Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life

Great new book on mobile phone use in Japan by USC's (and Keio's) very own Dr. Mimi Ito with colleagues Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda:

The book ... is out from MIT Press and available on amazon.com. Click here for a pdf of a draft of the introduction.

The book is an edited collection of social and cultural studies of keitai (mobile phone) and pager use over the past decade or so in Japan. We included our own research as well as research by a variety of mostly Japanese scholars whose work we translated from Japanese.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Editor’s Notes on Translation

Introduction: Portable, Personal, Pedestrian
Mizuko Ito

I
The Social and Cultural Construction of Technological Systems

Discourses of Keitai in Japan
Misa Matsuda

Youth Culture and the Shaping of Japanese Mobile Media:
Personalization and Keitai Internet as Multimedia
Tomoyuki Okada

A Decade in the Development
of Mobile Communications in Japan (1993-2002)
Kenji Kohiyama

II
Cultures and Imaginaries

The Third Stage Paradigm: Territory Machines from the Girls' Pager Revolution to Mobile Aesthetics
Kenichi Fujimoto

Japanese Youth and the Imagining of Keitai
Haruhiro Kato

III
Social Networks and Relationships

Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality
Misa Matsuda

The Mobile-izing Japanese:
Connecting to the Internet by PC and Webphone in Yamanashi
Kakuko Miyata, Jeffrey Boase, Barry Wellman and Ken’ichi Ikeda

Accelerating Reflexivity 300
Ichiyo Habuchi

Keitai and the Intimate Stranger 341
Hidenori Tomita

IV
Practice and Place

Keitai in Public Transportation 381
Daisuke Okabe and Mizuko Ito

Gendered Usage of Keitai in Domestic Contexts
Shingo Dobashi

Visualization of the Work Space of Service Engineers
by Keitai Technology and Its Designs
Rieko Tamaru and Naoki Ueno

Technosocial Situations:
Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use
Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe

V
Emergent Developments

Keitai Usage Among Today’s
Japanese Elementary and Junior High School Students:
Research of the Views and Reality of Parents, Children, and Schools Yukiko Miyaki

Uses and Possibilities of the Keitai Camera
Fumitoshi Kato, Ryuhei Uemoto, Daisuke Okabe and Mizuko Ito

unprecedented data set about continuous human behavior

From the Mit site:

We have captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of the 2004-2005 academic year. This data represents over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields. The research questions we are addressing include:

* How do social networks evolve over time?
* How entropic (predictable) are most people's lives?
* How does information flow?
* Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data?
* How can we change a group's interactions to promote better functioning?

If you have a series 60 phone you can participate... check out the MIT site for details.
http://reality.media.mit.edu/
Wired article
MoSoSo's

EA + Verizon

EA has agreed to launch its first round of mobile titles via Verizon Wireless and Sprint. EA says the deals will probably be worth $25 million. The titles include mobile games for popular EA franchises like Madden and NBA Live. There will also be a special version of Need for Speed for Verizon V-CAST subscribers. EA currently has a relationship with mobile development house I-Play, again the gaming giant is rumored to be looking at an acquisition in the mobile space, namely JAMDAT and Superscape.

http://australianit.news.com.au/

7/7 Community

Flickr set of the London bombings. Interesting example of news coverage, expression, and commentary by the embedded masses.

NYtimes, not exactly impressed.

Tamagotchi on mobiles

link to article.

Who would have guessed it? Tamagotchis are back, in a big way. Manufacturer Bandai certainly owes some of the brand's revival to the "old is new" mentality that invariably brings back most fads, but when a BREW mobile version is released later this summer, it could help propel the quintessential virtual pet to the stratospheric heights it reached in 1996.

mobile 360

the company Panoman has created some cool auto-panorama generating software for cameraphones. You just start the app, turn around in a circle, and the program stitches together a panorama for you. Simple, but cool.

Page One LA Times article on Mobile Teens

A relatively light Column 1 article in the LA Times today about mobile use by teens. Abbe Don of HP Labs gets a choice quote as she is currently working on a "tweens" project.

SAN FRANCISCO - In a not-at-all unusual month, Will Wu spent more than 10,000 minutes on his mobile phone - an average of 5 1/2 hours a day.

Sometimes he talked, sometimes he listened. But most of the time, the 15-year-old just dialed up a friend and left the phone on. Connected only by wireless headsets, Will and his pal spent entire days - together, but apart - shopping, snacking, doing homework and even nodding off to sleep.

Read online or just pick up today's physical manifestation.

future of mms

really nice article on thefeature.com interviewing John Poisson, head of Sony's mobile media research and design group in Tokyo about MMS technology, what it's limitations are, and where to go in the future.

MMS has several problems. Cameraphones are kind of like home exercise equipment: the ad make it look like a cameraphone will be fun, easy to use, improve your life and make you smile more. But when you get home and try it, you realize it's a pain in the ass. So you don't really use it. We think it's the software. The MMS interface on most phones is user-hostile. It can take 40 clicks to do what you want to do. There isn't really that ability to take a picture and share it with someone intuitively like you can when sending a text message. And the ability to add music or a little icon to a picture is not aligned with people's simple desire. There's also very little feedback that what you sent was received. It's simply a send mechanism and not a communication mechanism. That ignores the very nature of what this mobile device is.

Phone as ping pong paddle

Forward: Prototype

Pong Redux Cell-phone games usually rely on keystrokes to control the action, but Finnish researchers have developed a program called SymBall that could turn the whole phone into the controller. The software analyzes in real time images captured by a camera phone; from that information, it works out how the phone is being moved and the game responds accordingly. The demonstration application, which works on phones running the Symbian 60 operating system, is virtual Ping-Pong. The player wields the phone like a paddle to hit a virtual ball displayed on the phone's screen. Two users can play each other if their phones are connected wirelessly via Bluetooth, to the amusement of onlookers who can't see the ball, table, paddles, or net. Charles Woodward heads the multimedia team at VTT, Finland's national technology research center, that developed the technology. Woodward says the patented interaction method has attracted the interest of a game firm, and a more accurate version is in development.

Video here and demo sw here.

Will also found some similar mobile interface projects here including the cool fishing game above.

mobile iTunes hack

so, if anyone today is just really desperate to hear that one song on their iTunes playlist, but happen to be without iPod, and don't care that the song will be heavily compressed, should load up this program on their machine before leaving the house.

Basically, you text message a particular song title to your pop email account, which then sends that request to iTunes via applescript. The script then opens Skype and gives your cell phone a ring, playing the requested song after you answer.

I have no idea if this works halfway well, or exactly how it would be that useful, but I enjoy seeing these kind of "solutions."

More mobisodes

A Singapore television station is making its romantic drama series, PS I Luv U, available in three-minute episodes on 3G mobile handsets. The mobile show will launch throughout Asia, but already handset makers are trying to develop video-ready programming that can be aired on wireless networks, according to this Reuters article.

From Technology Review Blogs:
Brad King: Emerging Technology and Culture - The 4-Gig Handset Hard Drive and Asian Television

Mobile Monday

The Mobile Monday USA. mission is to cultivate and accelerate US mobile and telecom sectors through leadership, technology, government relations, research, education, mentoring, investment, recruitment, networking and promotion.

Seems like a great community discussion if you're in the bay area and into mobile.

Link.

Collaborative Mapping for Everyone

First there was Google Maps, and that was cool.
Then there was Google Map hacking, and alpha geeks thought that was cool and, you know, made alpha geeky things.
Now, there's user friendly Google Map map making, and that's just plain awesome.

Location Based Services - Research Notes From The Field

Via Nicolas Nova at Pasta and Vinegar, which is loaded with cool stuff this morning.
This set of research notes from the Center for Research and Support of Training for great for two reasons. First, it presents some great and fascinating locative media projects. Second, it shows the work in great summary, meaning its completely accessible and legible. Neither too heady with the art-technology angle, nor too terse and technical as found in some scholarly presentations. Good mix.
Now, I understand sometimes you have to get arty and sometimes you have to get techy - depends on your audience. This is just a great example of finding a middle ground.

Now we're all embedded

BBC soliciting news from anyone and everyone. Instant news, the second it happens, straight from your mobile to the world...or at least soon after.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/4599531.stm

Send us your comments using the form on the right hand side of the page. Make sure to give us your location and contact details, such as your email address or phone number. Send any accompanying pictures or video to yourpics@bbc.co.uk.

Fieldworks Art-Geography at the Hammer

This symposium includes an evening of performance and a day of discussion to bring together practitioners from art, architecture, and geography to present original (field)works and address emerging relations between geographical science (including GPS, satellite surveillance, etc.) and artistic production. Program includes Trevor Paglen, Laura Kurgan, Lize Mogel, Juan Geuer and a live performance by Ultra-red. At the UCLA Hammer Museum on Thursday evening and all day Friday.

Fieldworks Symposium Program

as seen on tv

fictional job opportunities abound for mobile research in cbs made for tv disaster/plague movie 'locusts'.

scott, can you check into this?

Congratulations, Will!

For your mention on engadget!

"Combining elements of alternate reality gaming, podcasting and geocaching, location33 is a game that requires players to wander the streets of Culver City, California, looking for musical clues that will allow them to piece together a sci-fi story involving a robot that wants to put out a record for Sony Music. The developer, Will Carter, put the game together as a thesis for his degree in Interactive Media at the USC School of cinema and TV. We�re not sure whether he�s angling for a job with Sony, or added the label for a greater degree of verisimilitude. Regardless, if you�re one of those rare individuals who actually walks in L.A., now you have something interesting to do while you wander."

Bluetooth rifle

The BlueSniper rifle, developed by USC student John Hering, was featured on NPR's "All Things Considered." The rifle remotely hacks wireless devices that use Bluetooth technology. Hering, who founded the wireless security think tank Flexilis, said the rifle is only used to determine security holes, and not to obtain personal information.

'Body talk' could control mobiles

Changing tracks on digital music players of the future while on the move could be done with the nod of the head. Building on previous work, researchers at the University of Glasgow have been developing "audio clouds" to control gadgets using movement and sound.

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Body talk' could control mobiles

"Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth, and the Re-Placement of Social Contact"

"Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth, and
the Re-Placement of Social Contact"

DR. MIZUKO (MIMI) ITO
Mellon Teaching Fellow
Department of Anthropology
University of Southern California
(weblog)

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2005
12:00 - 1 pm

ROOM:
GFS 223
Grace Ford Salvatori

new religion meets old religion

(originally found here)

mobile graffiti

graffiti reappropriated for usage in virtual space - but, i have to ask: is the form's original spirit of dissent lost?

"Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or on sidewalks. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link... Grafedia is a boundless, interactive publishing platform, base, cheap, and easy to use. It is an open system - the places and ways to use it are limitless. With grafedia, every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world can be joined with the Internet."

mobile music blog

new mobile music blog

via boingwhatever

music on mobiles

(mock-up of the forthcoming, hopefully, iPhone)

Really, really interesting write up on textually about the current clash between verizon and cingular, and apple and motorola.

It seems like the new apple/motorola iPhone was set to launch this week at new orleans confab. But what's happening is that apple isn't getting any support from the two big wireless players (verizon and cingular) because of the way that apple has designed the phone.

The Apple phone would basically work like an iPod, in that you can plug it into a PC, and transfer songs to it directly. What Verizon and Cingular are pissed about is that they think that the ringtone model should be applied to all forms of media on next-gen phones like apple's. This would mean that for every song you want to put on your phone, you've got to pay so much cash.

This is a really huge turning point in the industry, and I hope that apple sticks to their guns, because maybe other companies will follow their general lead and demand that the current structure of media content on phones be changed. After a year at working at Sony's mobile division (which is now folded into their marketing division... ick) is that the mobile stuff will never really be able to hit until the phone providers are willing to open up their platforms, and go away from this closed pipe model of pay-to-play.

Apple has gotten some bad PR recently with the whole suing the blogger thing, but this is a big power play, and I hope the clout they've built up with the iPod will enable them to put pressure on these idiots.

Sky Ear

Sky Ear is a non-rigid carbon-fibre "cloud", embedded with one thousand glowing helium balloons and several dozen mobile phones. The balloons contain miniature sensor circuits that respond to electromagnetic fields, particularly those of mobile phones. When activated, the sensor circuits co-ordinate to cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate. The 30m cloud glows and flickers brightly as it floats across the sky.

Evolving forms of entertainment

Good article by Douglas Rushkoff on new directions for entertainment:

"How mobile can -- and should -- change the way we think about entertaining ourselves and each other...A playful mobile device need not entrap its owner within its own RAM. Rather, it can connect the owner with other people, the environment, or the temporal reality in new ways. Who is available? What is around me? What's going on right now? Instead of enter-taining, these devices might do better to inter-tain us -- that is, hold our connection to other people, places and things.

The mobile intertainment device depends not on captivation, but on introduction, orientation, and interconnection. Although very few companies are conceiving of mobile fun in this way, the early interest in services from UPOC and Dodgeball prove that people are seeking a different sort of fun through their phones -- a fun that involves experiences with other subscribers rather than some company's content."

TheFeature :: That's Inter-tainment

Elizabeth Goodman @ ZML circa 3:30pm Thursday

Elizabeth Goodman of Intel Research and "Familiar Stranger" fame will be dropping by the ZML around 3:30pm on Thursday for a chat with students interested in mobile media. Bring your cuppa.

Project Postmortem - CatchBob!

Here's a great example of something we should do more of - auditing in the form of a "post-mortem" a project called CatchBob! a treasure-hunt type, Wi-Fi based locative and collaborative mobile game Fabien Girardin developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. The document describes the whole development process, from the technical architecture to the user perception of the game. The document works very well for both technies and non-tech savvy people, explaining the whole process and results of the play testing.

CatchBob! Post-mortem

Vectors launch party at MoCA Thursday March 3

Please join us on Thursday, March 3, 7-10 pm at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (250 S. Grand Ave.) for the launch of Vectors, USC's new electronic journal of culture and technology. Thursday night's party features multi-player mobile gaming led by Julian Bleecker and Jane McGonigal, large-screen projections, live music and free food and drink. Vectors editor Tara McPherson will facilitate a discussion of a new era in digital publishing featuring work by Erik Loyer, Raegan Kelly, N. Katherine Hayles, and Alice Gambrell. Free and open to the public.
RSVP
More info

Barcodes get some style

Here's the coolest thing I've seen in a while -- barcodes with style meta-data! :)

Check out the Japanese version of the site - and then imagine the possibilities of what a cameraphone-wielding kid could do with these little icons. Suddenly, barcode-scanning becomes much more interesting...

and here's... camera phone stereo!

link

Backseat Playground

Reblogged from we-make-money-not-art.com


Backseat Playground, developed by John Paul Bichard, Liselott Brunnberg and Oskar Juhlin at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, is a mobile gaming research project that will enable kids to play with the world outside their window from the back seat of a car. This augmented reality game uses a digital compass and a GPS-receiver to connect the game to the passing landscape. By aiming the device towards objects, players can defend themselves against creatures or pick up magic artefacts.

Node Explorer

A little "postcard sized" portable, embedded Linux piece of spatial annotation hardware - and the operation here seems to have some smart things to say about why spatial annotation is a promising activity..cool stuff..
Location aware computers and the content and services that run on these devices, will change the way that society experiences the real world. Node is a world leader in developing both the technology and the content production methodology required.

Node provides services and products that take the visitor experience of a building, national park or city further and deeper than ever before.
Node

bbc rules

Your part in the news is important to us and we'd like to see the photographs and videos you are shooting using the latest digital technology.

If you want to e-mail it to us, send it to yourpics@bbc.co.uk .

Why not add the above email address to your mobile phone and email address book.

If you want to send your picture from your mobile phone, dial 00 44 (0)7970 885089. You can send them from any network or phone. Please send the large full size images (usually 640x480 pixels) taken by the mobiles otherwise they are too small to publish.

in a few years, we'll all be potentially on the media payroll during media events we're witness to.

DataJockey mobile device interface

An novel interface to share images and content between mobile devices developed at Keio University's Shonan Fujisawa campus in a lab headed by Prof. Michiaki Yasumura.

View project poster image

Mobile Stereo@Keio SFC

by Yuuta Nakayama

Cingular Wireless Film Festival

http://rucingular.com/screeningroom/default.asp

15 seconds or less.

prize: motorola V551 + $5,000.

some rules:

- Contest starts at 12:00:01 a.m. ET on November 15, 2004 and ends at 11:59:59 p.m. ET on January 31, 2005.

- The videos can be about anything and fit within any genre, such as action or comedy and will be judged based on creativity, expression and entertainment value.

- You may enter as many times as you wish during the entry period, but only one entry per person can be selected as a winner. (See details in Rule 4 below.)

- Entries will be disqualified if they contain any inappropriate material or language, including profanity.

And for the most awesomist, craptastic rules of them all!
- Open to legal U.S. residents between 18 and 24 years of age who are film students at time of entry.

- All videos submitted, and all concepts or ideas contained or embodied therein, become the sole property of Sponsor and will not be acknowledged or returned

that aside, yeah, if someone here isn't entering this, umm, yeeah....someone should enter (even though many of us have exited the coveted 18-24 demographic! damn it!)

"Visual Google"

This was developed by Hartmut Neven, a researcher here at USC's ISI lab in Marina Del Rey - we should propose some content and user studies??:

Neven has applied for a patent to cover the use of image-recognition software on mobile phones and has started cutting deals with various companies. Vodafone Japan and NTT DoCoMo offer wireless video-messaging services powered by Neven Vision technology. Vodafone's MovieMask, launched in July, recognizes your changing expressions as you look into the camera and adds the appropriate special effects, like tears or sparkles. DoCoMo introduced a similar service called Face Stamp in November. Neven Vision expects at least three European cell phone carriers to make the technology a standard feature next year.

Meanwhile, the company is developing a security application that would use biometrics - facial features, skin texture, and iris pattern - to authenticate purchases made via cell phone.

And this fall, after two years of development, the company is rolling out its most ambitious service, what Neven describes as a "visual Google." The company has tweaked its facial analysis algorithms to identify anything from a Coke can to the Mona Lisa, barcodes to kanji. By linking this object-recognition software to a database of images, Neven aims to build a search platform for phonecam users. Don't know what something is? Snap a pic and the service sends back a match within 10 seconds.

The technology will debut next year in ads that offer, say, $1 million to the millionth person to submit an image of a can of Coke. Travel guides are next: Snap a picture of the Pantheon to learn its history, or click a road sign you need translated from German to English. "The system hyperlinks the visual world," Neven says. "Eventually every building and object will be in the database."

Wired 12.12: START

Mobile SCOUT

Mobile SCOUT A Mobile Phone and Web Public Art Project by Julian Bleecker, Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow Are you in a concrete jungle or swamped by tourists? Who's around you, what do you see? A deer, a dump or a daydream? Saintly acts or sinful facts? Mobile SCOUT is a public art project that collects audio narratives of your local surroundings, personal rituals and public sightings. Using your mobile phone, you leave a voice message of your observations with the Mobile SCOUT Ranger, our automated quirky naturalist. Turn your observations into a brief message about the flora (landscapes), fauna (characters) or behaviors (events) that populate your surroundings. Call the Mobile SCOUT Ranger - 1 (877) 564-3060 - he will guide you through the experience. When you call you'll: pick your mission (flora, fauna or behavior) pick two habitat attributes leave a recording Further instructions for operating Mobile SCOUT are available at our online brochure at http://www.mobilescout.org/brochure.htm. Mobile SCOUT defines place as being made of social habitats, not geography. Your recordings are organized into an audio/visual field guide according to the kind of space you occupy, be it play, work, nature, culture, public, private, branded or free speech. See the field guide and listen to recordings left by others by visiting the web site www.mobilescout.org. Mobile SCOUT was commissioned by "The Database Imaginary", an exhibition at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Center, and curated by Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz and Anthony Kiendl. Mobile SCOUT was produced with support from BeVocal for voice application hosting http://www.bevocal.com.

SMS Guerilla Projector

The SMS Guerilla Projector is a high powered, home made projection device that can be used to project SMS messages on to buildings, signs or any other surface. Made by Troika, the London based collective of designers and artists, it consists of a mobile phone, camera lens and slide projector.

via cool hunting

PLAN - Pervasive and Location Arts Network

From the locative [http://locative.x-i.net]list

PERVASIVE AND LOCATIVE ARTS NETWORK (PLAN)
A new international and interdisciplinary research network in pervasive media and locative media has been funded as part of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Culture & Creativity programme. The network will bring together practicing artists, technology developers and ethnographers with the aim of advancing interdisciplinary understanding and building consortia for future collaborative projects.

Focus
A new generation of pervasive technologies is enabling people to break away from traditional desktop PCs and games consoles and experience interactive media that are directly embedded into the world around them. And locative media, the combination of mobile devices with locative technologies, supports experiences and social interaction that respond to a participant's physical location and context. Together these convergent fields raise possibilities for new cultural experiences in areas as diverse as performance, installations, games, tourism, heritage, marketing and education.

Objectives
To support the formation of a new interdisciplinary research community to investigate how the convergent fields of pervasive media and locative media need to evolve in order to support future cultural and creative activities. To catalogue interdisciplinary collaborations, and to review the research agenda, methods, and community.
To identify the key research issues that need to be addressed.
To seed future projects by bringing artists, scientists and industry
together in a creative environment so that they can generate and
practically explore new ideas, and also to provide a forum for publicly demonstrating some of these.
To produce online and offline resources to support researchers, artists, industry and to promote public understanding of this emerging field, including a public website, an online document repository for members and a newsletter and DVD.
To lobby for additional funding for this area.
To link international networks.

Activity
The network will stage three major gatherings. Each gathering will have a distinct form and focus: an initial workshop to launch the network and assess the state of the art; a technology summer camp for artists and technologists, including hands-on prototyping sessions using the facilities at Nottingham's Mixed reality Laboratory; and a major public conference and participatory exhibition as a central component of the Futuresonic 2006 festival in Manchester; as well as a supporting web site and other resources.

JOINING THE NETWORK

The network is open to individuals, art companies and industry research
labs as well as institutions.

To join the Pervasive and Locative Arts Network (PLAN) please write to
stating the nature of your interest and why the network is of relevance to
the kind of area you are working in. An email is adequate. (Please contact
us for further details or a template letter.)

Please send to:
ben at open-plan dot org

Prototyping Location Based Services

From Pasta and Vinegar

Topiary lets designers create a map that models the location of people, places, and things; use this active map to demonstrate scenarios depicting location contexts; use these scenarios in creating storyboards that describe interaction sequences; and then run these storyboards on mobile devices like PDAs, with a wizard updating the location of people and things on a separate device.

Topiary allows designers to quickly design, prototype, and test a location-enhanced application without requiring them to implement the application or deploy a supporting infrastructure, enabling them to get early feedback about their design from real end users.

Catch Bob

Via We Make Money Not Art

The CatchBob! mobile game by Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin investigates how people benefits from knowing others' whereabouts when working on a joint activity.

CatchBob! aim is to test how a location awareness tool modifies the group interactions and communications, the way they perform a joint task as well as how they rely on this spatial information to coordinate.

Art By Telephone

A nice review of prior art - using the telephone as an interactive interface.

Art By Telephone

murmur

still trying not to completely link dump, but:

murmur is a of-the-canada project that is basically, without too blatantly referencing julian's project, Another Spatial Annotation Project. Murmur signs are affixed to certain locations around participating canadian cities (toronto, vancouver, and somewhere else...), and mobile telephony enabled people can dial a number and location code printed on the sign. They they get to hear an audio stream of people's recollections, etc., of that specific area. I guess what makes this project unique, and to me personally, potentially more interesting than some other location-annotation projects (except patholog of course), is that you can actually hear the voices of people making these annotations. I guess this could be bad if the person is completely boring, but I envision these really lively, almost scripted recollections, stories, etc., coming from the other end of the line.

that being said, I'm getting a little bored of these annotation projects, unless (like patholog, cough) they rely on a high turnover of this content, and place more emphasis on social connection. Personally, I find these projects pretty similar to the musuem model -- at this location, these things happened. Sure, this is interesting, to a degree, but it has zero "replayability" to me, and it basically doesn't seem like much fun, or something that I'd get really excited about doing (although I'd definitely like to try out...). I think the main thing about these annotations is that they need to be stories -- they need to be engaging or they won't hold anyone's interest. Sure, maybe I can find out about what Jack Ireland things about "the best irish pub in all of Los Angeles," and what maybe his favorite menu items are, but that's about it. Sure, that kind of stuff is a nice service, but I think we're at the point now with this "mobile media" stuff that we really need to start thinking about crafting unique experiences for people. I certainly think that murmur could be compelling, but it seems like it rests it's success on the storytelling capabilities of those who are annotating.

Sorry for the big block of text.

Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS Launches on Nov. 21 in North America -- At $149.99!

I'm psyched. Just got to scrape together the loot to get ahold of this device. @ E3 Nintendo was saying it wasn't due out in North America until first quarter of next year. I had a VIP pass and made it inside to play with the system. The games where simple but showed so much potential! I really have a lot of confidence in this device to break some great new ground.

Here are some snippets from Nintendo's article:

Nintendo's newest innovation, Nintendo DS, will make its worldwide debut in North American stores on Nov. 21, and then in Japan on Dec. 2. Nintendo DS will become the company�s first system ever to make its sales debut outside of Japan.

Nintendo DS is the dual-screened, hand-held video game system redefining the idea of interactive entertainment. One screen allows for touch input using a stylus, while the unit includes both voice recognition and multiplayer wireless features.

Read more @
DS Release Announcement

About The System

Mobile Design - Lessons from Sci-Fi

From The Economist (PDF), we learn of a mobile device that uses WiFi for proximity-based connectivity, location awareness, voice over IP, and speech recognition to route communications intelligently.

It seems that �Star Trek� has done it again. This month, American soldiers in Iraq will begin trials of a device inspired by the �comm badge� featured in �Star Trek: The Next Generation�. Like crew members of the starship Enterprise, soldiers will be able to talk to other members of their unit just by tapping and then speaking into a small badge worn on the chest. What sets the comm badge apart from a mere walkie-talkie, and appeals to �Star Trek� fans, is the system's apparent intelligence. It works out who you are calling from spoken commands, and connects you instantly.

cool ass GPS camera hack

(picture source: engadget)

looking at engadget today and found this sweet GPS camera hack. Of course, in other parts of the world (cough, japan, cough...) these are pretty ubiqutous. but you have to respect the ugliness of this system.
link via engadget

Lots of other cool stuff there today, so check it out.

The "I found your life" thing is pretty strange, and relates to some of the privacy / personal ethics issues we were discussing in mark(co?) bolas's class yesterday.

Election 2004: The Missing Mobile

The 2004 Presidential Election is very hotly contested - if you keep up with a site like Electoral-Vote.com, you can watch the so-called "Battleground States" shift from blue to red as volleys of advertising are fired over the airwaves.

Polling is a huge part of these politics - driving strategy and coverage. And, it turns out, political pollsters don't count mobile phone users - making the 170 million mobile devices in the USA the largest mystery voting block in modern politics.

chojo demo filming

looking for extra tomorrow morning, 9.30am at lucas loading dock. should be fun and pretty basic, lasting no more than an hour or so. (didnt mean to belittle or dismiss production films/homework this evening; was trying [and failing] to say this was more 'departmental-like' filming.)

hope a few of you can make it; it would be nice to see some people outside of the platoon of third years i see every day.

Cell Phone With 1.5GB HD

Seoul, Korea -- Consumer electronics manufacturer Samsung, the world's third-largest maker of cell phones, announced on Tuesday that it will begin selling the first mobile phone with an embedded 1.5GB hard disk drive in Korea later this month. The phone will feature a mexapixel digital camera, 2.2-inch display and MP3 player. It will also offer an enhanced microphone, and dual speakers that create the feel of 3D sound. The company did not provide pricing details or announce plans for a North American release for the hard drive phone, which could spur more interest in downloading music and video over wireless networks.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?P3BA22C39
http://www.samsung.com

Ped-Rage - It Was Inevitable..

No, You Can't Walk and Talk at the Same Time
Via the New York Times

By KEN BELSON

With nearly two-dozen states now enacting some sort of restriction on the use of cellphones while driving, the random weaving and inexplicable speed variations, the short stops and sudden lateral jerks of drivers with phones tucked against their ears are slowly becoming things of the past.
But as any urban dweller will testify, the hazards presented by nattering mobile users do not begin and end behind the wheel.
It may sound insignificant, but pedestrians talking on cellphones have become a major cause of "pedlock" and subsequent "ped-rage."

Their minds elsewhere, cell walkers are more likely to step into traffic without looking, cut off and bump into other pedestrians and even confuse passers-by with their very public conversations - all of which can hinder the natural flow of human traffic along sidewalks.
And as cell-free walkers grudgingly adjust to the unpredictable ambulations of their distracted brethren, the communal bond that once linked pedestrians brushing elbows on crowded city streets, some experts say, is evaporating.
This trend is nowhere more in evidence than in New York City.
"I look forward to walking and being in my own space, but cellphones make it more difficult to do," said Oren Hellner, a 36-year-old marketing executive who walks 15 minutes each day from Pennsylvania Station to his Midtown office. "I've seen people nearly get hit by taxis, and I have to bob and weave around people on their cellphones who aren't paying attention."
Last year, 13,807 pedestrians were struck by motorists, and 170 of them were killed, amounting to almost half of all traffic deaths in the city, according to the New York City Department of Transportation.
Aware of the hazards of walking while distracted, the department this spring began a campaign, "Cars Hurt, Stay Alert," and printed posters that showed warnings stenciled on street corners reminding New Yorkers to look both ways when crossing.
"Cars Are Made of Steel," one poster reads. "You're Not."
"People are moving quickly and technology has changed the way people can use their time," said David Woloch, the deputy commissioner of transportation. "If people would be more alert by making fewer phone calls or paying attention while they are on the phone, that's what we want to see happen."
There are no statistics on the number of pedestrians injured while talking on cellphones. But Kit Hodge, the campaign coordinator for Transportation Alternatives, a group that advocates for pedestrians and bicycle riders, says the congestion caused by mindless cellphone use on city sidewalks is "out of hand," adding that she has seen shoving matches break out between pedestrians and has herself been smacked by callers who were walking and gesturing wildly.
Still, at least an accidental smack requires two strangers to acknowledge each other. The proliferation of cellphone use on city streets is also contributing to what urban planners have come to call the privatization of public space. Whether they are making calls out of a sense of necessity or as a simple means of escape, cellphone walkers are less likely to help a stranger in need, for instance, or to exchange pleasantries with passers-by. They are effectively cutting themselves off from the random encounters in public spaces that used to invigorate city living.
"The charm and excitement of the city is that it allows you to exercise freedom you can't get at the shopping mall," said Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia University and a former president of the New-York Historical Society.
The incursion of technology into public spaces - cellphones, iPods, security cameras - is causing cities to resemble more closely the controlled environments of suburban towns.
"The city needs to be something else," Mr. Jackson said.
For some people, of course, isolating themselves is a way of coping, not a guilty pleasure. Cities are big, busy and sometimes scary places. Talking on the cellphone to friends about most anything can ease the stress of having to head down a street that might appear threatening or just mentally taxing.
With nearly two-dozen states now enacting some sort of restriction on the use of cellphones while driving, the random weaving and inexplicable speed variations, the short stops and sudden lateral jerks of drivers with phones tucked against their ears are slowly becoming things of the past.
But as any urban dweller will testify, the hazards presented by nattering mobile users do not begin and end behind the wheel.
It may sound insignificant, but pedestrians talking on cellphones have become a major cause of "pedlock" and subsequent "ped-rage."
"Cellphones are a way to pick something we can deal with," said Robert V. Levine, a professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno, who has studied New York pedestrian behavior, "and at the same time filter out other things. Cellphones shut people off from the here and now."
Still, cities like New York depend on the civility of their citizens, whether they are in a bus, an elevator or simply walking down the street. By sealing themselves on their phones, cellphone walkers might well be encumbering their phone-free counterparts twice: first by forcing them to duck, dodge and otherwise adjust to meandering callers, and again by robbing them of one more engaged neighbor.
"Anything that separates people from their surroundings is antithetical to the idea of a public realm," said Jerold S. Kayden, professor of urban planning and design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "Every little brick added to the walls around people creates less of a common cause, and I don't think we need to be adding bricks."

EA Mobile Deal

BBC article

EA is joining forces with the Scottish mobile entertainment firm Digital Bridges to make more of its games available for mobile phones.

Bluetooth Body Blow

I have to say, three years ago I went to a technical training session on Bluetooth and was quite surprised as to the chasm between the technical hype and the technical reality of Bluetooth. Bandwidth, capacity for multiple simultaneous signalling for distinct apps, range, etc. were all gradually deflated as somewhat typical real-world operating conditions were introduced into the case studies. One guy at the session was there to figure out if his company - an outfit that manufactured monitoring equipment for hospitals - could use Bluetooth to eliminate all the wires required. He never came back after he found out that the technology would only really support a few devices within the space of a typical hospital suite.
Cross Posted from 80211report.com by way of Unwired
In a body blow to Bluetooth -- a technology which has already suffered more setbacks than successes -- Swedish company Ericsson, which 10 years ago invented Bluetooth as a cable replacement, said it would stop making new chips using the technology. The company said, "Even though large volumes are manufactured, the business case for Ericsson�s design of new Bluetooth
solutions is not strong enough." The company will form a new unit to support existing Bluetooth silicon customers, and its mobile units will continue to offer Bluetooth software. "It's not gone yet, but it is not going to make it long-term," says Craig Mathias of the Farpoint Group. "Ericsson made a
business decision -- a good one."

Bluetooth has never been quite able to get out from under the mountain of interoperability and pricing problems afflicting it. What did not help was the relentless, suffocating hype which accompanied Bluetooth in its early stages -- hype which only helped to accentuate the technology's every little
flaw and failure. The rapid proliferation of 802.11, the commercial availability of UWB, and the introduction of ZigBee would likely have spelled doom for Bluetooth in any event. Ericsson's decision may well be the coup de grace.

Culver City Free WiFi

CULVER CITY LAUNCHES
FREE WIRELESS INTERNET ACCESS IN DOWNTOWN DISTRICT

Revolutionary Technology Brings Free Broadband
Outdoors to Downtown Culver City

Culver City, Calif., (September 2004) The City of Culver City is pleased
to announce the launch of free wireless internet access in Downtown Culver
City effective Thursday, September 9. This service, called Wi-Fi for
Wireless-Fidelity, is the first broadband wireless hotspot on Los Angeles
Westside. It offers laptop users the ability to log-on to the internet
without the use of phone lines or traditional wires that bind most
internet use to the office or home.

A kick-off party and demonstration of Wi-Fi in action is scheduled for
Thursday, September 9 at 12:30 in Town Plaza at the intersection of Culver
and Washington Boulevards in Downtown Culver City. Technical staff from
Wireless Hotspot, Inc. will be available to offer free Wi-Fi support and
demonstrations, along with music and refreshments. Staff will be
available through 6:00 P.M. The general public is encouraged to bring
laptops to this free event.

CULVER CITY LAUNCHES
FREE WIRELESS INTERNET ACCESS IN DOWNTOWN DISTRICT

Revolutionary Technology Brings Free Broadband
Outdoors to Downtown Culver City

Culver City, Calif., (September 2004) The City of Culver City is pleased
to announce the launch of free wireless internet access in Downtown Culver
City effective Thursday, September 9. This service, called Wi-Fi for
Wireless-Fidelity, is the first broadband wireless hotspot on Los Angeles
Westside. It offers laptop users the ability to log-on to the internet
without the use of phone lines or traditional wires that bind most
internet use to the office or home.

A kick-off party and demonstration of Wi-Fi in action is scheduled for
Thursday, September 9 at 12:30 in Town Plaza at the intersection of Culver
and Washington Boulevards in Downtown Culver City. Technical staff from
Wireless Hotspot, Inc. will be available to offer free Wi-Fi support and
demonstrations, along with music and refreshments. Staff will be
available through 6:00 P.M. The general public is encouraged to bring
laptops to this free event.

On an everyday basis, users will be able to handle e-mail correspondence,
get the latest weather, stock and sports updates, search the news
everything a person would normally expect from the internet, but for free,
anywhere they choose outdoors in Downtown Culver City.

Downtowns hotspot covers an area of approximately one square mile from
Trader Joes at Culver & Ince to the edge of the Sony Pictures campus at
Washington & Hughes five blocks west. The district includes Town Plaza,
an outdoor performance and gathering spot; a public park, the Culver
Hotel, numerous outdoor cafes and retailers, and a number of offices
including Culver Studios and Westwood One.

This new technology is as revolutionary as when phones were freed from
cords and plugs. Now, you can sit on a park bench, in a caf� or under a
market umbrella and browse or write to your hearts content, states John H.
Richo, Director, Information Technology, whose department initiated the
project.

The project is funded by the Citys Redevelopment Agency. Community
Development Director Susan Evans states, As an important hub of the
entertainment industry where high numbers of creative personnel are
employed, Culver City embraces new technologies that lay the groundwork
for new and more flexible ways to work.

Any wireless-equipped laptop which includes almost all manufactured from
2002 onwards - can easily access this new, free service, states Joseph
Hsieh, founder and president of Wireless Hotspot Inc., the company
retained by the City of Culver City to deploy the new technology. Even
without a built-in receiver, it is easy to buy and install a wireless card
from any major computer store.

Wireless Hotspot, Inc offers end-to-end wireless internet and network
access solutions for retail, hospitality, government and other agencies.
Wireless Hotspot is a privately funded company based in Los Angeles and
incubated by the FAME Renaissance Center. FAME is a joint effort of the
Community Development Department of Los Angeles, the Economic Development
Administration, Department of Commerce, Wells Fargo Bank, and State Farm
Insurance Company.

To implement this pioneering project, Wireless Hotspot partnered with
Firetide and Vernier Networks. Firetide is a privately held wireless mesh
technology company that develops networking equipment for large Wireless
Instant Networks, like Downtown Culver Citys. Firetide's Instant
Networking, which utilizes mesh overlays, is a technology developed by the
military and allows for identical signaling from numerous sources
simultaneously. Downtown Culver City employs this feature to allow for
continuous-stream access unbroken by interference from buildings, trucks,
trees or any potentially impeding object that could obstruct the broadband
signal.

Vernier Networks provides the technology that addresses security issues
created by Wi-Fi users inside the network. Vernier received InfoWorlds
2004 Technology of the Year Award for Best WLAN (Wi-Fi Local Area Network)
solution and 2003 Product of the Year Award from Network Magazine.
Vernier is a privately held company headquartered in Mountain View,
California.

For further information:
Alicia Weintraub
Redevelopment Agency
(310) 253-5778

Carlos Vega
Department of Information Technology
(310) 253-5975

the degree confluence project

The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.

Seems like a very cool project. Would be very cool to see this project completed and viewed in some sort of 3d world space.

Link via We-Make-Money-Not-Art

Telejournalism at the RNC

More from the folks at NYU working in Telejournalism that I posted about a last semester:

Participate in the RNC from Anywhere tonight and tomorrow night

We're at NYU assembling our interactive cameras and wearable computers for tonights Konscious Convention broadcast. We'll have four crews in the field, one in Madison Square Garden. Also, three of us from Unmediated will be at Manhattan Neighborhood Networks monitoring the four cameras in the field, and chatting with participants that want to ask convention attendees and protesters questions. You can watch and participate tonight at 7PM EST by going to www.Konscious.tv. You can watch a stream of the live broadcast over at MNN from 7 PM to 7:30 PM EST. If you live in the New York City Area, you can tune into MNN and watch the live broadcast on Time Warner channel 34 or 78, RCN Channel 110 and digital cable channel 107. For more info on the system we're using, developed by Shawn Van Every, click here

unmediated: Participate in the RNC from Anywhere tonight and tomorrow night

Seven Mile Boots

link via wmmna

After putting on the boots they start looking for active chat channels. When the user walks around s/he can locate a chat activity through audio. S/he will hear himself passing through a group of chatters or s/he can decide to stop for closer observation. The boots log into the chat rooms automatically under the name of "sevenmileboots". The channels are selected according to their activity and topic. Everytime while walking, the boots are looking for a new selection of channels from the net. The boots contain all the necessary techniques in them, a computer with wireless network, microprocessor, sensors, amplifiers and loudspeakers. The boots are ready to function in any location with an open wireless network.

I like the idea of hearing convesations of chat groups, but it seems like a pretty limited application of the tech.

Sprectropolis

Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City is a three-day event (OCT 1-3, 2004) in Lower Manhattan that highlights the diverse ways artists, technical innovators and activists are using communication technologies to generate urban experiences and public voice. The increasing presence of mobile communication technologies is transforming the ways we live, construct and move through our built environment. The participants of Spectropolis make obvious or play with this shift, creating new urban perceptions and social interactions with cell phones, laptops, wireless internet, PDAs and radio. In addition to twelve projects presented in City Hall Park, there will be several free hands-on workshops and three panels available to the public.
[And featuring Julian Bleecker!]

( (( ((( Spectropolis 2004 ))) )) )

World's smallest robot flies forward

The firm behind a tiny flying robot says it could be used for security work, disaster rescue and space exploration.

Seiko Epson has designed the insect-sized craft as a more advanced successor to its flying micro-robot, reports Japan Today.

The new version of the world's smallest robot flies autonomously according to a flight-route program sent by Bluetooth wireless from a computer.

The robot has two tiny ultrasonic motors that drive two propellers in opposite directions for lift.

Epson said the model, which is 136mm wide, 85mm tall and weighs 8.6 grams without the battery, will be on display at the Tokyo International Forum from August 27 to 30.

from http://www.ananova.com/

VC's on fire for Mobile Gaming

Investors have finally caught on to the fact that mobile entertainment is hot growth sector. Now they're climbing over each other to throw money at mobile game developers.

"mobile gaming is young enough that it's cheap to produce a lot of games and see which ones stick."

"In two months' time, venture investors have recognized this is a great market in the U.S. and there are a finite number of lead players," says Rory O'Driscoll, managing director at BA Ventures. "They've made bets real quick."

VCs made six gaming investments totaling $50 million in all of 2003. In the second quarter of 2004 alone, there were five deals totaling $86 million, according to VentureOne, a San Francisco-based research firm.

Arc Group predicts that the mobile game industry could reach $8.4 billion worldwide by 2008.
San Jose Biz Journal Article
SlashDot Article
The Feature Article

WiFi Rickshaw Temple

From India, word reaches us that there is a high-speed rickshaw..er, a high-speed WiFi rickshaw..I mean, a rickshaw, that's got a temple-like carriage and that provides wireless Internet access. Or something..
From USA Today

BITHOOR, India � For 12-year-old Anju Sharma, hope for a better life arrives in her poor farming village three days a week on a bicycle rickshaw that carries a computer with a high-speed, wireless Internet connection.

Students gather around a mobile Internet classroom in the northern Indian village of Bithoor.
Rajesh Kumar Singh, AP

"By using computers, I can improve my knowledge," Sharma, whose parents plan to pull her out of school at 15, said in Hindi, before joining a class on Web cameras. "And that will help me get a job when I grow up."

Time That Land Forgot

Here's an interesting experiment in switching around the Position-Image-Annotate syntax of your typical geo-referenced photography project. Timo Arnall and Even Westvang have inverted the representation so that time becomes the landscape, and location/GPS coordinates become the things time references. I think..
Parenthetically, Timo's www.elasticspace.com is an awesome resource to other geo-image-mapping-annotation types of projects.

SmartView

I don't know when this happened... but a friend here just showed me this feature of yahoo's mapping service:

Link.

So cool...

I want this on my GPS cameraphone.

roam.net

ROAM-NET members will start broadcasting information about themselves, and their surroundings. At a most basic level, all members will be broadcasting video and GPS feeds and anyone connected to the network (including the cars themselves) will be able to view maps of their peers, and see from their perspective. Spectators can also use laptops, pocket PCs, and kiosks to view the vehicles in action, and send messages to the vehicles. For example, one might message "I need a lift, will you barter?" or "Come visit us at camp hello; free greetings and smiles".

ROAM-NET is non-profit, and will no doubt evolve as technology and social networks improve, but is dedicated to the community of technomads (technological nomads), be them cyborgs, or computer equipped transports. We are currently using the open-source blogging/cms tool, thingster as meta and mapping engine.

link

OS Master Map

via wmmna

Ordnance Survey, Britain's national mapping agency, started 30 years ago to build a database of Britain's landscape and society. MasterMap contains 450m topographical features, each positioned to an accuracy of centimetres.

From the Master Map website:

The OS MasterMap Topography Layer is a large-scale digital database of the detailed surface features on the landscape, with relative positions and elevations of every town, manor, parish, or tract of land mapped to minute detail. This highly accurate, flexible resource covers some 400 million man-made and natural features, from fields to pillar boxes, each with its own unique identifier or TOID� for easy reference. It is broken down into nine themes to make it easier to access the data:

roads, tracks and paths;
land;
buildings;
water;
rail;
height;
heritage;
structures; and
administrative boundaries.

There is the choice of a single theme, a combination of themes or all of the above. When overlaid with other OS MasterMap layers or the customer's own data, it will provide a clear picture of what's on the ground.

Britain has gotta be a pretty fun place for AR now.

Social Lives of a Cell Phone

Good overview of a couple of the more interesting social apps for mobile phones.
New wireless services will maximize your connections to others and minimize your need to plan ahead

MIT Technology Review

Err..MoPhoBlogging?

Courtesy of we-make-money-not-art

Audioblog from your phone

If you blog on Blogger, you can send free unlimited audio posts from any phone to your blog. You call their number, record a post, then your blog is updated with an audioblogger icon and a link to your audio...

Quarantined iPods

Music fans, beware: Britain's Ministry of Defence has become the latest organization to add the iPod to its list of high-tech security risks. The pocket-sized digital music player, which can store thousands of songs, is one of a series of banned gadgets that the military will no longer allow into most sections of its headquarters in the UK and abroad.

From CNN

Camera Phone Scavenger Hunts

Simple and fun, from Picturephoning:

I picked this up from an article published in the Miami Herald on various mobile campaigns (mostly text message) launched by wireless companies. But this one involves camera phones:

"In April at six colleges, Verizon sponsored the Urban Challenge on Campus -- scavenger hunts with camera phones. College students had to decipher clues at 12 campus locations and photograph them in 90 minutes."

GPS Digital Camera

It's way too expensive - the software alone is $250, bringing the entire package to over $1100, but I've been waiting for something like this: digital photography integrated with a GPS. Actually, now that I think about it, when I cobble the same technology together for a current project that includes a PocketPC PDA, Bluetooth GPS unit, and a decent Compact Flash digital camera, I'm up to about $800! But, I guess the DIY satisfaction is invaluable..oh, and Microsoft donated the PDA and a huge box of development tools..

Geospatial Experts

Location-based Photo Albums

From we-make-money-not-art
Trevor F. Smith has released the first public beta of a new photo map editor, 93 Photo Street. The application downloads and renders free maps for any region in the US and makes it easy to geolocate your photos and generate web photo maps.
This is something I and probably other people have thought would be fun and interesting to work with. The idea of cohering physical space somehow to your photos to help ground them and locate them. I wonder what you do next? I'd want to be able to make my maps to look like those goofy placemats you get at small town diners where a map of town shows all the featured tourist traps more than anything else.
Maybe i'll have to get out my Denis Woods to help me think through this one..

Flexible Color LED Screen

check out the
video

The screen is connected to a mobile phone via a Bluetooth link, so drawings and animations can be sent by MMS to another user with the same equipment. Thanks to a dedicated embedded software application, the mobile can be used as a remote control to activate the screen's functionalities: adjust the brightness, select the image or text to be displayed, enter text, draw simple animated visuals, download animations from the Internet, etc. A more sophisticated animation editor has been produced to allow professionals to market their own animations, which will be online and downloadable via the Internet from a mobile phone.

Sensors integrated into the screen mean it can also be used as a "standalone" device (to display visual sequences stored in the screen's memory or specific animations triggered by certain gestures or sounds, etc.).

The electronic components (including LEDs) have been soldered on a flexible circuit board and then packaged in a fabric layered sandwich. This offers an optimised display rendering while maintaining a very good flexibility and a comfortable yet resistant textile feeling.

Compared with the optical fibre screens developed by the same team of researchers (and awarded the prize for innovation at the 2002 Avantex textile trade show), the display screen is lighter, has a colour display and is easier to integrate into clothing because it is small (10cm by 7cm) and light (approximately 50 grams, in addition to a battery weighing approximately 100 grams). The removable screen is inserted in a special pocket in the garment. It is easy to use and connected to a rechargeable battery with a 4-hour charge life.

though I think OLED will make this tech moot, and the "flexibility" looks pretty minimal, it's got some definitely interesting immediate potentials.

compiled from France Telecom press release

R&D blurb

via ./

Apart from the fun, trendy aspect that appeals to consumers, possible applications exist in the professional event marketing and communications sectors (the staff coordinating events could display real-time information for the visitors) or in advertising, public safety, etc.

In July, trials under real conditions will allow the developers to confirm the advantages of the functionalities offered, discover new specific applications and check that the communicating clothes are comfortable to use. In the mean time, France Telecom's R&D teams are continuing to explore the nascent communicating clothes market, concluding market research studies and finalising an appropriate economic model with a view to launching commercial production of the existing prototypes in the near future. Even today, they are working towards future generations of the new screen, and in particular its compatibility with a large number of mobile phones.

CFP: Mobility, New Social Intensities and the Coordinates of Digital Networks

From stirrups to satellites, the invention of new forms of
technically-assisted mobility has always created new intensities within
the social. Each invention has also required a new idea of what it
might be to be human, along with new tensions as older cultural
practices and social forms are challenged.

Papers are invited for the 'Mobility, New Social Intensities and the
Coordinates of Digital Networks' Issue of the Fibreculture Journal, to
be published late in 2004/early in 2005. The issue will be co-edited by
Larissa Hjorth and Andrew Murphie.

http://journal.fibreculture.org

The deadline for submissions is September 22, 2004.

Streetmemes

Streetmemes are those idiomatic tags that appear in nooks, crannies and crags and pretty much anywhere someone can quickly paint or sticker. And somehow they silently spread around the world. When I was last in LA my driving route from Los Feliz to USC was lousy with Andre the Giant. A curious distinction between LA and NYC, I noticed, was that car culture forces the memes in LA to be ginormous, while in NYC one finds more tiny ones tucked into odd corner and door ways.
I helped prototype this application last year. It's essentially a growing catalog of memes, with an almost genetic-like schema to help categorize variants, originals and so forth. Geographic tagging would make a nice addition as it'd be interesting to visualize where what particular memes appear.
Check 'em out and submit yours: Streetmemes

GPS enabled Gameboy

A GPS affixed to your Gameboy!? Pretty cool. Now all we need is an open API for creating games on there.

From We-Make-Money-Not-Art.

RedSky Mobile

AmbieSense

AmbieSense

With the AmbieSense system we have started a completely new interaction paradigm for mobile persons! The intelligent and wireless context tags lets everybody tag their surroundings and situations. The result is ambient, personalised and context-sensitive access to info systems of the future.

Microsoft Patents Human Body

It sounds like an April Fool's Day joke, but it isn't. Microsoft, that imperialist of the information-technology world, has actually succeeded in patenting the human body as a computer network. US Patent 6,754,472, issued to the company on June 22nd, is for a �method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body�.

The Economist story

Pocket Projector

blog post via /.

Video projectors able to project high-quality images will be embedded in your cellphones and laptops within two years. This is the promise of a new technology developed at Cambridge University. These pocket projectors will have no lenses and no light bulbs. Instead, these future battery-powered tiny projectors will rely on holographic technology and special algorithms. In "Holograms enable pocket projectors," Technology Research News explains that a 2D hologram will be created on a microdisplay and projected by using a laser beam. This has been possible because the researchers have written special algorithms which generates the holograms a million times faster than standard ones.

this differs from the matchbox projector earlier in the year.
Hopefully this technology will develop into something high quality, and eliminate the need to continually buy expensive bulbs.

Students and Scholars Take To The Streets - Mixed Reality Gaming

Recently, some NYU ITP students put together PacManhattan - a PacMan game played in the streets surrounding Washington Square Park. It was a fun stunt that got lots of media attention and for good reason: there's something compelling about re-imagining physical, lived space in such a way, especially if it's playful and pulls elements from resonant pop-cultural idioms like video gaming.

Curious for more substantive insights into why this sort of re-imagining has appeal?

The Human Pacman project, originally developed at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University in Singapore, share their insights in a very cogent way. Their publications page indicates that there are (at least) 7 different audiences to which their Human Pacman project has something to say about mobility, ubiquity, entertainment, social computing and more. (By comparison, Pacmanhattan's Press page has links to 19 press clips, and no reference to the MRL's Human Pacman seems to exist anywhere on the site.)

The game is fun by itself, to be sure. Drawing out how the essence of this sort of activity lives beyond a press blip is the hard work of solid, collegial reseach+development.

Mobile Gaming - Who Says Women Don't Play?

Fifty-eight percent of U.S. mobile gamers are women, compared to 42 percent who are men, according to the recent Yankee Group U.S. Mobile Entertainment Survey. In addition, 29 percent of male mobile gamers purchased games compared to 17 percent of women. The Yankee Group is one of those market research operations, and their Media & Entertainment Strategies senior analyst gives some top line insights in the release.

"Our survey clearly disagrees with the common stereotype that men, especially young men, are the most ardent mobile gamers. The largest market may be getting the least attention in a space that's increasingly competitive. This could be important news for games manufacturers and other content providers making large investments in game design and marketing programs that target men and adolescent boys."

USC Mobile Media Institute

this was news to me. anyone know more information?

The new Mobile Media Institute, comprised of Cinema-Television, the Annenberg School, the Marshall School of Business, Viterbi School of Engineering, the law school and the Thornton School of Music will produce new knowledge, art, business models and technology to shape the world of mobile media.

The Institute will also involve various research centers including the Institute for Creative Technologies, Entertainment Technology Center, the Annenberg Center for Communication, the Integrated Media Systems Center and the Center for Telecom Management.

The institute�s main goal will be to develop solutions to real-world problems in the digital economy of the future.

Specifically, the USC Mobile Media Institute will provide solutions to the challenges created by the intersection of three new phenomena:

� the increased digital creation and distribution of content, ranging from movies to news bulletins;

� the increased availability and accessibility of wireless Internet communication; and

� �interactive engagement� - the evolving ways in which people interact with each other and with media in an increasingly wireless world.

Each month, the participating schools will take turns playing host to discussion groups on topics relevant to the institute�s mission. Briefs written from what happens in the focus groups will provide the basis for roundtable discussions that will involve a roster of industry and academic experts.

press release (short)
press release (long)

Found Magazine

"we collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles- anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life. anything goes..."