Orange Cone

Luxist reports on a new service to help track the provenance of wine. When Tod and I were at NextFest we spoke to some folks at Hitachi who had contemplated using their RFID technology to do the same thing, but just recently two new services have come online that are designed to track wine by the bottle (the other is Great Wall of Wine, a Chinese merchant, who are using RFIDs to stop counterfeit wine).

This seems to be an unnecessarily narrow use of the technology. Counterfeit wine is a problem, but (in my understanding) it's primarily it's a problem with a few very old, very expensive bottles. Old wine is not going to have RFID stickers on it, and if one is applied in such a was as to not damage the expensive bottle, it'll probably be easily moved to another bottle. Moreover, the business plan (as I understand it) is dependent on Metcalfe's Law network effects to work. In other words, it becomes useful if lots of wine has the stickers (the old "if only you have a fax machine, then faxing isn't a useful technology" argument), but initially very little wine is going to have stickers on it. For systems like that to be successful, the technology needs to be useful to just a single user. That's exactly the situation where a rich information shadow becomes valuable, and if you excuse the self-promotion, that's why we made WineM focused on the richness of wine's information shadow rather than just a single application. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the business model. Maybe the people who really need these systems are not end consumers, but dealers, distributors and regulators. Regardless, between these projects, Smartcorq and the Queen's ISETAN experiment, it looks like wine and RFID are going to be mated at some point in the very near future. The question is whether the power of all of the information about the wine will be exposed to end users (to everyone's great benefit, in my opinion) or whether the technology will remain stuck in the realms of logistics and security.

Posted by at 9:19 PM | Permalink

Over the years there have been many projects that use mobile phones to associate physical objects with their information shadows (YellowArrow, QR Code, ScanLife, etc.). There have also been many projects that use phones in social setting as a way for people to find out about the people around them (Nokia Sensor, Dodgeball, etc.), usually with the promise of dating. None have been particularly successful, in either category (though I gather that QR Coded stuff is pretty common in Japan).

Now comes a company that's trying to combine the two unsuccessful ideas to make one successful one. Wickd is betting that there will be enough people who want to snap shotcode barcodes on t-shirts to find out about someone, and that there will be enough people who wants to wear those (kinda expensive, kinda plain) t-shirts to create a critical mass of urban singles willing to pay for the privilege to make their business model work. I'm pretty dubious of the underlying interaction model (it's more related to first person shooters--where you run up to a target, fire your weapon while they're not looking, and run away--than dating, where you get close, interact face-to-face and ideally stay close), but for me it's another example that people are the most popular object to unify with its information shadow. Having information about the people with you at brunch or at a conference (which is where an adult version of Disney Clickables could be very valuable), and having your intersection in physical space mapped to social networking space opens up huge possibilities for maintaining your social network.

All of these projects point to the inevitability of that unification, it's just that no one has found the right vehicle to move the penetration of the technology to the appropriate place on the Metcalfe's Law curve.

Oh, and two final words of advice to the Wickd people: Hanky Code. Think about it. ;-)

[UPDATE: Several people suggested I should be more clear about why I think that this is a questionable idea. OK, here it is: I think that no woman in her right mind wants to wear a shirt that gives random people behind her back personal information. It's not the quality of the information or the content, it's the coupling of that with anonymity and immediate physical presence.]

Posted by at 11:00 AM | Permalink

There are two projects I've become aware of recently that represent the explicit linking of physical objects to their information shadows, both in children's products. This kind of thing has existed before, but its prevalence seems to be on the rise.

The first (found by Liz) is WebKinz which are plush toys that each have a unique code on their tag that brings up a unique play space that's just for that specific toy (randomly generated of course). The idea is "Beanie Babies meets NeoPets meets Cabbage Patch Kids" and although I think the execution of the concept leaves much to be desired (why buy furniture for your toy basset's online "room"?), it's an interesting example of how toy companies are merging offline and online conceptual play spaces in a very direct way.

The second is Disney's Clickables, which I learned about from CNET's Matter/Antimatter blog.

Clickables that we are launching in connection to our new Disney Fairies virtual world. It's a way for kids to take their online world experience into the real world. The core of it is a magical bracelet. By simply clicking their bracelets together, girls become friends in the online environment.

From the press release:

“The future of toys is about connecting online and offline play,” said Chris Heatherly, vice president of technology and innovation, Disney Consumer Products. “Kids and tweens are quickly embracing virtual worlds and, while there are several Internet-related toys in the market today, the play ends when the computer gets shut down. With our new line of Disney Fairies toys featuring Clickables technology, we're bringing the fun of social networking, collecting, and trading into the real world so that girls can extend the fun of the enchanting online world of Pixie Hollow to school, the park, or wherever they may be.”

This system of course owes a lot to Ruth Kikin-Gil's Buddy Beads project in terms of its use of jewelry to communicate social relationship between BFFs, but it also explicitly links the online world to the physical world using magic as a metaphor. It's not surprising that it's coming from Disney thematically, but what's interesting to me is how much Disney is investing in it. This is a sizable product rollout, which typically means that they have done enough research to believe that it'll be successful on their terms, which typically means hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers. It's a project, and a genre, to watch.

Posted by at 6:19 PM | Permalink

Here here's your latest computer fridge news: Whirlpool has partnered with a domestic groupware software company called Cozi. Right now, it's just a branding partnership with Cozi's calendar/to-do list/grocery list etc. software for families, but it's clear where this is going: WP is going to create an embedded version of Cozi's software for their centralpark fridge line and then create other ways to connect to the same service. First it's the fridge, then it'll be an iPhone widget, and if it's a hit, a "household activity dashboard" on Mom's desk at the office, like what Ambient devices has done with some data feeds. Or at least that's the hope.

Electronic household organization tools has been around a long time (I took a half-hearted stab at it a couple of years ago). Not counting pre-Cambrian kitchen computer technology, getting into kitchens was an early goal of the first wave of Internet appliances in the late 90s. 3COM's Audrey, one of the classic failures of this first wave, advertises that it "can be the family's nerve-center in no time, handling schedules, phone books, and notes." Cozi's pitch is similar: "Cozi helps busy families manage schedules, appointments, shopping and communications from wherever you are — the kitchen, car, office or even the grocery store."

Timing is critical in technology adoption so there's no reason why these technologies can't work now when they failed 8 years ago. Many people who in WP/Cozi's likely core audience of affluent 30-something new home buyers are probably thinking much more about their families now than they were 8 years ago, because they probably did have them then. However, the repeated failure of the idea is something to learn from and I hope that Cozi has been studying people's habits and the pattern of earlier similar technologies to see why they didn't work out. Is it purely because the value of the service versus the cost isn't great enough (i.e. dry erase boards are cheaper and more flexible, but don't allow you to check your kids' schedule from the road, but that's OK with most people) or is there something deeper? I'll be interested to see where this goes.

Posted by at 9:40 AM | Permalink

Last night I presented a version of the Sketching Smart Things talk I gave last month at CHIFOO to BayCHI. It was an honor to be invited to speak there because BayCHI is such an institution in the HCI world and because the talk was in the PARC auditorium, feet from where the core concepts of ubiquitous computing were first formulated. Thank you, BayCHI and Rashmi!

The presentation is available on Slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

And as a 710K PDF where you can see a complete transcript of my talk in the notes.

Posted by at 9:00 PM | Permalink

The title implies more mean than this blog post will have in it, but in my research on digital rings, I discovered an amusing factoid: the first people to have worn digital jewelry on a regular basis are the children of the public schools in Celebration, Florida, the New Urbanist Disney planned community.

In this article, from 1999. Here are some interesting pieces:

Residents like to call Celebration a "perfect town," but even perfection needs security. That need has led to use of access control at Celebration School, a K-12 county-run institution.

[...]

All 930 students move freely around the campus through locked doors using a new system of Java-enabled Schlage Primus industrial door locks, modified by Lares Technology Inc., San Antonio, Texas, to work with the Java computer application. Each student is issued a Java Ring, built by Dallas Semiconductor, Dallas.

[...]

Celebration conducted the initial trial for the system when they equipped 100 middle school students with the iButton in a Java Ring, said Mori. "We wanted to see if the rings were of benefit to students. Now, it's a wearable accessory for the kids. We found that for some kids the rings work very well, but some wanted a key fob or a watch. In the beginning everyone was given a ring, but now they have the option of purchasing a watch or a key fob.

Without reading too much into suburban perfection requiring an incredibly technologically sophisticated security and monitoring system, it's interesting that the first sizable deployment of smart jewelry will have turned out to be for a bunch of 13 year-olds in a Disney planned community.

Posted by at 11:11 AM | Permalink

Hideaki Matsui's ring-based concept made the blog rounds this week, and it's only the latest of a trend of ring-shaped ubicomp devices (as helpfully cataloged by Yanko Design):

Right now they replicate simple functions that may be done better by other technologies (Matsui's design, for example, is very close to IBM's Personal Area Network from 1996, but embodied in a ring). However, that's not the point. What's interesting to me is that people have started to think about the capabilities of rings as a form factor for the development of devices. It no longer seems far fetched to design functionality in this way. As with many objects that are a product of their time, the idea is reinvented seemingly simultaneously in multiple locations as culture churns through the possibilities. That process generally predicts the actual development of an actually useful product (followed by a lot of people grousing that htye thought of it first). That's exciting because it means that an actually useful enchanted ring device may be forthcoming.

This also tangentially reminds me of NTTDoCoMo's FingerWhisper bone conduction phone speaker project (which was supplanted in the market by Bluetooth headsets, but had lots of potential), and I predict it's only a matter of time before someone comes out with a cell phone concept that's a ring or a bracelet, or both.

Posted by at 2:50 PM | Permalink

Doing some research for my upcoming CHIFOO presentation, I realized that there have been a number of attempts at merging computers and refrigerators. Here's a timeline:

1998: The V-sync "Internet Refrigerator"

"With a speedy Pentium II microprocessor and huge hard drive, it packs more computing power than most home PCs, and has separate compartments for fruit and vegetables."

1999: The Electrolux Screenfridge

"Electrolux earlier this year unveiled the Screenfridge, a connected refrigerator designed to allow users to order groceries over the Internet, but the product has yet to ship."

2000: Whirlpool/Cisco fridge

"While the Whirlpool refrigerator won't cook an omelet, it does have an integrated Web-browser to search for recipes that match the food items people have on hand. In case you have no idea how to make an omelet, you can prepare the meal by watching a celebrity chef on the Web pad."

2002: Whirlpool's Connected refrigerator

"Whirlpool's refrigerator transforms into a multimedia communications centre. The owner can surf the Internet, receive e-mails, listen to the radio, watch TV, videos and DVDs and even talk on the phone."

2003: LG's Digital Multimedia Side-By-Side Fridge Freezer with LCD Display

"It's the ultimate in kitchen technology with a built-in MP3 player for downloading and playing music from the internet, e-mail and video mail using a built-in camera and microphone. It even has full internet access so you can re-stock the refrigerator on-line or check on the latest news and weather - all without leaving the kitchen. And it's great for storing food too."

2006: Electrolux Screenfridge (again)

"The Screen Fridge is connected to broadband and TV via wireless connection. 15" touch screen and pop-up keyboard. As if Internet, email, phone, radio and MP3 player are not enough, Electrolux adds highly advanced calendar and video messaging system so the kitchen truly becomes the center hub in your house."

2007: Whirlpool centralpark

"Custom choices will include satellite radio, a Web tablet with interactive message board and family calendar, a digital picture frame, a DVD/CD player and more."

I like to watch how companies try the same idea over and over and how the ideas evolve. Initially, the computer fridges were just tablet PCs stuck into the door of a conventional refrigerator. Why were they there? Who was going to be using it? How were they going to be used? No clue. And sure you could do all the stuff they advertised (listen to music, make a phone call) because you could do anything you could do on a laptop. You could compose a Powerpoint or write software, too, but you wouldn't do that, or anything else, because there was no clear reason for it. The products quickly disappeared with the end of the first dotcom boom.

Then a resurgence happened. What was different? I think that companies, helped by the staff user researchers they hired in the interim, started to realize that it wasn't the computer that was important, but what people did with it. Not until the most recent Whirlpool offering does the idea of a computer fridge disappear entirely to be replaced by a series of functions that various modules can do. Each module is, of course, a computer, and every module can probably do the same functions as the other modules from a computational perspective. But that's not the point. The point is that the modules have different interfaces. They're different tools. Focused tools. Tools where the design uses a computer to help the user accomplish a task, just as they use waterproof plastic for the buttons and stainless steel for the shell.

[4/20/08 UPDATE: I noticed that in the proceedings to the 2008 Internet of Things conference there's a paper by Matthias Rothensee called "User Acceptance of the Intelligent Fridge: Empirical Results from a Simulation." His conclusions, from the abstract, are "It was found that generally a smart fridge is evaluated as moderately useful, easy to use and people would tend to buy it, if it was already available. Emotional responses differed between the assistance functions. Displaying information on durability of products, as well as giving feedback on nutrition health and economics are the most appreciated applications." That sounds like, not surprisingly based on the market response, faint praise at best, but I haven't read the paper yet.]

Posted by at 7:24 PM | Permalink

Yesterday I had the pleasure and honor of speaking at the Information Architecture Institute's IDEA Conference in New York. I got to share the stage with David Rose, CEO of Ambient Devices, probably the most pioneering consumer ubicomp company. The title of our session (as chosen by Peter Merholz, who curated the conference) was "Digital IA in a Physical World." David spoke about Ambient Devices' history from the Ambient Orb (well, actually, from his childhood home) to their current products, and how they've changed their vision since they began. I spoke about how ThingM developed our smart wine rack, and the larger context in which we do our work.

Speaking to an audience of information architects, I really wanted to emphasize what I feel is the fundamental change that information processing goes through when it becomes ubiquitous. One of the ways I've been discussing this transformation in the last couple of years is by talking about information as a material. I reiterated that argument for the IDEA audience:

[...] embedded information processing and networking starts behaving like a material.

Let me explain. When a product designer can include information processing in a product for very little cost, the calculation becomes not one of engineering complexity, that’s relatively cheap, but one of competitive advantage. Including a CPU becomes a line item in the competitive analysis of making an object, just like the calculation about what to make it out of. Of course, as any brand new material, adoption doesn’t come all at once, it trickles in first in one industry, then another. Think of nylon going from being a molding material in 1941, to panty hose, to cogs in sewing machines by the 1960s. You can already see it happening with information processing. All kinds of toys now depend not just on their physical appearance, but behavior created by electronics, for their competitive advantage.

I also described why we chose to augment existing objects, rather than creating wholly new devices. For me, this is because existing objects already have highly-developed information shadows that we aren't fully taking advantage of and that there's still much potential in exploring augmented everyday objects:

Every material object casts an information shadow. It exists simultaneously in the physical world and in the world of data. That information shadow has a life of its own. Sometimes that life is pretty simple. But it can also be complex, maybe as rich as the physical object’s life. Like Frank [Lanz of area/codesaid yesterday, the border between the real and the virtual is becoming more porous. This is also where IA comes in: the information architecture of these shadows IS the information architecture of objects. With this project we wanted to unify the informational and physical aspects of a common object. We looked around for objects with rich informational lives, and after discussion about books, clothes, and cars, we settled on wine.

In the rest of the talk, I describe some of the design challenges we faced in creating the WineM and how we solved them. You can get the whole presentation(684K PDF) with my notes.

Posted by at 8:55 PM | Permalink

[I wrote this for the ThingM newsletter that went out yesterday, but thought it may be of broader interest]

Wine keeps reappearing at the intersection of the digital world and the physical one. Bruce Sterling's pioneering book on the implications of ubiquitous computing, Shaping Things, uses it extensively as an example, but he wasn't the first to discuss it. Wine is the textbook example (literally) in the Information Architecture world, where the problem of organizing is often used to explain an approach known as faceted classification. Virtual Vineyard (arguably the first successful ecommerce website) launched before Amazon did.

Why? Our theory is that wine exists in two worlds: as a physical object and as an informational one. The informational object doesn't just exist as a way to help people select wine to drink, but the information about the wine becomes an important part of the process of collecting wine. Moreover, unlike other collectibles that exist as physical and informational objects (think Magic the Gathering cards), wine is a consumable. You can never get a complete set and what you have is always shrinking, so there's a perpetual pressure to gather new information to gather new wine.

The problem is that wine bottles are terribly difficult to track. As collectibles, there are market pressures to create scarcity, which leads many producers (especially of high-end wines) to avoid using the most common object tracking mechanism, the UPC barcode. Barcodes symbolize mass production to wine producers struggling to create scarcity, so they don't use them, or use them haphazardly. We feel this ends up backfiring on wine producers, creating obscurity instead. Wine is a classic Long Tail product: in other words, there's a huge volume of potential in the obscure end of the market, but despite wine's early entry as objects of cutting-edge technological consideration, it hasn't achieved nearly its potential.

We believe the core problem is that most wine is virtually untrackable in the information space. It's a physical object that has no anchor to which to attach data. There is huge potential in creating such anchors. Ulla-Maaria Mutanen created the Thinglink project to create "social objects" that "make it possible to 1) aggregate online discussion around particular items, 2) track their history, and 3) develop new ways of connecting through particular objects on the web." She's talking about handicrafts, but the same thing can--and should--apply to wine.

However, when I went to the Wine Industry Technology Symposium a couple of weeks ago, there was virtually no discussion of ideas like this, even as the group discussed the power of "Web 2.0" and social networks.

Since we're currently working on an RFID wine rack, we're thinking a lot about these issues. We would like the answer to be RFIDs embedded in wine labels (invisibly) coupled with open, shared communication standards for exchanging wine information. These should look forward toward the capabilities of the technology and the "social life" of objects that bridge the information and physical worlds, rather than trying to copy UPCs or ISBNs, as valuable as those have been. Until then, wine, that most textbook example of hybrid objects, will be frustratingly out of reach for consumers, who then will be themselves frustratingly unavailable to producers. It's a situation that could be much better (i.e. profitable and enjoyable) for everyone involved.

Posted by at 10:18 AM | Permalink

A couple of months back, receiver magazine, Vodaphone's magazine about art, society and technology, asked me to write a short piece for them. I decided to write about the evolution of appliances. As with many of my recent articles, it starts with the history of post-WWII American society and how the values, technologies and social structures of that time created the basic framework that allows for ubiquitous computing to appear. Here's an excerpt:

1947 was a big year. That year, Bell Labs invented the transistor and Levittown, New York, the first modern American suburb and the model for most others to come, opened for business. 1947 was not only the beginning of the Baby Boom, but of a whole new lifestyle of electronic home appliances.

[...]

With [semiconductor] prices so low, including information processing in a product becomes less an exotic research project and more a competitive calculation akin to selecting plastic over rubber or aluminum over steel. Manufacturers will likely soon begin to use information from the domestic environment in an effort to make appliances more effective and more attractive to buyers. Some will even succeed.

[...]

This means that our everyday domestic devices will soon change. Hybrid devices, "smart things", have already begun to appear and will continue to do so, blurring the lines between furniture, tool, computer and robot.

[etc.]

You can find the whole article on the receiver site. I also highly recommend the rest of the magazine, which features articles by danah boyd, Louise Barkhuus and John Seely Brown talking about technology and the home.

Also, Tamara Adlin has posted an interview with me on her UX Pioneers site. I'm flattered and grateful to be in such distinguished company. It's probably the most coherent explanation of my career and motivations, ever. THANK YOU, Tamara!

Posted by at 4:40 PM | Permalink

I had the great privilege of speaking at the Taste3 conference on wine, food and art in Napa today. This is a terrific conference that's run as a kind of "TED for food" by many of the folks who organized TED years ago, and with the same ultra-high quality of experience design and attendees. I've had a number of great conversations with really smart, successful and fun people.

My talk today was a somewhat speculative presentation tracing some of the history of appliance design and how ubiquitous computing may change that. In the talk, I present the history of blender controls as an example of the encapsulation of knowledge into our tools. I then show several examples of how networked kitchen devices may (or may not) present a fundamental shift in the nature of how we relate to our kitchen tools:

Imagine that every time you used this [networked, barcode-reading microwave], it quietly told a database somewhere--say, in your iPod--how many calories you just ate. Then your iPod could query your shoes about how much you had run the previous day. The next time you went for a run, your iPod would pick songs with a different tempo to encourage you burn off that Mac and Cheese. Now that’s starting to get interesting. It is now possible for our tools to automatically encapsulate knowledge and share it with each other.

The full presentation is available here (360K PPT).

Posted by at 6:14 PM | Permalink

Steve sent me a link to the Interactivos? workshop at Media Lab Madrid. I'm sad I wasn't able to propose for it and won't be able to attend. The theme is "Magic and Technology" (which everyone knows I'm a big fan of ;-). Their introduction reads:

Magic and illusion have always gone hand in hand with technology; from mechanical illusions, optical and mirror tricks, through the incorporation of electricity and the filmed image, to digital technology: augmented reality, reactive objects, reality hacking and immersive spaces.

This new edition of Interactivos? in Medialab Madrid is inspired by the strategies of magic and illusion, in order to harness some of the old and new technological resources to collectively build software pieces and interactive installations which can propose a rethinking of the usual scenario in magic tricks, marked by a very clear separation between the wizard and the spectators.

[...]

The call is focused on projects of digital and sound art, critical design, educational applications, etc., which, inspired in magic and illusionism techniques, propose experiments on perception and attention, behaviour and interaction generated by social relations. The call is also focused on projects inscribed within the open hardware and software philosophy.

I'm happy to see that they're taking the social perspective and talking about breaking down the barriers between spectator and performer, owners and observers, adapts and novices.

I also really like their focus on "artists, wizards, engineers, musicians, programmers, designers, architects, and hackers." Explicitly crossing the barriers of designers, programmers and artists is critical right now as the field is maturing. In the beginning of film theater magicians were major drivers of innovation. This was not because they were magicians, but because they were applied creative professionals who had an immediate financial stake in the innovations--this differentiated them from scientists or artists, and makes them closer in terms of motivation to today's designers.

Posted by at 4:29 PM | Permalink

This morning I gave a keynote at O'Reilly's Etech. It was an elaboration on the theme of magic in the design of ubiquitous computing user experience that I've been developing for a while now.

The core of the piece were three linked arguments about emergence:

• The emergence of ubiquitous computing from market forces acting on, and in concert with, CPU prices
  
• The emergence of animist reactions to devices that have behaviors that go beyond action-reaction physics
  
• The emergence of magic as a metaphor for the design of ubicomp devices
  

I've made the presentation (710K PDF) with all of my speaking notes available.

Posted by at 11:46 AM | Permalink

(photos (cc) by eecue and decade_null, found on Flickr)

A couple of years ago I wrote about an idea I had for visualizing the implicit heat maps in Wifi signal strength using actual heat.

I never made the device, but I thought about what the ideas it was pointing at and generalized this as an observation I called "new data for old senses" and wrote some notes about it that I never shared here. Today PT at Makezine posted a link to a project along the lines that I was thinking about. It's a Wifi sensor that uses vibration to give you a sense of the Wifi landscape around you without having to look at anything, which was the crux of my idea in 2005. So, since the idea is now out there, here are my notes:

-----
I'm interested in the idea of using senses that don't normally get used for device communication as secondary display channels. This is a way to allow access to what John Udell calls the vast middle ground between devices that either demand our full attention or none.

We have more senses than sight and sound, which are channels already full with important information, so how do we use our "secondary" senses to communicate "secondary" information?

What are other kinds of senses and other kinds of data we can use?

Here are the somatic senses (thanks, Google!):

• touch
  
• pressure
  
• vibration
  
• heat
  
• cold
  
• pain
  
• proprioception (the feeling of joint movement)
  

What to visualize? Liz has been doing a bunch of stuff about visualizing people's relationship with the RF spectrum and geography, but I've been thinking that there are several granularities that would change in perceptible and interesting ways. At human scale in a city there's Wifi strength; at car scale there are things like crime maps, and at airplane scale there are political boundaries (voting records, natural phenomena).

-----

The bottom line is:

How we can introduce secondary information into people's awareness in a secondary way, using their less-used senses and without adding additional cognitive noise to the primary channels of sight and sound?

Posted by at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I don't advocate the implicit weirdness of such a device, since I can't think of any case where using it doesn't imply some seriously screwed-up priorities, but this lamp that hides a secret GSM camera is an interesting example of fusion between technology and furniture. It uses a mobile phone and camera embedded, and concealed, in a lamp.

Room monitoring has gone to a new level. Simply dial into this unit and the sensitive microphone will secretly be activated so that you can hear everything that is going on within 15 to 20 metres of the lamp. Unlimited range.

As an example of technology integrated into everyday life, it's an interesting data point (if only for the surprisingly high price). At least for me, however, the ethical considerations greatly outweigh its utility.

(Originally seen on BornRich)

Posted by at 6:32 PM | Permalink

Although the event at which the technology is described appears to be have happened some months ago, I just saw this video on YouTube about a Philips project called "Drag & Draw." It appears to be a projector and a motion-tracking camera that's tuned to specific colors in an RGB LED pointer. The colors are selected using a "paint bucket" of glowing LEDs. It seems to be a small-scale version of the Graffiti Research Lab's LASER Tag project (though predating it, the GRL project got more media coverage recently), and not unlike Golan Levin's many projects.

Philips describes that with Drag & Draw, "the entire home becomes a virtual canvas for expression and play for young children, thanks to a magic brush, a magic eraser, a magic wand, and a laser projection bucket." That's a lot of magic.

In the YouTube video they go further, "You can cast magic onto the drawing and it will come to life." Their video scenario is fanciful with how this animation works, but as Levin shows, there are many precedents for this kind of static-to-dynamic drawing.

Of course I find it interesting that they're using magic as a metaphor to describe functionality, but I suspect that this is primarily to explain it to themselves and to other adults. If their audience is genuinely small children (and why not people who need a white board replacement?), the kids probably don't need the explanation that it's magic. It just is, it works the way it works. How does glue work? Does it matter when you're making a collage? Same here.

Also, speaking of wands, in the same show Philips showed the "uWand" that they describe as:

a Philips vision of a revolutionary way of accessing and managing content, enabling the user to interact with their digital environment in a natural and self-expressive way. A simple stroke of the uWand allows users to intuitively point at a device and to scroll, select, play and move elements.

This is the first pairing of the "u" prefix (which typically implies "ubiquitous" in the same way that "i" originally implied "Internet" and now implies something like "interactive" or "me") and "Wand." Magic and ubiquitous computing. From Philips, no less.

Posted by at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last week, in honor of Valentine's Day, Tod and I put together another ThingM Technology Sketch, LoveM. It was a result of a process we regularly use: we look at a technology and apply "what if" metrics to it. "What if this technology cost 1/10 as much?" "What if it was 10 times more powerful?" "What if we could make one of these in 1/10 the time?" That sort of thing.

One of these discussions--"what if LCD screens continued to drop in price?"--led to LoveM. It's a chocolate box with an LCD display. When we came up with the idea, it started as kind of a joke, but then we went to a grocery store display to look at chocolate boxes and there was a $4 box of Valentine's Day candy with an LED blinker on the front. Sure, one LED does not make an LCD video display, but LED technology has existed for a long time and at current prices a chocolate box with an LED could have been done five years ago. It wasn't. I suspect because people weren't ready to have that level of technology in their food. That box and the relationship it implied made it clear to us that it was a lot more acceptable to introduce technology to food, and led us to pursue the idea and make a concept video (and give the box a cameo in it).

There's a more elaborate description on the ThingM site, but here's the video:

Posted by at 11:17 AM | Permalink

I started keeping track of interesting developments in furniture design recently. I'm primarily focused on the integration of furniture and technology (call it "smart furniture" ;-). Most of these have been collected from the gadget blogs over the last couple of months, so you may see familiar things if you follow those.

Massage Chairs

I had just noticed that massage chairs are domestic robots when Matsushita had to recall 68K of them. Now what this means is that there were at 68K massage chairs in the world. That's fewer than the number of Roombas or iPods, but that's a lot of chair-shaped domestic robots, and Panasonic is only one of dozens of brands producing the things.

EL Couch

Designer Danielle Sobik has made a prototype reactive electroluminescent couch. I think that her narrative that it's designed to bring couples apart by providing glowing color feedback that they're sitting too far apart is a bit simplistic (OK, so it works once, what's the daily utility) and, frankly, unnecessary: why not just have a couch that glows when people sit on it, and the glow changes depending on the orientation. I think it's also interesting that her goal seems to make the modernist design esthetic of the couch form she's using "more personal." This is a theme that seems to be reappearing recently, and it makes sense to me (but, then again, I'm no fan of Modernist minimalism).

Herman Miller includes charging into desktops

Induction based battery charging (most frequently seen in cordless electric toothbrushes these days) has been one of those technologies that has been possible for a long time, but practical maybe only recently (and maybe not now). Herman Miller's licensing of the technology, and including it into their portfolio of products makes it distinctly more possible. It also creates an interesting technology lock-in problem. This may be the first technology H-M has installed that's tuned to a specific set of devices that the company doesn't make. As those devices evolve, how will H-M update this technology? More importantly, how will they reassure office managers that the desks they're buying today--the very, very expensive Herman Miller desks--won't be "obsolete" 2 years from? This may be the thin edge of the smart furniture wedge, since the drastically different lifecycles of furniture and technology are what have prevented deep inclusion of tech into furniture.

Whirlpool Centralpark

A similar idea is Whirlpool's new fridge/accessory charger. They're being explicit about the pieces being swappable, so therefore trying to make it "futureproof." I'd be interested to see if that'll work, or if the whole assumption that things need to be recharged is going to disappear in a couple of years with new battery technology and induction charging. But that's of course not how Whirlpool's customers purchase: they have iPods today and when comparing Whirlpool's fridge against the Subzero, any slight advantage helps. It'll be interesting to see how well this sells. It's also interesting, because it provides electronics-level power input into the face of a refrigerator, which not only opens up all kinds of hacking possibilities, but also expansion possibilities. The classic "stick an LCD display into the front of your fridge" idea can't be far behind (though probably no one will buy it, as they didn't before).

Finally, a couple of design-oriented technology notes. Exploring the integration of technology into everyday life is the leitmotif of this blog, and the other side of installing technology into everyday objects is making technological objects that already exist better integrated. To that note, here are two fascinating recent examples:

Suck UK's fabric clock

An excellent melding of DIY, ironic anti-Modern design, historical reference (think 1960s tabletop radios) and technological camouflage, a simple idea for a 30-year-old technology and a great use of LEDs. Go Suck UK, go.

Samsung's blinged-out washer

Again, I'm no fan of cold Modernist minimalism. My reasons are many, but--among other things--it no longer make sense to treat the products of technology as if they were from a scientific lab, even when a lot of science goes into making them. That level of communication is no longer necessary, and we've grown used to tech. So much so, that casemodders, the hotrodders of our age, are the vanguard of technology personalization and expression. They show us that bling is a core part of our lives, or it should be. In our hearts, we all bling. Rimless architect glasses and Eames furniture are still bling, they just come from a different social background than gilt and Baroque curlicues. I think it's about time that appliance makers recognized and embraced the latter as a legitimate design style, which is why I'm so happy to see this washing machine. More bling!

Posted by at 5:52 PM | Permalink

I've talked about video scenarios and sketching before. Well, now that ThingM is up and rolling, i figured it was time to practice what I was preaching. Today we put the first of our Technology Sketches, which are video scenarios we use in the rapid prototyping of interaction ideas. We did this one in a little more than 3 days, including all technology, design and video work, and learned a ton from the process. Here's the abstract:

WineM is a Technology Sketch of a smart wine rack. It's designed to locate wines in a wine rack using RFIDs attached to bottles and to display which wines have been located using LED backlights behind the bottles. Collectors (or anyone with a large wine cellar) can use it to search through collections, track the location of specific bottles and manage inventory with a minimum of data entry. Linking bottles to networked databases can provide information that would otherwise be too time consuming or difficult to obtain (for example, the total value of a collection, or all the wine that is ready to drink).

A full description of the ideas and technologies behind this sketch are available on the ThingM Site.

Posted by at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A group in Switzerland has been doing some interesting experiments with technology embedded in everyday objects that helps people use those objects. Two of their papers were mentioned on Engadget and I enjoyed what they had to say. One paper, Instructions immersed into the real world–How your Furniture can teach you (160K PDF) was presented at Ubicomp 2003; the other, Towards Situation-Aware Affordances: An Experimental Study (240K PDF) was presented at Pervasive 2004. Though their field is giving instructions in the everyday environment, their platform is flatpack furniture (aka IKEA):

If the user takes a wrong action, a red light pattern appears reporting a mistake. Additionally, a green flash pattern shows the right alternative. After boards have been aligned together in the right way, individual green lights direct user’s attention to the holes where the screws have to be inserted and tightened. Once the final assembly state is reached, synchronous flash patterns on all LED’s indicate that the task is finished.

Their results present some comparative experiments with the LED-augmented shelves versus the standard instructions. Their results pretty uniformly favor the augmented version:

[...] there is a measurable time gain when using LED based instructions. [...] errors during assembly can be reduced using instructions in the right place. [...] determining which part fits where is one of the main problems using today’s instructions. [...] 75% of the participants found that the LED based instructions help with exactly this problem.

They also provide a good comparison (in the 2003 paper) of embedded technology versus other kinds of technological approaches:

[Augmented Reality] is cumbersome and typically computationally expensive. Audible instructions offer a cheaper way of immersion but have to tackle with the problem of addressing the appropriate parts by a vocabulary the user is familiar with or has to learn before. There is the possibility of presenting information on a screen [...]. However, the integration of instructions with the task remains unsolved.

Of course it's unlikely IKEA's margins will allow it include this kind of technology in their furniture in the future, but it's an interesting example of how cheap (relatively, by hardware standards) can be used to augment everyday tasks and how furniture can be the conduit of that. I'd also be interested in some exploration of what the embedded technology can do in the furniture after it's been assembled. I've posted about smart bookshelves before and ThingM will be posting about them again in the near future, so this is particularly timely.

Posted by at 4:06 PM | Permalink

Researchers and designers at Aachen University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have a magical user experience design project called REXplorer. As described in their paper entitled REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software,

REXplorer is a pervasive and mobile spell-casting game designed for tourists of Regensburg, Germany. The game platform blends location services, mobile photo and video blogging, and phonecam-based interactions to create a fantasy world that brings the history and culture of Regensburg to light. REXplorer applies mobile social software concepts to enhance the game and tourist experience.

They go on to describe the game:

The basic premise of the game is that the historic buildings of Regensburg have magical spirits, secrets, and treasures locked inside of them that can be unleashed with the proper magical spell.

Magic spells are cast with a wand that consists of a mobile phone in a plastic shell, which is running custom software that uses gestural recognition of the motion of the video from the phone's camera to identify certain basic movement shapes, which then invoke "ghosts" that talk about the city's history. The game aspect takes the magical metaphor to a greater extent than I've seen before:

[...] players hear voices from magical spirits trapped inside the buildings through their magic wand (the loudspeaker on the smartphone). If they cast the spell incorrectly, the spirits will be disgruntled and uncooperative. If they cast the spell correctly, the spirits will open up to the participants and divulge stories from the past that contain elements to help lead them on their path to master wizard. Participants may also need to duel against other participants in a spell-casting battle to achieve their goals.

It's a great, thought-through and exciting project. The use of magic as a interaction metaphor in a Medieval town as the backdrop is perfect. Judging from the video, the technical execution is also impressive. Great stuff.

I'll be updating my Magic in UX bibliography momentarily.

Technorati Tags: magic ubicomp ubiquitous+computing museum location augmented+reality smart+objects

Posted by at 2:04 PM | Permalink

I'm pleased to announce two exciting events, in the form of two websites.

First is the appearance of Tod Kurt's Hacking Roomba book, and its companion site, roombahacking.com. Tod is my friend and business partner, but (that notwithstanding) I still feel the book is still an exciting statement about technology and people's understanding and access to it (and an a fun way to get close to an otherwise difficult subject, robotics). Of the many books about hacking software, and homebrew hardware, this is one of the only ones that focuses on a single, cutting-edge appliance.
For me, this is an important milestone. For many years the trend in device design has been toward less end-user access to core functionality because the incentives for creating clarity about device functionality decreased in proportion to the increase in complexity and price competition. Cheap component prices mean there's little reason for developers to let people other than the manufacturers access the core of everyday technological objects. Even appliances, which designers once labored to make easily fixable, have become nearly disposable. I was recently surprised when I opened a 1970s blender and discovered that it was made to be easily repaired: the individual parts were clearly marked with part numbers and positioned to be easily replaced.
iRobot, whose company culture grew out of the MIT hacking tradition, designed the Roomba otherwise. They included a serial port on nearly every Roomba, and then they revealed the protocol for talking to that interface. Tod was one of the first to jump on this opportunity and wrote an excellent, broad ranging book about how to use this port (and the Roomba as a whole) to explore the possibility of personal robotics. He especially focused on uses outside the typical "robot fighting" genre that the majority of hobby robotics energy goes to. He feels that robots can do other things than push each other out of circles, flip each other over, or be the first to score a goal. His Roombas dance, draw and make music. As Tod puts it, the hacked Roomba can be a lover, not just a fighter.

The second announcement ( which I alluded to above) is that Tod and I have started a company, ThingM (pronounced "thingum" as opposed to "thing em"). We started this company close to a year ago, but we decided to put up a site to coincide with the launch of his Roomba book.
ThingM is a design and development studio focused exclusively on ubiquitous computing. We have many hopes for the company, but my dream is to rethink objects in the age of ubiquitous information processing. I believe that information processing can be considered a new kind of material in design (this is the basis of my Smart Furniture Manifesto, and furniture is one of the "object genres" that we have been studying), and that tangible networked objects can be considered a kind of projection of services, rather than mere standalone entities. At ThingM we aim to create a new class of smart everyday objects that abandon the idea of computers as general-purpose devices with a screen, a keyboards and a mouse. Our goal is to change the fundamental nature of all designed objects using pervasive networking and computing. In this, ThingM can be considered a combination of an interaction design studio, an industrial design studio, an engineering consultancy and a software development house, but really, we're a ubiquitous computing studio. Expect to hear more from us in the upcoming months.

Thanks to Judith Zissman, who helped us envision and produce these two sites (in addition to doing much of the site design and production, editing and basically everything else). Her contribution was instrumental, as it was with the Sketching in Hardware conference over the summer (the first ThingM product, if you look at the bottom ;-). Sonia Harris talked us (really me) through a bunch of overly-nebulous ideas and overly-specific requests to design the ThingM logo. Thank you!

[and thanks to Phil Torrone for blogging Tod's book on MAKE!]

Posted by at 8:25 PM | Permalink