Zoomii reminds me of my old MLE project Media Dive. Media Dive was a graphical and audio ZUI for browsing large collections of music, where I played around with integrating zooming with controlling exposure to multiple spatially arranged audio sources. One feature of Media Dive enabled you to zoom towards a song/album to select what music to hear while also increasing (or zoom out to decrease) the music’s volume.

Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, misses and ones to watch.

Sit back and watch the addictive flickrvision. flickrvision is a spatial photo visualisation that shows photos on Google Maps as the photos are uploaded to flickr.

Jump around jump around and smile Where the Hell is Matt?

Break out the champagne. Today User Designer is 1 year old!

I’m happy with how the blog has developed over the first year. Though it took a while to settle into writing weekly. Two posts a week has become my regular rhythm. For the 2nd year my posting target will continue to be one post a week featuring research analysis and synthesis, and a second weekly post packed with stimulating and fun links.

Of course not forgetting :) Thank you all for reading and for your great suggestions. Over the last month more than 2000 visitors, or 2500 depending on which counter I believe, came to the website. The feed subscriber count is now between 200 to 300 regular readers and its increasing faster each month.

Anyway…wanna collaborate?

I’m delighted to announce I’m looking for a talented undergraduate student to spend their summer in Ireland on a 3 month paid scholarship working on a new research project. The project is very relevant to User Designer – it is exploring the intersection of individual customization with presence.

The project title is Ambient Jewelry: Be part of your friend’s desktop – Individually designed presence avatars for social connectedness. Prof. Paddy Nixon and myself (Mike Bennett) will be supervising. This project is part of the ODCSSS (Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School) summer research internship which is part funded by an Undergraduate Research Experience and Knowledge grant (UREKA) from Science Foundation Ireland.

Visit the ODCSSS website for more details. There are 15 other funded projects in this years program, all around the theme of Technologies for Social Connectedness. In previous years we had talented and enthusiastic students from all around the world. If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, the application process is now open. If you have any questions about this project you can contact me directly via the contact form.

Project outline:
Ambient Jewelry seeks to explore the intersection of individual customization with presence. The aim is to enable the creation of more personal and richer forms of presence, with the aspiration that this will allow us to more deeply connect with our friends and family in a non-intrusive manner.

Presence is an important part of our day to day lives. Often we will have a sense of who is around us and what they are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cupboards banging, footsteps on floors, voices vaguely heard through walls, etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops, presence enhances our sense of connection with geographically separate friends and colleagues. For example when you use an Instant Messaging (IM) client you see which friends are currently online or away, and when engaged in IM chat you are also told whether the people in the conversation are typing. On social network sites, such as Facebook, presence has a more explicit form. We are told what the people in our social network did, e.g. Mark joined the Ireland network, Eimear and Mike are now friends, etc.

As of yet presence tools don’t enable us to control how our presence is represented. We don’t have little coloured jewels (ambient presence avatars) spinning on our friends’ desktops to show how fast we’re typing, nor do we have a flower opening and closing in the jewel when we move the mouse, etc.

The outcome of this project should be parts of a framework that easily lets people create and share their presence avatars. There will be a desktop client like an IM client. The client watches whether you type, move the mouse, open windows, close windows, play music, etc. The specifics of what you type aren’t recorded, instead your activity is used to update a presence avatar / Ambient Jewel. Your jewel updates, changes and transforms based on your actions. For example imagine everytime you open a window a flower blooms in your Ambient Jewel.

Ambient Jewels are tiny. You share your ambient jewel with your friends. When you get a jewel from a friend you can hang it off your mouse pointer, use it to decorate your GUI windows, place them on the side of your screen, etc. Groups of friends are able to work together to group their jewels into larger jewels, and they can then coordinate how the collaborative jewel looks and behaves based on what they do on their desktops.

The core functionality is:

- Ambient Jewels (presence avatars) encode action
- people can create relationships between jewel transforms and their actions
- people can share these jewels with their friends
- jewels can be used to personalize GUI desktops

Potentially the jewels could be shared on people’s blogs, websites and social network profiles.

Some research questions that arise:

1) Does enabling people to personalise the presence avatars affect the importance and value people place on sharing their presence?
2) How should the interface be designed for simplifying the process of creating relationships between user actions and how the avatars update?
3) Does enabling people to decorate their desktops with their friends’ ambient jewels make desktops less socially isolated? By turning them into shared private spaces?

Previous coding / hacking experience writing GUI’s and networking code is desirable. Candidates should be interested in learning about research in Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design. A creative streak, whether technical or artistic, is also useful.

What would happen if your toothbrush could mate with another toothbrush?

Would you end up with an even better toothbrush – the best of both toothbrushes? How about if your toothbrush mates with 5, 10 or 15 different toothbrushes, with each new toothbrush in turn mating with another new toothbrush?

If you could decide which toothbrushes get to breed would you eventually end up with a toothbrush that’s perfect for you? Its form and function, its colour, feel and shape all bred into the toothbrush children generation by generation. The toothbrushes you dislike don’t breed so don’t pass on their “Form & Function DNA” to the next generation.

How would you tell a toothbrush to mate? Maybe to start the mating process you exchange design DNA by physically rubbing your toothbrush against another toothbrush. After that your smart malleable material toothbrush turns into a lump, which then self-forms into lots of little baby toothbrushes. To decide which mini-toothbrushes breed you crush the ones you don’t like, and rub the ones you do like off each other. Then repeat again and again, till eventually you have a baby toothbrush that you stretch into full size and begin using as your day-to-day toothbrush.

The method I’ve described for breeding toothbrushes is a Genetic Algorithm (GA) search. GAs are very powerful for exploring a large search space. In this case our search space is the potential designs for toothbrushes. Seeing each design generation could be a great way of helping people explore and imagine design possibilities.

Dryad, from Stanford Virtual Worlds Group, is a related example of software for exploring the design space around 3D trees. You can cross breed different kinds of 3D trees. Dryad is freely available for Windows and Macs, go play.

It’s easy enough to speculate about reshaping toothbrushes by cross breeding them, but what about more complex artifacts. Such as doors that slide or TV remote controls. How would you control the cross breeding of what a button does? Functionality is more abstract than form. For example if you cross breed two door handles where one door handle works by turning and the other by pulling…you could end up with a nightmare child door handle that works by turning, then pulling, then turning again.

How can the person doing the cross breeding place limits on what forms and functionality are explored? Maybe by only cross breeding one specific part of an artifact at a time, e.g. only cross breed the handles on the toothbrushes.

For artifact cross breeding to be possible objects and artifacts will need some kind of DNA. At the most abstract level the DNA would encode form, functionality and the relationship between both. Or putting it another way: malleable objects and artifacts need to be self-describing.

Smart Lego (New Scientist article), from CMU’s Computational Design Lab, is an example of a physical / virtual artifact that is able to self-describe. Also for many years various computer languages have been capable of different amounts of self-describing, which in computer science is called Reflection.

Of course now I’m wondering what would happen if you cross breed a door handle with a toothbrush?

To those of you who voted in the poll about HCI tutorials, thank you. To those who didn’t bother (there’s still time) I mutter a future curse: May all your solar panels develop self-awareness and go on strike.

Anyhow, previously I touched upon the idea of objects and tools that enable us to more easily create physical objects (How To Make (almost) Anything), or allow us to more easily reshape existing objects (Shape A Seat, aka Don’t Forget Me). In both cases we do the creating and reshaping, we give objects their physical structure, we are the shapers.

How can the physical structure of an object or artifact reshape itself?

Imagine while drinking a coffee you rush out the door to catch a bus. As you run to the bus stop the coffee cup changes into a sealed heat preserving flat container that easily slips into your back pocket. No more splashing coffee everywhere and your coffee is still hot. Then while standing in the packed bus the flat coffee container runs a straw from your pocket to your mouth so you can continue drinking coffee.

If a smart self-reshaping cup is going to be possible we need malleable materials that can change shape anytime we want. Or even better, they change shape when they realise that’d make life easier, e.g. your soup spoon turns into a straw so you can suck up the last drops from a bowl of soup. These kinds of self-reshaping and self-assembling materials are commonly envisioned as the result of nanotechnology research and development.

Now have a look at this video showing a shaping-shifting robot forming from a magnetic swarm (New Scientist article). The research into programmable material shown in the video is part of Carnegie Mellon and Intel’s Claytronics project. Neat ain’t it – yep, its still a young research area but online you can find a bucket load of research into self-reconfiguring modular robots. If the robots where made small enough then millions of them working together could become self-reshaping materials.

Xerox PARC’s Lattice is another example of interesting early stage research into modular robots for smart materials (esp. Proteo). If you have a chance play around with the Proteo RDSim (Rhombic Dodecahedron Self-Reconfiguration Simulator). The researchers who created the simulator were trying out different techniques for enabling lots of small robots to form themselves into different shapes.

To play with the simulator your web browser needs to run Java. When the simulator loads click on “New Goal”, then select “Disk”, set the Radius to 4, click “OK”, then click “Start Run”. In the main area you’ll see a flat disk form out of the white cubes. The white wireframe is the target shape the cubes are to self-organise into. If you’re feeling brave you can new try another “New Goal” of a Cup, try with a Radius of 6.

Another more recent simulator, which I haven’t tried yet, is DPRSim: the Dynamic Physical Rendering Simulator from Intel Research. DPRSim is a platform on which Researchers can develop and test new distributed algorithms for large ensembles of Catoms. Catoms are tiny robots with no moving parts that have internal computation and magnetic actuation.

Finally, if you want a quick review of previous modular robot research have a read of the review paper Design of a Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot.

Would you like one of these futuristic disappearing car doors? Here’s an online video of it in action.

At Ellyssa Kroski’s InfoTangle read about the leading forms of information design and navigation structures for the web. Non-technical and clearly written – perfect.

Here’s lookin at you, human. Golan Levin and co’s art piece Opto-isolator is going to stare you down. Time to plonk two of those eyes on top of every TV to cure us of TV addiction?

Help yourself by helping yourself while helping yourself. Ouch. Play the temporal-tastic Cursor * 10. Interesting game idea that could be extended to other forms of interaction design. Reduce task complexity by timeshifting collaboration with yourself?

Have a look at Yahoo’s Design Innovation Team project website for some interesting visualisations and interactive concepts.

we make money not art writes about creating art with living materials. There’s something about that kind of bio-art that tickles me.

Neat concept: Spy planes to recharge by clinging to power lines

Just a small heads up: At some stage over Christmas I’m going to turn back on blog comments, once I’ve got the right comment and spam filters installed. It shouldn’t take long but the blog will be briefly offline during the update.

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.