“By merging graphics with props in the physical world, handheld Augmented Reality games pull the player through the small screen and into a larger merged play-space. Our primary motivation for this AR game was to explore fast-action first-person augmented reality, where the camera controls and movement that would typically require a mouse and keyboard are handled directly by simply moving the device. Advanced tracking technology allows the player to quickly zoom in and out and view the world at steep angles, making this a highly interactive and engaging game. Finally, we wanted to test tangible input mechanics, such as placing and shooting Skittles to trigger in-game events.”
Archive for June, 2009
ARhrrrr!: Helicopter vs. Zombie Augmented Reality Game - June 30th, 2009
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Tags: Augmented Reality, gaming, video |
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| Posted: 6/30/09 7:34 am UTC by djp3 Add Your Comment | |
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Tukopticon, Six and Lilly make O’Reilly’s Blog - June 29th, 2009
From: Mechanical Turk Best Practices – O’Reilly Radar
“For most users of mechanical turk (us included), it has become an API call that fits smoothly within their workflow. (Or as someone at the meetup wryly suggested, turk is a Remote Person Call.) The last pair of speakers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, reminded us that behind mechanical turk lies thousands of workers† (“the crowd in the cloud”) working without (health care) benefits, oftentimes at extremely low hourly wages. Irani and Silberman suggested that rather than abstracting mechanical turk services as mere API calls, users should start thinking of the plight of the turks (“Mechanical Turk Bill of Rights”) behind the service. As a first step they have a released a Firefox plugin that aims to narrow the information assymetry between turks (those performing tasks) and requesters (those posting tasks). While requesters can see ratings for turks, requesters aren’t rated: Turkopticon lets turks rate requesters. They need more turks to download and start using Turkopticon, so if you know any mechanical turks please enourage them do so.”
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Tags: article, Lilly Irani, Mechanical Turk, Six Silberman |
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| Posted: 6/29/09 10:24 am UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Design Algorithms: Skeuomorphs, Spandrels & Palimpsests - June 29th, 2009
Video podcast
Watch online at Vimeo
Skeuomorphs – Garnet Hertz – UC Irvine
“An ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object
when made from another material or by other techniques”
This event explored how cultural objects shift over time, with
each presenter exploring a single term related to patterns of cultural
change.
Garnet Hertz is an interdisciplinary artist, Fulbright Scholar and is
an affiliate of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and
Interaction in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. He has
shown his work at several notable international venues in eleven
countries including Ars Electronica, DEAF and SIGGRAPH and was awarded
the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotics. His research
is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his
workhas disseminated through 25 countries including The New York
Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo
and CNN Headline News.
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Tags: art, award, design, Fulbright, Garnet Hertz, podcast |
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| Posted: 6/29/09 9:51 am UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Rendering speed on iPhone, Android and Pre - June 24th, 2009
An interesting experiment looking at web browser rendering speed on different mobile platforms from: “AppleInsider | Apple undersells, over-delivers on iPhone 3GS speed – report”
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Tags: Android, article, ipod, mobile phone |
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| Posted: 6/24/09 1:01 pm UTC by djp3 Add Your Comment | |
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The Morality of Consumption - June 23rd, 2009
Persuasive Technologies, Ecotopian Agendas, and the Morality of Consumption: Rethinking the Relationship between Human-Computer Interaction and Environmental Sustainability
This is a rebroadcast of the Friday Informatics Seminar hosted March 20, 2009 at 3:15pm in 6011 Donald Bren Hall
Speaker:
Paul Dourish
Professor, Department of Informatics
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. In particular, contemporary technologies — including mobile devices and ambient displays — can be imagined to provide opportunities for reflection on personal and collective action, or for monitoring and visualization of behaviour and its relationship to environmental change. These efforts exploit recent explorations of the use of computers as persuasive technologies in domains such as health and fitness.
In this talk, I want to examine the limits of this work as currently construed. In particular, I want to argue that the framing of environmental consciousness in terms of personal moral choice has three problems. First, it commits to a form of ecological utopianism whose internal contradictions make it a questionable basis for practical action; second, it implicitly adopts a model of ecological market capitalism that may be as much a source of problem as one of solutions, and, third, it systematically closes off areas of inquiry that reach beyond individual morality and consumption. By drawing on research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism, I’ll suggest some new directions for the relationship between sustainability and HCI.
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Tags: HCI, Paul Dourish, podcast, sustainability |
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| Posted: 6/23/09 4:05 pm UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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LUCI iTunes Podcast Presence is fixed - June 23rd, 2009
If you click on the “iTunes Podcast” link on the upper right, you can subscribe to audio and video content from the LUCI lab through the iTunes store now. It was broken. Apple support technicians helped us to clean up our records in the database. Now anything we record shows up in your iPod with nary a lift of your finger (after lifting a finger to subscribe). The content is still a little raw, but it’s flowing at least….
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Tags: podcast |
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| Posted: 6/23/09 4:00 pm UTC by djp3 Add Your Comment | |
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Automated Dependency Analysis for Internet-Scale Code Reuse - June 16th, 2009
Photo courtesy of flickr:eye2eye (247583501)
Congratulations to Joel Ossher on passing his advancement to candidacy exam!
Thesis: Automated Dependency Analysis for Internet-Scale Code Reuse
Committee:
Crista Lopes (Chair)
Jim Jones
Andre van der Hoek
Ian Harris
Jim Hicks
Software reuse by search-copy-paste-and-adapt has become a common practice in software development, along with other more traditional forms of reuse. Opportunities for this kind of reuse are plentiful, thanks in large part to the widespread adoption of open source processes and the availability of search engines for locating relevant code. Despite increased availability, merely locating an appropriate artifact to reuse is not sufficient. There remains the challenge of developing an understanding of its workings as well as integrating it into a project. This is made more difficult by the interconnected nature of complex software, as a single artifact may touch many different pieces of the system. This greatly complicates localizing usage examples and extracting reusable pieces from existing code. This paper presents a novel method of static dependency analysis to help support the understanding and integration of reusable code. Our dependency slicing algorithm automatically isolates self-contained slices from a source program, thereby dramatically reducing the amount of source code irrelevant to the artifact of interest. We describe how we modified Sourcerer, an infrastructure for internet-scale open source code search, to support an implementation of our dependency slicing algorithm. An empirical evaluation showed that the slicing algorithm introduced no compilation errors. Further, compared to the standard approach to dependency resolution, it reduced the number of files required by up to 300 times and decreased the number of declarations in these files by up to 4000 times.
Congrats Joel!!
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Tags: André van der Hoek, Crista Lopes, information retrieval, Jim Jones |
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| Posted: 6/16/09 4:24 pm UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Measuring Display Interaction in Presence of Context Information - June 16th, 2009
Congratulations to Kah Liu on passing his Master’s Thesis defense! He passed a few weeks ago, but we wanted to put video up!
Thesis: Measuring Display Interaction in Presence of Context Information
Committee:
Don Patterson (Chair)
Gillian Hayes
Chen Li
Traditional directory kiosks present users with common facilities information that may be difficult to understand because it is out of the context of the user. Our study implements contextual information onto a kiosk display and studies the user interaction with context information.
Our study is separated into four phases to precisely measure the interactions of the
traditional kiosk display system and compare the results to the interactions on a
contextual kiosk system. Phase One was designed to establish a baseline for the
interactions with the traditional display. Phase Two determined the effects of moving the display in location with a higher amount of traffic. Phase Three studied the interactions with a contextual display with search and compared the quantitative data with the previous phases. Phase four is exit interviews to gather qualitative data on the contextual kiosk display.
Our results show that contextual data is welcomed by patrons of the display. However,
there are many concerns surrounding the validity, generalization, and subjectivity of the information. Many felt uncomfortable using the context due to their unfamiliarity with
the system. Even with concerns, patrons used context more when it was available and
interviewees rated a contextual display higher than a display with traditional facilities
information.
Congrats Kah!!
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Tags: Donald J. Patterson, Gillian R. Hayes, kiosk, podcast |
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| Posted: 6/16/09 12:42 pm UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Commentary: “Lightstage and Cinema 2.0″ - June 16th, 2009
More examples can be found here:http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Data/LightStage/
Lightstage
Commentary by Warren Applebaum
Lightstage and Cinema 2.0 are the combined efforts of Jules Urbach and AMD. Lightstage is a full body data capture environment, where 6,500 white LED lights and many HD camera’s take data from objects, for example humans, and provide CGI and Entertainment developers exact duplicates of the object for use in film, video games, and even communications. The Lightstage captures data from the flashing of the lights at speeds too fast for the human eye to see; from each light’s individual reflection from the object, a data structure is formed. The data being collected from the Lightstage is currently being rendered into CGI graphics for future films and human models.
The exciting goal for Lightstage is its potential when coupled with a strong enough rendering device to produce tactile representations of whatever was captured on its stage. The biggest claim, being that it could provide the dataset to power a future Holodeck (From Star Trek, a room that is completely composed of light rendered tactile objects). This is an incredible leap for the field of data visualizations, just think about sequence diagrams which were composed of real actors, just a thought.
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Tags: article, Commentary, motion capture |
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| Posted: 6/16/09 11:13 am UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Commentary: “HacketyHack Programming for Kids” - June 17th, 2009
HacketyHack
Commentary by Warren Applebaum
Hackety Hack a programming environment for the language ruby, meant for
children. Its creator is the radical and outrageous professor [ok warren
-ed.] who goes by the internet handle ”why the lucky stiff”. His goal is
to enrich the lives of children and adults with programming and
imagination; or perhaps to just draw cats. His other work; “why’s poignant
guide to ruby” is one of the most unorthodox approaches to programming
language study that I’ve ever encountered. He uses comic strips to denote
the reader’s comprehension of each topic. His use of illustrations in
comic book fashion allows him to explicitly depict the designs he is
describing in ruby; as well as another of his creations, “shoes”, a GUI
framework for ruby.
Children armed with Hackety Hack; coupled with some of the already
available ubiquitous technologies, such as the iPhone presents a very
optimistic outlook for the future of computing. Our children will already
be programming the applications we learned how to implement in college, as
tweens or even elementary school students. What kind of science fair
projects are children going to be entering in the next decade? The impact
of having these resources available for children at such a young age
presents many concerns about developmental growth. The sacrifice of their
other activities in order to program could possibly hinder their
intellectual or emotional growth.
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