Off-the desktop Interactive technologies are spreading quickly, across many platforms. It seems that within the next 3-5 years we will be able to have instant access to a social and dynamic web, with information and entertainment at our fingertips, anywhere we go.
The "world-as-web-browser" concept is one I've touched upon in the past. I'd like to focus on this topic in future posts. I came across some of the information in this post on the Future of Media Blog,maintained by the folks at the Interpublic Emerging Media Lab, based in California. This blog is a must-read!
The Saatchi & Saatchi ad agency in the UK created interactive games that provide people waiting in bus shelters the opportunity to pass the time by bashing digital falling eggs.
A more utilitarian approach to interactive touch screens is the EyeStop bus stop, a concept created by researchers MIT's SENSEable City Lab, along with the city of Florence and the city's transit service:
Danoo: "Location scouting and scalable web technologies combined to create a targeted DOOH experience".
If you are tech-savy and a member of the digital signage/interactive display/AV end of things, you probably know what this means. If not, you should. Things are pairing, merging, and converging in the world of "out and about" technology.
Technology, especially digital signage, is ubiquitous, and has targeted you and your neighborhood.
So what's the fuss? A company from Danoo, from China, is ramping things up in the Digital Signage/DOOH (Digital Out of Home) arena. Fast.
Danoo has rapidly up with exisiting companies, such as National CineMedia, Blue Bite, Electronic Arts, and the HISTORY channel to create and push off-the-desktop and off-the-TV content and interactive user experiences.Bill Gerba, of Wirespring, and Manolo Almagro, CTO of Show + Tell in NYC (think Times Square digital signage experiences), and others have recently written about this phenomenon, right after Danoo released the following press announcement:
Danoo Inc Announces a Breakthrough in Mobile Content Delivery(7/11/09, Business Wire) "Danoo partnered with mobile technology company Blue Bite to enable the campaigns, and is actively rolling out its mobile interactivity capability to all of its venues. The first 200 Danoo locations will be live in Los Angeles and New York by July 1st. At full deployment, Danoo will give advertisers the ability to get their content into the hands of more than 200,000 consumers in an average two-week campaign. In addition to content downloads, Danoo offers multiple ways to pair its screens with mobile interactivity to maximize campaign effectiveness, such as SMS call-to-actions, social gaming and mobile application promotion."
"Visitors to Danoo locations viewed video content on Danoo’s digital screens accompanied by an on-screen prompt to download exclusive content such as sneak peeks and ringtones from their Bluetooth or Wi-Fi-enabled devices via the Danoo network."
Here are a few related articles: How Significant is the Danoo-IdeaCast-National CineMedia Deal? (7/14/09, Bill Gerba, Wirespring) A Watershed Moment for DOOH Media (7/12/09, Bill Collins, Daily DOOH)
Pictures from Danoo's Website:
Danoo's IdeaCast- "Captive TV".
I've probably encountered Danoo's technologies numerous times, judging from my archive of pictures of displays and related technologies that have crossed my path. The TV screen on the treadmill looks just like the one I saw on a treadmill in the fitness center of a Princess cruise ship last year. The picture in the middle looks like it was taken in an airport. The picture on the right is of a system in a coffeehouse. According to information on the Danoo website, the system is interactive and includes "content downloads, social gaming, mobile couponing and more via SMS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi".
Blue Bite's website is worth looking at. It demonstrates their concept very well through animation:
Things are ramping up in my region, too. T1 Tapas, a restaurant north of Charlotte, N.C., in the Birkdale Village in Huntersville, has majority owners with a technology background. Mike Feldman and Jim Morris started up Digital Optics Corporation, which focused on optics for computers and imaging, and after they sold their company, they teamed up with Denise Feldman to establish their company.
T 1 Connection Booth with Multi-User Touch Screen, HD TV, Sound System, Computer, & more: "T1 Connection Booth seating gives you access to music, photos, and videos through built-in touchscreen tabletops, brilliant monitors, speakers, and computers."-Picture and taken from the T 1 Tapas website
The restaraunt serves as a test bed for T 1 Visions to try out their software and hardware designed to enhance the digitally connected dining experience.The restaurant was featured in May of this year on CNN:
Over the next month or so I will be re-organizing this blog. I'll be analyzing the various themes that have emerged since I started this on 4/11/06, over three years ago, as part of an assignment for a class about distance education and on-line communication tools.
My first topic was "Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds". Although I continue to focus on those themes, I mostly center around off-the-desktop interactive, collaborative, and emerging technologies that support interaction and activities in public spaces.
One theme that interests me is technology that supports travel experiences. Since I've had the opportunity to travel a great deal (before the economy started to go downhill), I've had a chance to explore this arena as a participant-observer*, and have documented my findings through photographs and video.
It is a joke in my family that if I disappear from the tribe, I can usually be found nearby, poking at an interactive touch screen, photographing something related to technology, or sneaking in a few shots of other people interacting with technology, and sometimes even talking to strangers as they use technology. (I usually ask permission to take pictures of people who are in my view finder, but sometimes they just happen to be in my line of sight.)
It is amazing what an earful you can get about technology as a fellow traveller!
I came across the work of Nanonation when I was on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, and was a little disappointed with the touch-screen content and interaction around the ship. From what I can tell from the NanoNation website, the applications have been improved somewhat, especially the way-finding application on the Freedom of the Seas:
Nanonation was also involved in the development of a "Discovery Wall" at the Umpqua bank. This system incorporates tangible icons that sit on a shelf located near the Discovery Wall that trigger an interactive flash presentation on a screen. The icons represent various bank products, and are RFID enabled.
Back to the topic of cruise ship/travel technology:
When I was on the Ruby Princess cruise in December of 2008, I was impressed with the "Movies Under the Stars" set-up. At night, the sunning decks are transformed into out-door movie viewing spots, where you can lounge around, basking under the stars at you watch the gigantic silver screen and excellent sound system.
During the day, the system is used to display games that people play on the Wii, which provides the non-playing sunbathers additional entertainment.
Take a look to my "Wii-OOH" Flickr set slideshow to see the Wii in action on the large screen of the Ruby Princess, and on smaller screens in the food-court of the Concord Mills (NC) mall:
(Note, the mall pictures were taken with my cell phone.)
I want to go back!
HCI Note
*I was trained in the use of participant observation long ago, when I was studying social science
and psychology at the University of Michigan. It is a method that was developed early on by anthropologists
and sociologists, and adopted later by researchers in other fields. Some human-computer interaction
researchers use this method, and related techniques, such as ethnography, in their work.
DANCE.DRAW: EXQUISITE INTERACTION
(Updated) "The movement of the visualizations are artifacts in real-time of the movements of the dancers. They draw while they dance, they dance together and they draw together. Every performance generates a new visual imprint." -DanceDraw website
Interactive multimedia technology, blended with the arts!
Dr. Celene LaTulipe, from UNC-Charlotte's Software and Information Systems Department, Professor Sybil Huskey, from the dance department, dance students, and others collaborated to create an amazing performance that I had the opportunity to see performed during the Visualization in the World Symposium in April (2008).
If you look closely, you will see that each dancer holds two wireless mice, one in each hand. The mice trigger the visualization that is projected in the background. Dr. LaTulipe has focused some of her research on two-handed computer interaction. It is interesting to see how her work has been applied to this beautiful "off-the-desktop" application.
Dance.Draw is a work in progress- visit the following links for more information:
Part I Musings: Learning about application development and programming at mid-life:
I thought I'd write on a more personal level this time.
I'm a school psychologist, so in 2003, my motivation for taking computers at mid-life stemmed from my desire to create engaging interactive multimedia games for learning, games that could be played on hand-held devices as well as on the interactive whiteboards that I noticed were inching into my schools.
It was difficult for me to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B.
I shouldn't have been shocked to learn that most introductory programming classes provide instruction, as well as endless lab assignments, that are geared for people who want to make business forms and manipulate business-related data, build e-commerce websites, or create relational databases for... banks!
I now can make a mortgage calculator forms that adjust for various scenarios and provide cute error messages, in beginning Visual Basic.Net, C#, and Java. I can create a database that will let users look up part numbers for all sorts of widgets, in all sorts of combinations, and ensure that client data can be easily accessed in a nice looking form.
Why should I learn all of the old stuff when there are so many new avenues to explore?
Over the past few years, I've been fortunate to take a variety of classes that were not readily available just 8-10 years ago:
Computer/Internet Multimedia. Computer Music Technology. Game Design/Development. AI for Games. Ubiquitous Computing. Web Development Tools. Virtual Reality for Education and Training. These courses have motivated me to learn more about programming. The traditional programming courses had the opposite effect.
PART II Keeping up
I recently attended a day-long code camp at Central Piedmont Community College to learn more about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight. WPF and Silverlight provide the foundation for applications that can run on Microsoft's Surface. WPF and Silverlight provide designers and developers with more efficient ways of developing visualization and interactive multimedia applications.
The architecture behind WPF and Silverlight seems to align more with the way people think and envision, which in my opinion, gives hope for those of us who have toyed with the idea of programming, but were frightened off the first time they opened up a traditional programming textbook.
Part III Visualization and Interactive Multimedia
For more information about WPF, Silverlight, design, etc, read Sam Batterman's (a Microsoft Evangalist) recent blog post: Some thoughts about WPF and Data Visualization Here are some pictures and text that I lifted from Sam's blog that will give you a picture of what I'm talking about:
"Here's an application that one of our partners built in a few weeks - all WPF and actually, not complicated code...getting that heart rendered was probably less than 100 lines of code. This app is used in a hospital for documenting heart surgery procedures. You can draw and annotate the 3D surface, rotate the heart, etc."
Can you imagine how kids would love to manipulate something like this in a science class?! This would be great on an interactive whiteboard or display.
This focuses on user experience, much more so than applications in the past. For more information about designing for user experience, take a look at the link to Bill Buxton's book, "Sketching User Experiences."
(I'll write more about WPF and Silverlight after I get my laptop repaired and have a chance to experiment some more.) Croquet and EduSim
Right now, I've been experimenting with Croquet, which uses Squeak, and EduSim, which is powered by Croquet, to put together some learning activities for students.The best part is that Croquet is open-source, and all of the EduSim applications are free.
Here are some pictures that link to short video clips from the Greenbush EduSim website:
Neuro VR
Another application that I'm working with is NeuroVR.
NeuroVR is a free virtual environment that was designed for use in clinical settings. If you don't have access to virtual-reality hardware, you can still use NeuroVR on a desktop or large-screen display. Available 3D environments include an office, a supermarket, a park, a classroom, a poolside setting, and a home.
Andrea Gaggioli, Ph.D., is the Chief Technical Officer of the this project. He's also behind the Positive Technology blog, which is a great resource. Andrea is a researcher working at the intersections of psychology, neuroscience, and emerging technologies.
NeuroVR allows the clinician (or educator) to easily insert pictures, objects, and videoclips into each virtual world. Doors open and close, and you can move items around in the environment. For example, fruit set on a table can be moved over to a counter.
In my opinion, NeuroVR has potential not only in the area of rehabilitation and therapy, but in special education as well, particularly for students who have multiple special needs, including severe autism. A variety of "how-to" videos are posted on DaevornLi's YouTube channel.
Here are some videos clips to give you a better picture of the application:
Interaction design is a relatively new field that combines concepts related to human-computer interaction (HCI), mobile, pervasive, and ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), interface design, service design, user-experience design, interactive media design, and more.
According to Dan Saffer, an interaction designer at Adaptive Path, and author of Interaction Design: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, interaction design is "about people: how people connect with other people through the products and services they use." If you are interested in learning more about designing for interaction, Saffer's book is a great starting point.
Saffer has recently established a wikki about interactive gestures, a site for the "dissemination of gestural interface information such as found on the iPhone and Wii." This is an important resource for those of us who are interested in developing useful interactive applications for emerging technologies.
(Related information can also be found on this blog.)
