BTW this post was originally much too long and contained a few different interrelated ideas. Rather than posting a very long post I’m spreading the ideas and questions out over the next few posts.

Mindful Football is today’s fun idea, and it builds on my previously posted ideas around pico projectors. Imagine you’re about to kick a football, and the football knows exactly how you’re going to kick it before you kick it. The Mindful Football knows how hard you’re going to kick it, in what direction you’ll kick it, and it can predict how it’ll behave after you kick it. Of course the surface of the football is also a kickable smashable display, and the ball can project images all around itself (its got inbuilt 360 degree kickable pico projectors!).

Just as you’re about to kick the Mindful Football it predicts and shows you the results of your kick. Close by the football on the ground you see a projected blue arrow, which points in the direction the ball thinks it’ll go. Further in the distance, the ball also projects a big blinking orange circle showing where it’ll land, or what it’ll hit (yes, you want the orange circle to be in the goal or at a teammates feet). Would the real-time visual feedback about your kick enable you to change how you kick the ball, so that it goes where you want at a speed you want? If you used the Mindful Football when playing friendly games, would the real-time visual feedback improve your ball control skills, even when you switch back to using a normal football?

What other forms of visual feedback could be shown to you as you’re kicking the ball? For example, a star could be displayed on the video surface of the football. The location of the star indicates where you should kick the ball to send it in the direction of the goal. You can easily imagine this idea applied to lots of other sports, such as tennis, baseball, rugby, American football, etc.

Another visual feedback possibility includes having the surface of the football show lots of animated red dots, where each red dot indicates where a teammate is relative to the ball. When you have control of the ball and are looking at it, the purpose of the red dots would be to the enhance your awareness of your teammates positions. Would that really increase real-time situational awareness? Would it help you learn how to predict where your teammates normally are relative to you?

Mind you, if you were really dastardly and mischievous, you could hack the opposite team’s Mindful Football so it provides slightly inaccurate feedback. Potentially leading to the players becoming less skilled at kicking the football!

A Mindful Football is an example of providing real-time feedback at the moment of action, i.e. when kicking the ball provide feedback. What about cases where we achieve a goal by performing a lot of interrelated actions that are spread out over time, such as when we cook a meal? I’ll cover that in the next post.

Some of the ideas I’ll post are fun, others are tamer and move obviously useful. I enjoy the fun slightly left-of-field ideas as they’re good for HCI / design conversations, inspiration and follow-on idea creation.

Below I outline three related ideas, which I’ve called FlowOut TV, Pocket CAVE and Half-Real Toys.

FlowOut TV is the first idea and its a bit of fun. The idea is motivated by the question: Can watching TVs and/or playing games on TVs be made more immersive, without having to use 3D displays? Imagine if TVs and computer displays had multiple pico projectors built into them, where each projector points in a different direction. Shown above is a quick sketch of the technology for FlowOut TV. The projectors are mounted on motors so they can point in different directions and project images onto the walls, ceilings and floors around the TV. Included in the pico projectors are video cameras, which can see the area the pico projectors project onto (video cameras enable interactivity).

As you watch FlowOut TV, the projectors are used to enhance the video shown on the main screen. Now imagine you’re sitting at home watching a FlowOut TV, while the screen shows a man dashing along a city street. The street at his feet becomes part of your sitting room because the street is projected onto the floor in front of the FlowOut TV. The sky above the man’s head is projected onto the ceiling, and the crowds walking by the running man are projected onto the walls to the left and right of the FlowOut TV. As the story progresses, the FlowOut TV finds a picture frame in your sitting room, and begins projecting relevant parts of the story into that – such as photographs of the main character’s family. In yet other parts of the story the couch you are sitting on has an image of victorian fabric projected onto it, because the main character is visiting a victorian home. It may even be possible to have the faces of those around you “painted” by the projectors, so they look like characters in the film (give everyone watching Avatar blue skin?!). You can easily imagine lots of ways stories can be woven into your environment.

Now extend the FlowOut TV idea a little further, imagine your laptop screen has the same pico projectors builtin. Fun for computer games? Games could project gloves and body armor onto your arms and wrists…as you move your arms the projected armor would stay projected onto your body, while the walls around you flash with incoming blasts of laser fire! Or more sedately, Facebook status updates could be projected onto family portraits that are near your laptop.

Iterate the idea further, add in front and back facing pico projects and build it into a mobile phone. Suddenly you have a portable CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), where any room you walk into can easily be turned into an immersive virtual reality environment. To turn a room into a CAVE, all you need to do is take the FlowOut phone out, place it on a stable surface (optional), let it examine the room so it can figure out the room’s shape and surfaces, then it can project images onto the walls and surfaces around you. Since it has builtin cameras, it can also track how you move around, and could make any surface interactive as long as the cameras can see your physical actions. Prototypes of a portable CAVE could easily be built – its idea number two and I’m calling it a Pocket CAVE (though I prefer the less snappy name CAVE-In-Yer-Pocket).

A final iteration is adding pico projectors with video cameras to kids toys. Imagine building it into a toy car, and as the car is “driven around” a road is projected in front of the car, or grandparents watching from 1000 miles away are projected into the room and they interactively draw the road for the car to follow. There are all kinds of Half-Real Toys (one part projected, one part real), where the act of playing with them in different ways leads to different interactive surfaces getting projected into the surrounding environment. For toys, I’m unsure whether adding projected images is a good or bad idea? It could easily be implemented badly, where the projection replaces the joy of imagining roads and worlds.

Right, enough for now – this post is getting too long. There are lots more ideas which fall out of the above, I’ll follow up with another few in the next blog post.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) are on the rise – a recent Nature paper covers an experiment where measures of thinking are used to separate out images. The BCI research community is gaining traction – keep an eye out for the BCI 2011 conference. BCI products and startup companies are springing up – for example Neurosky have an interesting commercial consumer orientation BCI headset, and a recent toy game from Mattel called MindFlex mixes up a basic BCI sensor with puzzle solving.

Unfamiliar with Human-Computer Interaction quantitative experiment design and statistical tests? Here’s a short introduction to statistics for HCI research. And yes R is great for calcs – though its usability is distinctly lacking. If you want to get serious about HCI stats and experiment design I recommend reading The Whole Art of Deduction. It’ll help you get familiar with Independent & Dependent Variables, Repeat Measures, Between Subjects, Within Subjects, etc, etc. Another handy link is this reference page, which helps you figure out which statistical test to use. Finally, CrossValidated is extremely useful Q&A website for asking and answering questions about specific stats techniques.

Do you think is Divvy a potentially useful user interface tweak for enhancing desktop window management?

Image Swirl is an interesting variant of a graph layout information visualisation from Google Labs. So far I like using it to explore clusters of related images, though I wonder whether the clustering reduces the range of images I see. Do I get exposed to more images that are strongly related to each other and see less images that are unrelated to each other (but may still be strongly relevant to the search term)?

If you like Image Swirl you’ll enjoy playing with Wonder Wheel, also from Google Labs. Wonder Wheel displays a graph layout of text search results. Enjoy.

The Future of Reading Conference could be interesting – especially for the views of authors such as Margaret Atwood. How much do they think the medium matters? Why? Marshall McLuhan has more than a few thoughts in that direction. The conference is in Rochester Institute of Technology and is starting tomorrow.

Very neat – home fabricating “real devices” with Lego. See a video demo of a printer made out of Lego. Yup made from Lego – I especially like how the little Lego people help out! The future of making & user designing is creeping up on us.

Bosch have enhanced the night vision system system in cars, so that it provides smartly enhanced high contrast images of the road ahead at night. Clever but would you trust it to properly identify which parts of the road are critical for highlighting?

For the last few years I’ve been using and really liked Sony’s eBook Reader, the PRS500. Yup, I was an early adopter and altogether unsure whether I wanted to give up paper books! Recently there’s been an explosion of electronic readers, lead by Amazon’s Kindle. Within the next few years we’re going to see bendable, foldable and colourful electronic paper. For those of you who are design minded and interested in using E-Paper to invent new kinds of interactive visual displays and devices, here’s a handy guide for learning more about E-Paper technology.

Fascinating The Secret History of Silicon Valley – just over an hour long but well worth watching.

How can we help people easily create and explore the design space around physical / virtual objects? I’ve touched upon this before when I wrote about physical objects that are designed to be easy to re-shape by physical manipulation, e.g. Snap Cups and Shape A Seat, aka Don’t Forget Me, etc.

With that question in mind have a look at this video showing off Magic Paper. Ain’t it cool! The researchers behind Magic Paper created a tool that tries to simplify the process of creating an interactive physical “thing”. With Magic Paper you create a virtual mechanical system by simply sketching it. You don’t have to spend ages creating 3d CAD drawings of a car, you don’t have to program complex models of gravity and other forces, etc. You could imagine an extended version of Magic Paper where when you’re happy with how your sketch behaves it is automatically built as a real-world object.

What excites me about Magic Paper is that anyone can (reasonably) easily create a very complicated physical mechanical system. You can create it by drawing, which we can all do – some better than others. You don’t have to worry about complex programming or physical modeling because Magic Paper has a lot of in-built smarts. The complexity of building a physical object / system is hidden, with the trade off that there are limits to what you can create.

Magic Paper is freely available for download, enjoy.

James Landay’s DENIM is a great example of another sketching tool. Over the years Dr. Landay has contributed a lot to sketch research, for example early in his research career Brad Myers and himself published Interactive Sketching for the Early Stages of User Interface Design. With DENIM (download) you sketch out websites. Your sketches are interactive – for example you can draw links between web pages, sketch a website button that really works, etc. Try out this example of a DENIM created website. The website sketch is crude but its a good way of creating a sense of what the website would be like to navigate.

Magic Paper and DENIM are powerful examples of enabling people to build by building on what they can already do, i.e. draw. Sketching to create prototype designs potentially enables a tight feedback loop, i.e. draw, test, tweak, understand, repeat. Sketching also ties into an attempt to make designing, interacting and building “natural”. I’ll come back to natural / reality-based / haptic interaction in the next few weeks.

One potential issue with sketching interactive “things” is the fidelity of the sketch. How realistic is the interactive sketch? If its a low-fidelity sketch then the sketch (no matter how interactive) won’t be very like the end product, though it should still help you think about the end artifact in the early stages of designing and creating. There are also medium and high-fidelity prototyping approaches, where high-fidelity prototyping often involves building versions that are much closer to the finished design.

How does this tie into Snap Cups & How To Make (almost) Anything? With sketching we potentially have a way of enabling people to shape interactive objects to their needs without requiring considerable technical know how. For example sketch out how your clothes transform shape over time, how your door opens, what trails the “Follow Me” robot ant overlords take, etc.

Three final examples: Teddy and Smooth Teddy are brilliant examples of research into tools and approaches for simply drawing and creating 3d models. Line Rider is a dangerously addictive game that involves fun sketching to control a little you in a virtual physical world.

In the above photo you can see an example where a streak of lightening can be seen on a model’s t-shirt when the t-shirt is viewed via a mobile phone camera. The lightening is printed on her t-shirt but the “colours” (wavelengths of light) used for printing aren’t perceivable by the human eye but are picked up by digital cameras. There’s more details about the technology here.

There’s a number of usage suggestions for the techology on the kameraflage website. You could imagine extending their idea but without digital cameras. Imagine multiple people sitting around using a shared surface computer (such as a DiamondTouch). Each person is wearing glasses with slightly different colour tints, so each person would be able to view a “personal” image on the surface that the other users won’t see. Or you’re going to the cinema and depending on which glasses you wear the film has a different age rating because different parts of the film are “cleaned up” for younger age groups. Alternatively wear these glasses during the film and get in for cheaper because you’ll see inserted advertisements on-screen?

I haven’t played with Ning (yet) but based on the video and from reading around it sounds like the commoditization of software infrastructures for social software.

The implications of Ning and cohorts are that we can expect to see lots of small social networks. Are there certain thresholds for small social networks? Will there be too much choice in a small social network? If you have a bunch of friends, say around 20 connected people, will they drown in too many options?

By giving people so many avenues of communication and interaction you could reduce the amount of shared virtual space between a group of friends. For example I often come across quiet web forums with lots and lots of different sub-forums. Each of those sub-forums commonly only has a few threads consisting of a scattering of posts made by different users, and often the posts are widely spread out in time. If you count the total number of posts on the forums there is activity but because the posts are so spread out between different sub-forums and threads the forum feels empty and devoid of participation. Will the same thing happen with small social networks? Do too many ways of contributing and interacting encourage small social networks to die?

Related to that I wonder will people become overloaded with update choice? Should they update their blogs, their photos, their videos, their profiles, leave comments on members blogs, or respond to comments on forums, etc, etc? All that content creation via so many paths sounds like time consuming work.

Mind you automatically pulling together and mashing together (via Ning, RSS, etc) people’s online contributions might help create a community and sense of focus – a village square.