I’m at Ubicomp 2007 in Innsbruck at the moment. On Sunday, I presented our paper on Making Bits and Atoms Talk Today at the DIPSO 2007 workshop. The workshop was great with a lot of interesting discussions.
Today we had a session on Health, one on Networking, the late-breaking results, videos and demos, and of course the 1-Minute-Madness. The latter featured some funny moments when presenters still wanted to get noticed and stand out between the rest of the participants when their presentations failed. Unfortunately I did not take pictures, but I’m sure others did. Considering the content of the talks, both at the workshop and at the main conference it seemed that persuasive games are becoming a popular research topic.
A really impressive and useful system I saw today was Haggle. It tries to abstract the lower-level network protocols, allowing you for example to send an email to someone sitting next to you without requiring an internet connection (falling back on Bluetooth or ad-hoc P2P networking).
During the poster and demo session, there was one cool demo stand that almost constantly had about ten people standing around it: VoodooSketch. The authors presented a drawing program on an interactive table that allows you to draw your own user interface widgets, combined with tangible controls (buttons, knobs, etc.). You can attach these to a function by writing a label next to it. So you could for example write the label opacity next to a line you drew, which would then turn into a slider to control the opacity of the drawing.
The city of Innsbruck is very beautiful and offers you some of the most amazing views. The room the DIPSO workshop was held in had a large window looking out to the mountains which made it hard to stay concentrated