique of the iPhone. A central concept to this approach relates to "computer administrative debris":
The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface – not computer administrative debris.
More precisely, anything that exists outside of the content, or that does not fit naturally with the information being presented, qualifies as administrative debris and is therefore a candidate for elimination from the design. While this definition is not exactly synonymous with minimalism, the end result in practice may be very minimalistic indeed. As an example, we need look no further than Ryan's blog, a snapshot of which is shown in the image above. Ryan took the concept to heart, and overhauled his blog. As you can see, the result is quite low in debris.
This sort of rethinking of interface design will be essential to the evolution of ubicomp. In my previous post: What Can We Do Differently With Ubicomp? , principle #2 states:
We will layer the interfaces onto our environment and blur the line between information and things.
Clearly, we will not be able to blur these lines until we remove the "debris" we have tolerated in computer graphical user interfaces, and make them more compatible with design principles which have evolved in the non-digital world.
rk