Wanted images Last night, while working on my presentation for the Jack & Matt workshop on experience hooks, i discovered that i was a few images short. I knew they should have been on my K610i's memory card. I really needed those images! I've always known that there is programs that recover deleted files, but i've never had any use for them until now.
The Dog A google search reveals a number of similar sounding shareware/freeware/cheap programs. So which one should I use? I downloaded one promising solution, but it failed to start due to some missing gif89.dll issue. The second one, and the one i would recommend is the one from "Zero Assumption Recovery". I installed "ZAR 8.3" and i was a bit sceptical as free software often comes with a package (addons, spies etc.), and indeed it has some functions that are not free. But the ones i needed actually was free.
Recovered! My phone has a 2GB card and even though it is easy to recover the images (hook phone to computer, select disk/card and go) it took me approx.2 hrs to get it to scan the whole card through the phones usb interface and recover the images. I got the images i wanted back from the phone although some other pictures was mashed up like the one on the right. Some addtitional videos was also lost. I felt i just had to blog this because it was really helpful for me when i was stuck last night and the deadline was closing in.
We got an introduction to who they are and what they do. Near future projects that has a strong focus on accsessibility and availability is their thing. One example of this is the, Olinda Radio for BBC. Their contribution to this project was to generate a document that describes functions of a new radio.
"Olinda is a prototye DAB radio that shares listening with friends, is customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the Home."
Describing realworld projects It seems like their strong point and our lesson lies in describing projects. I would say that evidencing the qualities in the product that are about to be developed is what we will look into in this workshop. In "Growing Meat", a future speculation and discussion project, the important part was how to model the project in an understandable and easy to understand way. This was achieved by napkin charts and models.
Experience hooks An experienc hook can be: Discovery, Being wished for (wanted), Selection, Purchase, being show off, discussion, review, re-sale. Apple is really good at exploiting the hooks they offer through their design. Unboxing is a growing awareness with manufacturers. Companies are more successful when tapping into the buzz around the experience of unboxing and similar "hooks" rather than pure tech specs.
Workshop As far as i did understand the goal for my part in this wShop was to describe my project visually and in written form as precisely as i can. Matt told me to leave no room for hidden potential, but bring it all out. Which will be really good for me, but then really hard to. Also i'm in a bit of time squeeze (300408@0900 - 300408@0155= 7,05h left) this time. but let's see where i end up.
Ok, this is square one regarding my Bagheera interface. Lets take it from here and see where we can go. Please tell me if it gets too heavy with the applets embedded right in the blogpost.
To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
--> I've commented out the embedded application for now, i'll make a separate webpage for it later
If you want to test it on your phone feel free to download Bagheera_02.jar
This is really cool! By using Mobile Processing's export functions i can actually emulate the applications online in a blog post! The process is almost straight forward. I just have to cut and paste from the resulting html page that is generated when exporting from mobile processing.
The applet is in it's very first iteration, just able to display "touches" randomly generated with touches on the keypad. You can even download the aplication (jar file) from the links below the emulation and try it on your phone! This is just the "Hello World" so don't take it as a proposal to finished product. Next version will look closer to what i want for the first real iteration of the interface.
To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
--> I've commented out the embedded application for now, i'll make a separate webpage for it later
For less than one year ago i had never touched a blog, but it seems to be a nice way to document what i do at school.
mobile processing 0007 For those of you interested, mobile processing was updated to 0007 not so long ago to be more in sync with processing 0135. It is good to see the IDE evolve, but it still have some way to go to achieve the ease of use we are accustomed to with processing-0135.
A wave of geo innovation is under way and it has the potential to connect local populations and to communicate news and ideas from every corner of the planet. If the World Wide Web has lured people away from their own neighbourhoods, then geo is the technology that will bring it back.
it is an optimistic article, but i think it describes and defines the field of geocoding as it is today. Toghether with methods and examples you can virtually start making your own adaptions and services.
Vimeo I should have announced this a bit louder, but i have started an AHO Interaction Design Channel at Vimeo (vimeo.com/aho). Please sign up and upload your evidencing and other documentation and presentations!
Progress I am doing experiments with the mobile interfaces of my Bagheera system. I will upload a working iteration of it soon, but while you wait: please enjoy an early image processing dude with a nice hat:
SMS setup Well, instead of using hours to create the perfect blog post i thought i should just post my experiences from my first pre-alpha evidencing of Bagheera. After talking to einar, timo & jørn i decided to jumpstart the project by doing some tests with a simple sms setup (see picture). I created a set of SMS templates that corresponds to objects that would have been tagged with an rfid chip. So by just sending those SMSes whenever i "touched" an object to my Bagheera group (tnx to Silje, Gunnar and Ingrid) i could crudely simulate the user experience of Bagheera.
I "tagged" a few objects and places and set out on a trip around campus to photograph some locations. I touched my Dell M70, my Canon D60, the door out of U1, the lunch room, reception and the wood shop, sending SMSes at a blazing speed to my unaware test group (i did not explain what was going to happen).
Results So what did this ad hoc test show? The participants seemed to think it was nice to get a sms from me, but when they started flooding in, pinging all three phones (which where in the same room) at the same time, it became annoying quite rapidly. Loudly announcing something that should just be appearing in the background is not an option. Also the SMS memory of Ingrids temporary phone filled up after 4 messages and wrecked havoc, and that discouraged her from meeting me with her camera when she found out that i was taking pictures in the lunchroom. I asked Silje what she thougth of the system and said it felt like a rebus, but with the sms scenario and me going for it because of the test, it also felt a bit artificial. Gunnar actually enjoyed getting the messages, he felt it had a glancable quality. Gubo also thought that it was nice to get real (realtime?) status updates from me. Other responses was that the name was important to have before the content (ie. knut\camera). Also it should be more objects than just camera and laptop and some places. And again sms sound/notification is certainly not the way to go with frequent messages. Someone questioned who is seeing all the messages, "is it just me?"
My own thoughts is that it will become an issue with which things gets tags and what does not. Does places get tags? Places need to have longer descriptions to add the context (eg. AHO/U1/Door/Exit). An object like my camera already got its context from belonging to me (eg. Knut/Camera). Also the huge difference in the display of SMS messages in short on the phones where striking (see picture). Eight clearly readable lines on the LG KG810 versus four hard to get tiny lines on the Nokia N73 (why all the wasted space?). White on black is clearly more readable in this situation. That is all good experiences for me to bring to my own Bagheera interface.
Bagheera:Black Panther living in the jungle and watches over Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Also, the spider Bagheera Kiplingi in the genus of jumping spiders are named after the author of The Jungle Books.
Bagheera is the name of my premier concept this week. It is a concept that fits well with previous research into RFID and everyday objects and connected products. This is a work in progress, so i might not be crystal clear in my thoughts and explanation yet, but i'll get there.
The basic concept is this:
Gunnar is at home and finds himself wanting to take some pictures for his blog. He pics up his phone, grabs his camera, a pair of shades, a nice cap and looking through the window, he decides to bring an umbrella. While doing this he momentarily touches each object with his phone. Knut (Me) on the other side of town is working hard on my concept (this) at school. To get some distraction i glance on my "bagheera" wich is running on my phone. Pictures of a camera, shades, a cap and an umbrella, with "time since touch (TST)" has appeared below Gunnar in my list. I sit back and contemplate this: "Gunnar is going out for some shots, but why the umbrella, is it raining?". I decide to take a break and call him to meet up for some joint picture taking.
An alternative title for the concpet could be "inTouch". The beauty of this service is ease of use. To add more objects (and later people and places), is only a matter of attaching a RFID tag to the object, read the tag, take a picture of the object with the phone and then the tag is connected to the picture in the system for everyone to see. Ofcourse it would be nice if we assume that every object has an RFID chip already, but at this time they mostly have no chip.
Further use could be to add RFID tags to places you commonly use, such as inside and outside of your home door. In this manner when you leave you touch the tag on your way out and people see you as "away" and when you return home the see you as "home". Parents could put tags some places enroute to school and have their kids touch their NFC phones on selected tags to show their progress. Maybe it would be comforting to have a physical beacon of where you are if you are going home from a bar late at night and people could see your status updates on your way home (touching tags on house corners light posts scattered around town). Yet another use could be having a tag on your lunch box. Then when you touch your box, your friends would spot it and do the same to their boxes with tags to indicate that they are ready for lunch. Even more areas to enable could be the ash tray outside of school, then your smoking buddies can join in if they watch your "bagheera" status updating to a picture of the ash tray with a recent TST.
This might seem a little bit "dirty" and unstable. But why not, the idea of ubiquitous computing is in itself dirty, as it relies on real life infrastructure, people and cheap/disposable products. Bagheera would be an open ended service that could develop in several directions based on what people do with it. Technically it could evolve into a complex service that adds a lot more data to the party. Like spatial location (GPS, Cell tower), nearby devices (bluetooth), website integration (flickr, twitter, facebook etc). But for my project i think it will be complex enough to add 3-5 devices with a total of about 50 tags to use. This recent post on techcrunch looks into the vacant place of mobile/physical soicial networking. This is an area that a service/system like bagheera would thrive in.
This week will be all about adding momentum to the project. Working with technical and Theoretical aspects just takes you so far. Today i started to look at the practical end, playing with some wax and my phone. The aim was just to get a feel of shapes connected to the phone. Rather crudely it evolved into something that penetrated the RFID tag bubble and extracts the information from within.
I just stumbled upon this guy that has a host of interesting projects going on. The above video describes a method of using any surface as a screen by tracking a projected image onto it in realtime from just one projector. That would be very useful for prototyping various devices with screens. The below video has a really interesting, but maybe not that clear application of RFID tags and projection. The idea is to capture information from RFID tags and project the information from the tags back onto the objects containing the tags.
Previously i have mentioned the term "Use Quality" as something i want to look into. We have now worked with RFID for more than three months, and my knowledge of the technology is steadily increasing. Lately i have been trying to figure out how the technology fits into my major project for this semester. At this point i find RFID to be a tool to enable cheap and ubiquitous objects to have networking capabilities. And then you ask: "What does use quality have to do with that?". The idea that are presented in the book "Toughtful Interaction Design" by Löwgren og Stolterman that the perceived quality of a product in use should be part of the designers repertoire of tools when designing. These qualities can be achieved by working consciously with the "language" of quality in much the same manner as we work with the language of shapes and colour.
In my view the answer lies in mapping. Think of the earth and the history of cartography. In interaction design the quality of transparency refers to what could be regarded as making complex interactions obvious and straight forward. The feeling the user should be left with is that the action is understandable, logical and crystal clear. But how can this be achieved? It is not that long ago that there was white spots on the maps of the world. Those areas had to be imagined and speculated upon before they where visited and mapped. And by mapping them they became transparent and demystified. So how can this transfer to my project? The mapping of unknown parts of the world and later the mapping of human genome by mapping the complete human genome, shows that mapping proves to be immensely valuable to humans as a tool for navigating and utilizing unknown and complex systems.
There is a host of mapping projects on all sorts of data, social relationships (like in the previous post), virtual relationships like the Digg arc map and other data that can yield insight when mapped. What i will try to do is mapping the objects people carry around into a similar structure and distribute the info in a broad and open manner. This map will be new to us and can help us understand or observe new quirks of human behaviour and find new opportunities for interaction.
My phone has a 2GB card and even though it is easy to recover the images (hook phone to computer, select disk/card and go) it took me approx.2 hrs to get it to scan the whole card through the phones usb interface and recover the images. I got the images i wanted back from the phone although some other pictures was mashed up like the one on the right. Some addtitional videos was also lost. I felt i just had to blog this because it was really helpful for me when i was stuck last night and the deadline was closing in.
The aim was just to get a feel of shapes connected to the phone. Rather crudely it evolved into something that penetrated the RFID tag bubble and extracts the information from within.
Innlegg
