Monthly Archive for February, 2008

SNiFTAG: datalogging for your pet

Published on 2/15/2008 in Tech. 1 Comment

SNIF Tag is a matchbook-sized wearable computer for your dog. Small, comfortable, and stylish, the SNIF Tag clips securely to your dog’s collar. Using the latest wireless technology, the Tag records and transmits a record of your pup’s activities and encounters with other SNIF dogs to a sleek base station in your home.

Bubba 390  Base Station Tag 265

The SNIF Tag is made of durable plastic composites, is water-resistant, and easily clips on and off your dog’s collar for once-a-week charging. The Tag and Base Station aren’t just cutting edge technology, they’re cutting edge design, too: the Tag’s faceplate can be customized to suit your personal style and the discreet, streamlined Base Station is as much sculpture as it is cutting edge technology.

The SNIF website is intuitive and easy to use. When you log in, you’ll find all the information your dog’s SNIF Tag has recorded: the other dogs he’s met; his activities and exercise logs; and all kinds of helpful tools to help you understand the life of your pet better. For the first time, you can check in on your pet’s overall health from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.

Activity Grab 390

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List of ‘Idea Labs’

Published on 2/9/2008 in Diary and Links. 2 Comments

Here is a list of “idea labs” around the country/world. It is a list of places where they carry out work very similar to what is done at MIT Media Lab – lots of engineering, design and rapid prototyping/fabrication for projects that push the envelope of technology and its application to our lives.

USA – ACADEMIC

D-Lab/Media-X/CDR, Stanford, http://mediax.stanford.edu/

Infolab, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, http://infolab.northwestern.edu/

Information Sciences Institute/Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, http://ict.usc.edu/

Georgia Tech GVU, Atlanta, GA, http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/

Human-Computer Interaction Institute, CMU, Pittsburgh, http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/

CMU Entertainment Technology Center, CMU, Pittsburgh, http://www.etc.cmu.edu/

NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYC, http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/flash/Home

Berkeley Institute of Design, Berkeley, CA,  http://bid.berkeley.edu/

Four Eyes Lab, UCSB, CA,  http://ilab.cs.ucsb.edu/

USA – COMMERCIAL



MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, http://www.media.mit.edu/

MERL – Mistubishi Electric Research Laboratories – http://www.merl.com/

Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, http://www.parc.com/

Eyebeam, NYC,  www.eyebeam.org.

Applied Minds in L.A., http://www.appliedminds.com/

Yahoo! Design Innovation Team, design.yahoo.com

Idea Lab, http://www.idealab.com/

Willow Garage, Menlo Park, CA, http://www.willowgarage.com/

Squid Labs, Berkely, CA, http://www.squid-labs.com/

Institute for Human- and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, FL, http://www.ihmc.us/

Accenture Technology Labs, http://www.accenture.com/Global/Services/Accenture_Technology_Labs/default.htm

IBM Research, http://www.almaden.ibm.com/software/disciplines/user/

Docomo Communications Labs, http://www.docomolabs-usa.com/

EUROPE / ASIA



Innovation Lab, Denmark,  http://innovationlab.dk

medialab prado madrid, spain, http://medialab-prado.es/

v2 rotterdam, holland, http://www.v2.nl/

interactive institutes, sweden, http://www.tii.se/

ars electroncia futurelab, linz, austria, http://www.aec.at/en/futurelab/index.asp

fabrica, treviso, italy, http://www.fabrica.it/

c3, budapest, hungary, http://www.c3.hu/

distance lab, scotland (former ML europe staff), http://www.distancelab.org/

art+com, berlin, germany, http://www.artcom.de/

meso, frankfurt, germany, http://www.meso.net/

Knowledge Media Institute, Milton Keynes, UK, http://kmi.open.ac.uk/

HumLab Blog, Sweden, http://blog.humlab.umu.se/

ITRI Creativity Lab, Taiwan, http://www.itri.org.tw/eng/

Sony Computer Science Lab, Paris and Tokyo, http://www.sonycsl.co.jp/

DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany, http://www.dfki.de/web

Creativity & Cognition Studios, University of Technology Sydney, Australia, http://www.creativityandcognition.com/

Mobile Life, Stockholm, Sweden, http://www.mobile-life.org/index.php

Studio Creatif, France Telecom, France, http://www.studio-creatif.com/

HITLabNZ, New Zealand,  http://www.hitlabnz.org/

Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Korea, http://www.sait.samsung.co.kr/eng/main.jsp

thinking and doing

Published on 2/7/2008 in aphorisms. Closed

Don’t think, try!

Jonh Hunter

Ubiquitous computing: failures and new interaction rituals

Published on 2/7/2008 in Diary. 1 Comment

LIFT is on. Yesterday, I took part in this workshop that stimulated discussions around the reasons that brought different technologies to fail. As the topic was very interesting to many LIFT attendees the room was quite full and we had to break into groups. I coordinated and worked with people interested in reasons of failures of mobile applications. We came out with a list of nine points that summarize well our discussion:

  1. Applications should be self-contained. No need to access data remotely as traffic is often charged separately and people do not want to pay extra money;
  2. Lack of market model. E. g., Mobile blogging did not really address a real user need;
  3. Lack of advertisement;
  4. Lack of awareness / lack of certainty. For instance applications might show an inconsistence mechanism of use or either they did not offer appropriate feedback. People could feel uncertain that the application will accomplish their communication intentions;
  5. Lack of culture. Either there is not a culture around a new service or the service might offer something which exist in other forms in other contexts;
  6. Ergonomic barriers. Usability issues like extremely complicate installation procedures or interaction mechanisms;
  7. Pricing/cost model. The user might feel uncomfortable if s/he is not sure of how much s/he is going to pay for using the system or the service;
  8. Tradeoff between responding to needs and creating new needs. I actually think that we should design following the first principle but most of the time is the other way around and this lead developers to design for false needs;
  9. Lack of standards. One of the biggest barrier for mobile development is the lack of standards. Devices offer inconsistent features and APIs and multi-device programming is extremely costly, and buggy…

During the general discussion we stated that most of the failures of “intelligent applications” lie on the fact that their definition of what is an intelligent behavior is flawed. Essentially, people are not rational and therefore unpredictable. Also for many of these products there is no effort to take the user’s point of view and adapt to changes.

androidlocation

Published on 2/6/2008 in Diary. Closed

I recently joined an open source effort to build a location-based social application that aim to provide location features to Google’s android compatible phones. It is called androidlocation. Initially, the application will allow to:

  • List of friends with distance to our current location
  • Detect GSM info and translate it to coordinates to know our current location
  • Google Maps interfase to see objects in a specified radio of our current location with zoom and sattelite and traffic views
  • Google Maps interfase to move around the map with zoom and sattelite and traffic views
  • Search for Objects in Google Maps and show their location
  • Show our current location with a transparent blue circle
  • Show closest friends with their names

Unknown  Unknown-3

Unknown-1  Unknown-2-1

Second Skin, a bio-I/O platform (Optical motion capture)

Published on 2/6/2008 in Tech. Closed

Raskar and colleagues at MIT Media Lab are building a wearable fabric to support millimeter accurate location and bio-parameter tracking at thousands of points on the body. Such a fabric can compute and predict 3D representation of human activity and use them for a closed-loop control to augment human performance. The goal is to support a detailed analysis and control of higher-level human activity. The basic technology uses a new optical motion capture method they have recently developed. The first phase of the project involves building next generation optical communication tools.

More here.

Raskar Motion-Capture

Language understanding

Published on 2/5/2008 in aphorisms. Closed

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations