Mobile GMaps is a FREE application that displays Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps and MSN Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local) maps and satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones, PDAs and other devices.
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
Bio Mapping is a research project which explores new ways that we as individuals can make use of the information we can gather about our own bodies. Instead of security technologies that are designed to control our behaviour, this project envisages new tools that allows people to selectively share and interpret their own bio data.
The Bio Mapping tool allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. This can be used to plot a map that highlights point of high and low arousal. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.
The picture below shows 6 months artist commission hosted by Independent Photography as part of ‘Peninsula’, a series of artist commissions on the Greenwich Peninsula, an emotion map of the area that explores people’s relationship with their local environment.
The project is set up as a series of participatory workshops that invite people to borrow a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk. The device measures the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The resulting maps encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.
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Tags: collaboration tools, ecology, environment, Exploratory Data Analysis, field tools, information visualization, location awareness, Location Based Services, map algorithms, maps, psychogeography
Lately I have been seeing a growing number of projects around this idea of multi-touch sensing interaction. Starting with Apple new touch pad that detects an threat differently two fingers, and now this patent fill that shows a possible touch interface. This is a very cool demo that rang my bell on how close these interfaces are from mass market.
Watch the video here.
Tags: interaction design, new technology
I first heard of OMNI at LIFT. Then I stumbled across the web site and I started reading some news. I have to say that this is the model I had in mind when posting and thinking about citizen journalism.
Going through the site it is clear the model of pushing the shift of the citizen’s involvement into news production and consumption. One passage in one of the articles of “about us” makes it crystal clear:
The traditional news model works something like this: An event happens; for example, a politician announces a new policy. The news media report it. The citizen reads, listens to, or watches what the news media have to say. And as far as the citizen goes, that is the extent of their involvement. If the medium concerned is a newspaper, then the citizen may have some very limited right of reply by, for example, writing a letter to the newspaper that has an extremely small chance of getting published. But in the traditional news model, the citizen is mostly a passive receptacle of somebody else’s ideas.
These kinds of services transform news from a passive experience into an active one. Instead of merely reading the news, the citizen reporter writes the news, too. This reflects on the level of implication of the citizen concerning the particular issue. It also compels questions that should be asked and answered.
Back at the beginning of my thesis I wrote something similar on the engagement of citizens on city life. There I was, with Nicolas Nova, suggesting a possible shift of engagement with technological solutions like the one of OMNI. Important questions arise from these shifts of controls that needs to be answered, like how to define trusts in such context and whether professional ‘etiquettes’ might apply.
Tags: citizen journalism, collaboration tools, collaborative writing, lift06, pedagogy, politics
Thanks to Nicolas, I found this nice search engine, called, iSpecies, which core idea is that web results can be grouped according to the species of the document. The engine uses several data sources, hacking on the aggregation and clustering of the data:
iSpecies uses web services to talk to source databases, extract data, and assemble a page for each species. The code makes extensive use of XML. Essentially, each web service returns XML in one form or another, and I use and XSL style sheets to transform the result into HTML.
[blog]
Tags: clustering, search engine
The Entertaible concept is a tabletop gaming platform that marries traditional multi-player board and computer games in a uniquely simple and intuitive way. Entertaible comprises a 30-inch horizontal LCD, sophisticated touch screen-based multi-object position detection, and all supporting control electronics. It allows the players to engage in a new class of electronic games which combines the features of computer gaming, such as dynamic playing fields and gaming levels, with the social interaction and tangible playing pieces, such as pawns and dies, of traditional board games.
Initially aimed at the out-of-home game market such as restaurants, bars, and casinos, Entertaible has the potential to evolve into a gaming platform for the consumer market.
Tags: interactive furniture, tangible interface, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous game
La nave e’ ormai in preda al cuoco di bordo e cio’ che trasmette al microfono del comandante non e’ piu’ la rotta, ma cio’ che mangeremo domani.
S.Kierkegaard
Thanks to Shuja and Guillaume that are kind enough to let me bug them all the time, I managed to finish the module to position the message on the map using latitude and longitude. It was hard because I had to play with three different reference systems: the canvas, the tile and finally the lat-long Mercator Projection.
To resources contributed to this little success: the first is this web site that allows you to debug a google map application, revealing the tile indexing system and the coordinates references. However, mind that the code offered as example is faulty. On a newsgroup I managed to find the good code that I am posting below. The code allow to convert a Google Map tile index, to latitude and longitude. Additionally, I converted the javascript into python 
Tags: google, map algorithms, maps, Python
Continue reading ‘Debugging an application that uses Google Maps’
Lyra Nikolovska’s last project is very relevant for our work on Interactive Tables. Her project is reflection on a type of social dynamics that takes place at tables during conversations. Who dominates the conversation?
Two people, seated at each end of the table, converse. As they converse, light emitting diodes (LEDs), embedded along the center of the table, are activated by their pattern of conversation. Two microphones pick up the duration and the volume of the conversation at regular intervals, and trigger light animation from the end where one speaks toward the other. If both people speak simultaneously, the lights start animating from both ends.
As in our technical solution, the table doesn’t parse nor “understand” the nature of the discourse, rather it isolates and brings forward one specific component of interaction at tables. One great point of this design is that the table does not use an “extra PC” for the computational part. Instead, there is a micro-controller embedded in the tabletop that does all the computation. The code is a couple of hundred lines.
Tags: collaboration tools, information visualization, interaction design, interactive furniture, ubiquitous computing
Cool! I was browsing google maps and I started noticing that it now covers Piedmont region, in norther Italy with vector maps! This is a great news for STAMPS …
Tags: google, map algorithms, maps
CampusBeacon is a startup of MIT building a site for campus communities. They intend to replace bulletin boards across campus and become the information center for students, faculty, etc. The website features a service called ePosters, intended to be a “myspace” for campus events and an information page for organizations both within and outside of the university.
They are interested in learning more about how you, as a potential user of ePosters, could benefit from advertising online through our service. You can take a look at a preview of ePosters. They are posing some questions to refine their service:
1. How do you advertise your events/functions on campus?
2. Do you face any difficulties advertising through your standard means (posters etc.)?
3. Do ePosters and its services seem helpful to your organization’s advertising efforts on the campus?
4. If so, how much would your organization be willing to pay for such services?
I would be interested in talking more with these guys because some of the functionalities they are designing are relevant also for ShoutSpace.
Tags: collaboration tools, graffiti, Location Based Services, tagging
Paolo Avesani pointed me on this nice web application that allows the users to share nice alpine walking itineraries. One of the main feature is the ability to see a cartographic support for the itinerary description which makes more easy to follow (although I could not find an itinerary with working map).
The list something like 700 itineraries. I would be interested in knowing some more about it.
Tags: collaboration tools, information visualization, map algorithms, maps
Yes, finally I can see that things are slowly moving forward. I am trying to complete the python port of STAMPS and somethings seems to work. Thanks to the help of Micah Dowty and Korakot Chaovavanich I managed to put together a working prototype. At the moment I enabled an annotation layer that displays a red dot on top of the Google Map tile and that allow the user to pinpoint a specific point on the tile. From here, it should be possible to implement the rest of the functionalities with a “relative” ease . More info soon …
While farting around the net, as Nicolas likes to say, I found this nice map which is quite astonishing. It shows the cables that have been placed under the sea to connect different countries. It is amazing to see how Africa and the North-East of Russia seems to be poorly connected with other continents. It would be actually nice to see also the terrestrials backbones.
(via)
Tags: maps, new technology
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