technology – In Traction

December 12, 2007

Missed a talk by Nicolas Nova in Brussels

I found out a bit too late that Nicolas Nova would be giving a talk at iMAL in Brussels yesterday. Luckily he always puts his slides online

The talk also explained his (seemingly random) blog title: “Pasta&Vinegar”. He states that the hybridization of digital and physical environments is explored both by academic researchers (pasta) and artists and designers (vinegar). In the talk at iMAL he talked about why vinegar is important for pasta

His slides contain lots of interesting and creative ideas, such as blogjects, augmenting animals (e.g. a dog with sensors that controls a WoW character) and a tooth implant that vibrates when you have an incoming call.

If you want to invent something that is to be used 10 years from now, who can you observe? Nicolas states that looking at new media, art and design can give us clues. He also explains that art and design can better convey desire of people for the future, and shows a typical diagram from an IT company that is not appealing to people and too much focused on the technology in the background. He finally refers to the use of technology in art. SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies and Art Gallery are good examples of this and of combining pasta and vinegar.

November 26, 2007

STRP festival redux

This is a quick update on my previous post about the STRP festival. Apparently, the technology expo continued at night, so I was able to see some of the demonstrations anyway. I wanted to share a few of them just to give an impression.

There were a set of large screens mounted in the expo that displayed a video of a woman’s face together with a power meter. When the lady smiles (no pun intended) , the power bar is green and filled to the top. When she stops smiling, it drops to the bottom and turns red. It took me a while to get the meaning of this power meter since the women only stop smiling once in a while There is a video available that gives some more details.

I also had the chance to experiment with the i_AM table which was not very impressive in my opinion. Although it was definitely more simple than the reactables table, as a consequence it did not offer much functionality. Each object that was placed on the table was linked to a sample (e.g. a guitar loop) with a certain volume depending on its position on the table. When an object was pushed up or down on the table, its volume changed from loud to quiet. When it was moved to the left or to the right, it would become linked to another sample. When you turned an object, the portion of the sample that was repeated could be altered. I did not find the mappings logical, but then again the problem with these kinds of systems is that there has to be a way for the user to find out about the object’s affordances. This can be done by using objects that represent their affordances explicitly, or by displaying something helpful next to the objects. The i_AM table did not offer a way to find out about an object’s functionality.

I only took a few pictures, and most of them were blurry due to the low quality camera on my cellphone but there are quite some pictures of the festival available at Flickr, including the demo of Johannes (it seems his demo was also covered by DJ BROADCAST and Eindhovens Dagblad). Another cool concept was Vinyl workout where a record was projected on the floor and could be played by running around its surface in the direction you wanted it to go. Motor karaoke was a demo I didn’t visit, but which would have been fun to try. It is a bike race where the motorcycle is powered by the player’s voice. The louder the player screams, the faster the bike will go

Oh and the concerts were good as well

November 23, 2007

STRP festival

Time passed quickly this week, it’s Friday evening already. Tonight I am going to the STRP festival in Eindhoven.

STRP (pronounced “strijp” in Dutch) is a four-day festival that can be seen as a combination of a technology exposition and a music festival. Yesterday The Chemical Brothers opened the festival. Today, Radio Soulwax, Roisin Murphy, Mr. Oizo and Goose are amongst others performing.

I actually found out about this festival through Last.fm which mails me when there is an event nearby with artists I like. I had a look at the day program and found out that Johannes Taelman (one of our new colleagues) will be presenting a system he built. Another interesting project at the festival is i_AM, which is similar to the reactable and Audiopad projects. According to the authors of i_AM, the main difference with other projects that allow music composition through tangible interaction is that their system is more usable for novices. Unfortunately, I won’t arrive in Eindhoven until somewhere around midnight so I won’t be able to check out the technology demonstrations.

The concerts should be good, I’m looking forward to seeing the Dewaele Brothers.

November 13, 2007

Living Tomorrow and public transport adventures

Yesterday I went to the FITCE event on the Internet of Things I blogged about earlier together with my colleague Geert Vanderhulst. At first, I wanted to go by car, but then I realized that meant going through the rush hour on the Brussels ring road. Eventually, we decided to take the train to Leuven, take another one from Leuven to Brussels North station, and from there take the train to Vilvoorde. Unfortunately there were some difficulties with the last element in this chain

Apparently there was a train that arrived at the exact same time and at the same platform at Brussels North station as the train we were supposed to take. This train also went to Antwerp Central Station, but had Amsterdam as its final destination. When we were on it, we realized too late that it didn’t stop in Vilvoorde. So we got out in Mechelen (the first stop) and took another train to Vilvoorde. Normally this train would be in Vilvoorde on time to allow us to take the bus to Living Tomorrow, but this evening it changed to an L train, meaning that it stops at every station on its way. When we finally arrived in Vilvoorde, the last bus to Living Tomorrow before 19:00 had already left. The next one was at 20:15. After asking a bus driver, we found another bus that stopped close to the venue (bus 47). After taking this bus, we finally arrived somewhere in the neighborhood of the Indringingsweg, but didn’t know where to go. Of course, then it started raining Luckily Geert had his satellite navigation system with him to lead us the way. When we finally arrived in the room, we had to pass by the speakers and all the lights went on, so we couldn’t make an unremarkable entrance

So what about the talks? Although it’s always interesting to see how people appreciate ubicomp technologies when they get integrated in their daily lives, I didn’t learn anything really new. A lot of the technologies or prototypes that were mentioned were familiar to me. One of the things I hadn’t heard about yet were washable RFID tags.

After the talks we got a tour through the house of the future. Again, a couple of the technologies they showed had already been integrated in real-life products or were already well investigated in research. There was a prototype by Volvo about parking sensors, dead angle cameras, lane tracking and a system to avoid collisions in traffic jams. The more advanced technologies here were mentioned in Donald Norman’s talk last year in Leuven. There was also a store of the future and a kitchen of the future. The presentations and film fragments of the talks are going to be put online soon. If I don’t forget, I’ll update this post with a link to the material.

But even after the event our public transport nightmare wasn’t over I entered some information wrongly on the travel planner of De Lijn, so the bus we wanted to take back to the station didn’t drive until after our train left. Luckily Geert Houben (another colleague) came by car and dropped us off at Vilvoorde station in time. So then we went back from Vilvoorde to Brussels North, where we took the train to Genk. But not before having an unhealthy, but satisfying snack