For a smile - T-Mobile & Flash Mobs: Dancing and Singing in the UK

T-Mobile: Dancing at the Liverpool Street Station

This viral ad from T-Mobile gives a glimpse of how music in a public space, a small crowd of dancers, and YouTube, can bring a smile to over 11,771,896 viewers. (My guess is that many of video's views were repeat views, because I immediately pressed "replay" after the first go-round.)

Apparently a real flash mob congregated at the Liverpool Station a month after the T-Mobile ad was filmed:


I guess this concept has been spreading in the UK. The following video was taken in Trafalgar Square, with 13,000 people singing karaoke:

 

The flash-mob dancing and singing in public places brought back a memory of a video clip I came across a few years ago of a "faux" dance happening at a mall during the late 1990's. The video was set to Fat Boy Slim's "Praise You".
It turns out that Spike Jonze, the man behind the upcoming film of Maurice Sendak's story Where the Wild Things Are, was involve in the creation of the video.
 
Enjoy!

RELATED:
Spike Jonze Unmasked

Arizona State University's ArtsWork Arts Education Center Website: 
Interactive Gateway: Dance, an 8-unit curriculum for high school students that explore the art and culture of the 1960's.

"Students will improvise and choreograph dances structured by chance methods, sports, games, political issues, surroundings, everyday gestures and the manipulation of objects. Through these investigations students realize that in the 1960’s, dance was redefined to include everyday people, everyday movement, indeterminacy, and alternative spaces"

Lesson 7. Anytime, Anywhere, Anything
Unit of Study: Interactive Gateway
Theme: Redefining Dance As Happening Anytime, Anywhere, Including Any Movement
Sub theme: Happenings
Grades: 9-12th grade

The Children's Interactive Library: User Experience Design and the Library!

The Children's Interactive Library was a collaboration between Interactive Spaces, the Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, the Department for Design, Aarhus School of Architecture, and others.

(Please excuse the audio - there are two narrators, each speaking a different language.)

"The Children's Interactive Library project was an untraditional interdisciplinary research and innovation project exploring the children's library of the future.

The objective was to create spaces for children in the library that offer new experiences, learning, events, sense impressions and physical activity. And at the same time acknowledging the library's unique capacity of being the place where children come in order to acquire information and knowledge."

The video shows how pervasive computing and natural interaction, and a child-centered focus were combined to create rich "user experience" at the library.

The Story Surfer:





Inspiration: Strategies and Prototypes for the Future (pdf)
Abstract from Children's Interactive Library Project, 2004-06, with lots of pictures and diagrams depicting the design process and products.

The following video provides a good overview of how user-focused HCI strategies were used a means to develop innovative plans for cool new libraries, otherwise known as "Media Spaces".
From what I can see, these strategies were used by the Aarhus Public Libraries,in Denmark, during the development of the Children's Interactive Library project, highlighted in the previous video.


Thanks, Matt Gullet, for the link to the video.



FYI: The Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, in North Carolina, is pretty cool.

Pictures from ImagineOn, the main library in Charlotte, N.C. for children and teens (Spangler Library & PLCMC):


ImagineOn, the LibraryLoft for Teens, and the Spangler Children's Library


Video production and editing at ImagineOn


Making games with Game Maker at the library


Lan Party at the Library

Future of Interaction: Microsoft Lab's Vision 2019 Montage; Future Healthcare Montage

The following video is from Microsoft Office Vision 2019. If you visit the YouTube source, you'll find an interesting discussion about this five-minute+ clip.



Video Presentation from MIX09: Untold Stories of Touch, Gesture, & NUI
Joseph Fletcher, Design Manager, Microsoft Surface


"Learn about new patterns, behaviors, and design approaches for touch and gesture interfaces from a practitioners point of view. Learn early lessons from applied knowledge of touch applications, devices, and design methods."



LukeW's notes from Joseph Fletcher's presentation
LukeW's post: Design Principles at Microsoft

LukeW is the Senior Director of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc.

Michael Haller Discusses Multi-touch, Interactive Surfaces, and Emerging Technologies for Learning

I came across an excellent overview of interactive display technologies that hold promise for education. The link below is a research article written by Michael Haller for BECTA, formally known as the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency.

Emerging Technologies for Learning: Interactive Displays and Next Generation Interfaces(pdf)
Becta Research Report (2008) Michael Haller Volume 3 (2008)

"Multi-touch and interactive surfaces are becoming more interesting, because they allow a natural and intuitive interaction with the computer system.

These more intuitive and natural interfaces could help students to be more actively involved in working together with content and could also help improve whole-class teaching activities. As these technologies develop, the barrier of having to learn and work with traditional computer interfaces may diminish.

It is still unclear how fast these interfaces will become part of our daily life and how long it will take for them to be used in every classroom. However, we strongly believe that the more intuitive the interface is, the faster it will be accepted and used. There is a huge potential in these devices, because they allow us to use digital technologies in a more human way." -Michael Haller

Michael Haller works at the department of Digital Media of the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (Hagenberg, Austria), where he is the head of the Media Interaction Lab.

Michael co-organized the Interaction Tomorrow course at SIGGRAPH 2007, along with Chia Shen, of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL). Lecturers included Gerald Morrison, of Smart Technologies, Bruce H. Thomas, of the University oof Southern Australia, and Andy Wilson, of Microsoft Research. The course materials from Interaction Tomorrow are available on-line, and include videos, slides, and course notes.

Below is an excerpt from the discription of the Interaction Tomorrow SIGGRAPH 2007 course:

"Conventional metaphors and underlying interface infrastructure for single-user desktop systems have been traditionally geared towards single mouse and keyboard-based WIMP interface design, while people usually meet around a table, facing each other. A table/wall setting provides a large interactive visual surface for groups to interact together. It encourages collaboration, coordination, as well as simultaneous and parallel problem solving among multiple people.

In this course, we will describe particular challenges and solutions for the design of direct-touch tabletop and interactive wall environments. The participants will learn how to design a non-traditional user interface for large horizontal and vertical displays. Topics include physical setups (e.g. output displays), tracking, sensing, input devices, output displays, pen-based interfaces, direct multi-touch interactions, tangible UI, interaction techniques, application domains, current commercial systems, and future research."

It is worth taking the time to look over Haller's other publications. Here is a few that would be good to read:

M. Haller, C. Forlines, C. Koeffel, J. Leitner, and C. Shen, 2009. "Tabletop Games: Platforms, Experimental Games and Design Recommendations." Springer, 2009. in press [bibtex]

A. D. Cheok, M. Haller, O. N. N. Fernando, and J. P. Wijesena, 2009.
"Mixed Reality Entertainment and Art," International Journal of Virtual Reality, vol. X, p. X, 2009. in press [bibtex]

J. Leitner, C. Köffel, and M. Haller, 2009. "Bridging the gap between real and virtual objects for tabletop games," International Journal of Virtual Reality, vol. X, p. X, 2009. in press [bibtex]

M. Haller and M. Billinghurst, 2008.
"Interactive Tables: Requirements, Design Recommendations, and Implementation." IGI Publishing, 2008. [bibtex]

D. Leithinger and M. Haller, 2007. "Improving Menu Interaction for Cluttered Tabletop Setups with User-Drawn Path Menus," Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems, 2007. TABLETOP 07. Second Annual IEEE International Workshop on, pp. 121-128, 2007. [bibtex]

J. Leitner, J. Powell, P. Brandl, T. Seifried, M. Haller, B. Dorray, and P. To, 2009."Flux: a tilting multi-touch and pen based surface," in CHI EA 09: Proceedings of the 27th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA, 2009, pp. 3211-3216. [bibtex]




P. Brandl, J. Leitner, T. Seifried, M. Haller, B. Doray, and P. To, 2009. "Occlusion-aware menu design for digital tabletops," in CHI EA 09: Proceedings of the 27th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA, 2009, pp. 3223-3228. [bibtex]


References from the BECTA paper:

Elrod, S., Bruce, R., Gold, R., Goldberg, D., Halasz, F., Janssen, W., Lee, D., Mc-Call, K., Pedersen, E., Pier, F., Tang, J., and Welch, B., Liveboard: a large interactive display supporting group meetings, presentations, and remote collaboration, CHI ’92 (New York, NY, USA), ACM Press, 1992, pp. 599–607.

Morrison, G., ‘A Camera-Based Input Device for Large Interactive Displays’, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 52-57, Jul/Aug, 2005.

Albert, A. E. The effect of graphic input devices on performance in a cursor positioning task. Proceedings ofthe Human Factors Society 26th Annual Meeting, Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society, 1982, pp. 54-58.

Dietz, P.H., Leigh, D.L., DiamondTouch: A Multi-User Touch Technology, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), ISBN: 1-58113-438-X, pp. 219-226, November 2001.

Rekimoto, J., SmartSkin: An Infrastructure for Freehand Manipulation on Interactive Surfaces,
CHI 2002, 2002.

Kakehi, Y., Iida, M., Naemura, T., Shirai, Y., Matsushita, M.,Ohguro, T., ‘Lumisight Table: Interactive View-Dependent Tabletop Display Surrounded by Multiple Users’, In IEEE Computer
Graphics and Applications, vol. 25, no.1, pp 48 – 53, 2005.

Streitz, N., Prante, P., Röcker, C., van Alphen, D., Magerkurth, C.,Stenzel, R., ‘Ambient Displays and Mobile Devices for the Creation of Social Architectural Spaces: Supporting informal communication and social awareness in organizations’ in Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies, Kluwer Publishers, 2003. pp. 387-409.

Morrison, G., A Camera-Based Input Device for Large Interactive Displays, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 52-57, Jul/Aug, 2005.

Ishii, H., Underkoffler, J., Chak, D., Piper, B., Ben-Joseph, E., Yeung, L. and Zahra, K., Augmented Urban Planning Workbench: Overlaying Drawings, Physical Models and Digital Simulation. IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality ACM Press, Darmstadt, Germany.

Han, Y., Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection, UIST ’05 (New York), ACM Press, 2005, pp. 115–118.

Hull., J., Erol, B., Graham, J., Ke, Q., Kishi, H., Moraleda, J., Olst, D., Paper-Based Augmented Reality. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (Esbjerg, Denmark,November 28-30, 2007). ICAT ’07. IEEE, 205-209.

Haller, M., Leithinger, D., Leitner, J., Seifried, T., Brandl, P., Zauner, J., Billinghurst, M., The shared design space. In SIGGRAPH ’06: ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Emerging technologies, page 29, New York, NY,USA, 2006. ACM Press.

Research email: emtech@becta.org.uk
Main email: becta@becta.org.uk
URL: www.becta.org.uk

(This was also posted on the TechPsych blog.)

"It's Never Too Late" (IN2L), Dakim BrainFitness: Interactive multimedia, touchscreens, and applications for seniors.

Touch-screen applications are making headway with seniors in the form of brain fitness games and therapeutic rehabilitation activities. It makes sense to take this to the next level, via multi-touch and gesture interaction. Here is a brief overview of a few systems that are making some headway in skilled nursing facilities, in homes, and on-line:

State-of-the-Art Technology and Hotel-Like Environment Get CareOne's Rehab Patients Home Quicker

"Seniors are empowered to connect and communicate online, to immerse themselves in rich multimedia experiences, to play, to explore, create, to revisit and document their histories. In short, to be engaged in a multitude of ways that help them remain physically and mentally active.

IN2L uses an easy touch-screen interface that allows each resident to have their own profile that they can access just by touching the screen. Touching picture-based icons on the screen gives the individual access to a wide variety of experiences, games and therapies, including simulation programs like driving, flying and biking." - Mel Fabrikant, The Paramus Post, 5/7/09

The applications can be used by speech, occupational, and physical therapists to deliver reimbursable treatment activities.






New Brain Training System Entertains While Fighting Dementia: Dakim BrainFitness
Jill Schmidt, Reuters 1/9/09

"The turnkey hardware/software system includes a touch screen computer  appliance that requires no mouse or keyboard,
plus brain games that adjust to  different ability levels and are automatically updated every few days over the Internet to avoid boredom.
Already the #1 brain wellness program in senior living communities, the Dakim unit is now being released in a home
edition that makes brain fitness fun while also fighting mental decline." 

Related

Washington Post Article

Future-Making Serious Games Post: Personalized Serious Games for Cognitive Fitness
(Detailed information about the CogniFit online brain training system)

Rhizome 2009: A Lovely Interactive Multi-touch App on a Flexible Lycra Screen

Loran Bey is a member of the NUI group. He created Rhizome 2009 using Unity 3D and tBeta, now know as CCV (Community Core Vision). The screen in the video is made from flexible lycra, and this provides a tangible interaction effect. The music in the background is Aphix Twin's Avril 14th.

MultiTouch Screen Lycra from Loran Bey on Vimeo.

Unity 3D is a game development tool for browser-base games, including games optimized for the iPhone. (If you visit the Unity 3D website, be sure to download their 3D web plugin and visit their relaxing on-line Tropical Paradise.)

The screen displayed in the video was inspired by the 2005 Khronos Projector installation, by Alvero Cassinelli, an assistant professor at the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Khronos is described as a "video time-warping machine with a deformable screen."

The Khronos Projector website provides several simulation applets built with Processing that you can play with. They were fun to interact with on my HP TouchSmart PC. I liked Behind the Door the best.

The following video demonstrates how the Khronos application works:


Take a look at Alvaro Cassinelli's archive of his interactive media art if you have the chance!

Cassinelli's Meta-Perception research group is doing some interesting things, too:

"The goal of this group is to research methods for capturing and manipulating information that is normally inaccessible to humans and machines. In doing so, we hope to create new ways of perceiving the world and interacting with technology. Our research methods span fields such as human-computer interaction, media arts, physiology, and ethics."