“The complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.” – Adam Greenfield (2009)

Immaterials: light painting WiFi film by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen.

This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-metre tall measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

This builds on a technique that was invented for the 2009 film ‘Immaterials: the Ghost in the Field’ which probed the edges of the invisible fields that surround RFID readers and tags in the world. It also began a series of investigations into what Matt Jones richly summarised as ‘Immaterials’.

While we were mapping out tiny RFID fields, we wondered what it would be like to apply the light painting process to larger-scale fields of Bluetooth, WiFi, GSM and 3G. What if we built huge light painting apparatus that could map out architectural and city-scale networks in the places and spaces they inhabited? We’re still very interested in understanding radio and wireless networks as one of the substrates essential to contemporary design practice.

We built the WiFi measuring rod, a 4-metre tall probe containing 80 lights that respond to the Received Signal Strength (RSSI) of a particular WiFi network. When we walk through architectural, urban spaces with this probe, while taking long-exposure photographs, we visualise the cross-sections, or strata, of WiFi signal strength, situated within photographic urban scenes. The cross-sections are an abstraction of WiFi signal strength, a line graph of RSSI across physical space. Although it can be used to determine actual signal strength at a given point, it is much more interesting as a way of seeing the overall pattern, the relative peaks and the troughs situated in the surrounding physical space.

After a week of walking through urban spaces holding and photographing this instrument, we have a much better sense of the qualities of WiFi in urban spaces, its random crackles, bright and dim spots, its reaction to the massing of buildings, and its broad reach through open areas. The resulting images show some of these qualities, and light painting is a brilliant medium for situating visualisations and data into physical world locations and situations.

Lots more visualisations and ‘making of’ pictures.

Einar writes more about this in an upcoming article called ‘Making material of the Networked City’ in Design Innovation for the Built Environment – Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice. There is also more detail on the project at the YOUrban weblog.

Related things:

1. Immaterials: the ghost in the field This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID,......
2. New film: Wireless in the World 2 In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations......
3. Making radio tangible Next week we’re launching some new work that explores the......

The ‘Radiogenic’

Dunne & Raby introduce the idea of ‘Hertzian space’ in Design Noir and Hertzian Tales where they describe a landscape of electronic products creating a “new, invisible but physical environment”.

In Tunable cities they map the radio signals from domestic equipment such as babycoms and begin to examine the “role of electronic products in the aesthetic inhabitation of a rapidly dematerialising, ubiquitous and intelligent environment.” Here there are visualisations of radio fields as bright red spaces overlaid on the streets of Chiswick, London.

Although their work specifically avoided issues around making the invisible visible or visualising radio, it explored the “links between the material and the immaterial that lead to new aesthetic possibilities for life in an electromagnetic environment”.

“It might seem strange to write about radio, a long-established medium, when discussion today centres on cyberspace, virtual reality, networks, smart materials and other electronic tehcnologies. But radio, meaning part of the electromagnetic spectrum is fundamental to electronics. Objects not only “dematerialise” into software in response to minituarisation and replacement by services but literally dematerialise into radiation. All electronic products are hybrids of radiation and matter. [...] Whereas cyberspace is a metaphor that spatialises what happens in computers distributed around the world, radio space is actual and physical, even though our senses detect only a tiny part of it.”

As Matt Jones points out, they go on to coin the term “radiogenic” to describe objects that:

“function as unwitting interfaces between the abstract space of electromagnetism and the material cultures of everyday life, revealing unexpected points of contact between them.”

The Faraday chair offers a slightly more nuanced ‘visualisation’ of the boundaries of electromagnetic waves through a physical object. These works operate by visualising and making tangible the boundaries between electromagnetic phenomena, and as such, serve to highlight and create discourse around the issue of radio in emerging products and systems

Celebrating the magic of remote action

The language used to describe RFID interaction includes closeness, touch, proximity and pointing but there are few explorations of the way that RFID systems shape the gestural and tangible aspects of this interaction. Within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) there is some discussion of the spatial aspects of sensor technologies. For instance Ailisto et al (2003) discuss the ways that RFID creates contactless interactions on mobile phones: “Physical selection may be based on proximity or pointing. In the case of proximity, the selection is activated by bringing the activating device, e.g. a smart phone, close to the target device.”.

In the Touch project we have experimented with the spatial aspects of RFID interaction, developing a tacit design knowledge of the technology over time. At an early RFID hacking workshop with BERG/Schulze & Webb we experimented with playful interactions that involved “the magic of remote action” where invisible interactions triggered events in the world.

This is something we went on to explore in much more detail in the film Nearness, where the relationship between proximity and physical interaction is explored in detail.

In projects like the Graphic language for touch we have begun to find ways of representing invisible radio as a tangible design material in a functional setting.

And in her project the Bubbles of Radio (that emerged from our Fields and Seams brief) Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas imagined and visualised many fictional representations of radio fields including Bluetooth and RFID. These drawings provide a playful starting point for the discussion of our relationship to radio fields and the possibilities they open up for interaction.

Exploring and experiencing waves

The political, social and phenomenological aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum are a recurring theme within contemporary media art practice. For instance the exhibition Waves at RIXC tuned in to artistic engagements with the electro-magnetic spectrum and suggested that “artists should take control of the very principles and materiality of the ‘network waves’.”

A common practice is to translate radio space into an audible, sonic experience. In projects like ætherspace, Aeriology, Electroprobes and in many RFID projects some kind of probe that senses radio and offers audible output is held or attached to the body. The experience is then about being mobile, moving through and probing the world to discover how the lanscape and patterns of radio changes through space.

Then there are a number of visual, interactive visualisation projects such as the Wifi camera, the sightseeing telescope that reveals open wifi networks in urban space and the Free Network Visible Network project. In most cases the visual representations of the radio waves are merged and overlaid into optical or video backgrounds of the physical world, in a kind of ‘augmented reality’ genre.

In Edge Town by Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen visual approaches are used to explore the ways in which we can “design interfaces with the flows of electronic data that run through our cities so that they can be experienced as an enriching complement to other, more ‘earthly’ phenomena.” Their garden-like visualisations represent the desire to turn these invisible flows into something more tangible. In another architectural approach, Pedro Sepulveda-Sandoval proposes the demarcation of public areas that are free of mobile phone signals, using the visual language of yellow/black warning tape.

Artists Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt visualised many kinds of fields in Magnetic Movie, where the fields are seen animated as crackling, pulsing and swirling waves that uncomfortably inhabit physical spaces. This animation reinforced by a strong soundtrack that crackles in time with the motion is one of the most engaging and compelling visualisations of radio fields that we have seen.

Spatial and seamful sensors

For engineers and scientists, accurately modelling and visualising invisible radio fields, and engaging in antenna measurement is a difficult task, if not almost a ‘black art’. Using specialist robotic equipment and slowly measuring the intensity of radio signals at various points in space, it is possible to build up a three dimensional map of a radio field. There are also specialist 3D simulation tools that create models of radio fields and their interactions with physical material. These tools are mainly used to optimise the design of radio antennae, probe and problem-solve radio interference problems in electronic equipment and to assess safety issues with human exposure to radio systems.

In a paper called The spatial character of sensor technology Reeves et al (2006) describe the importance of understanding seams and spatiality in sensor-based systems. Although they concentrate on ‘torch-based’ interactions, their concerns are relevant for other sensor technologies:

“We are primarily concerned with the way in which seams between devices create a particular spatial character for the location in which they are deployed. This spatial character of seams derives from the use of spatially-embedded sensor technologies (e.g., GPS, Wifi, etc.) which are particularly prevalent in ubiquitous computing. Sensor technology plays a fundamental part in the creation of seams, and thus the character of the space in which such technology is deployed. The main issue, then, is how interactive and ubiquitous system design may appropriately address this essential spatiality.”

There is also a discussion of the ‘seamful’ character of many ubiquitous technologies.

Chalmers and Galani (2001) describes the ways in which “wireless networks have distinct physical characteristics such as a tendency to be absorbed by metal, water and other conductive materials, and a pattern of coverage that makes for a limited area of usable network connectivity.” They suggest that there may be a method or conceptual process of ‘seamful design’ that builds upon the way that “people accommodate and take advantage of seams and heterogeneity, in and through the process of interaction.”

“We critique the ‘disappearance’ mentioned by Weiser as a goal for ubicomp, and Dourish’s ‘embodied interaction’ approach to HCI, suggesting that these design ideals may be unachievable or incomplete because they underemphasise the interdependence of ‘invisible’ non-rationalising interaction and focused rationalising interaction within ongoing activity.”

There is something in this ‘seamful design’ process that may help us to understand of the way that we deal with the invisible aspects of radio-based interaction, and the ways that mental models are built out of these systems.

Related things:

1. Fictional radio-spaces In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in......
2. Immaterials: the ghost in the field This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID,......
3. Immaterials: light painting WiFi “The complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce......

Hat tip towards The way things go, that Honda commercial and Pythagora Switch.

Some photos.

Related things:

1. ‘Nearness’ goes further Since the launch three weeks ago, our film Nearness has......
2. Making radio tangible Next week we’re launching some new work that explores the......
3. Designing with film We’ve compiled a short sequence of some of the design......

(I’m a big fan of dotted or dashed lines, it’s a great visual trick for representing hidden things. Glad to see that Mike is taking up this language, we should develop it further!)

Here’s the description of the talk in full, the slides are available from slideshare and at Mike’s weblog:

Things have long had identifying marks, from silversmiths’ hallmarks to barcodes, but mating machine-readable identification with pervasive networking greatly increases the value of the marks.

For example, when a machine-readable identification method such as an RFID or a high-density visual code is combined with the wireless networking of a mobile phone, a new way of interacting with everyday objects is created. Once you have the capability uniquely identify anything immediately, you can attach meta information to it. Any meta-information. How much is this worth on eBay? Which of my friends has one? Will this go with my Mom’s china? Will it make me sick if I eat it? Was it made by children?

I call this digital representation as accessed through a unique ID, an object’s “information shadow” and I now see them attached to just about everything. Beyond getting meta information, however, lies an even more powerful concept: changing the physical object to a service, for which the thing you’re looking at is but a single instantiation of that agreement. It’s already happened to media, and to car-shared cars and shared bicycles in urban areas.

When this happens, the objects have to change at a fundamental level. They have to be designed differently and they have to be described and discussed differently. The “owner’s” relationship to the object changes. The very idea of ownership changes. The solid object grows a dotted line that is filled-in as-needed, when-needed, and with the features that are needed. This is not the same thing as renting or co-ownership, its anytime/anywhere nature-enabled by the underlying technology makes these new service objects fundamentally new.

Many recent products point in this direction, where objects such as the Amazon Kindle are useless without the service contract, where a Nabaztag/tag is an empty shell waiting for connection to a network full of personal information and social connections, and where NFC phones and RFID peripherals are just the touchpoints between the online and the offline.

Related things:

1. Everyware icons (visualising ubicomp situations) In December 2005 Adam Greenfield asked me to work with......

The console includes versions of Tag, multiple Quiz games, Hide and Seek and Charades. The base-station connects to the internet for uploading scores and downloading content.

The movie on their home page demonstrates some of the simple game mechanics.

It seems that many of the games are about measurement, tracking and timing of otherwise person-to-person negotiated activities. In this way the product becomes more about tagging people and measuring their activity, particuarly when combined with the wristband attached to the body rather than tagged objects.

This might sound insignificant, but the difference between tagged objects and tagged people is quite pertinent, particularly as this is intended as a playful, learning environment for children. The kinds of learnings that are achieved through a digital system that tracks you rather than the objects you manipulate could be very different.

Related things:

1. iPhone RFID: object-based media This is a video prototype of an iPhone media player......
2. RFID peripherals Plug and play RFID-reading USB peripherals are all the rage,......
3. Playful augmented products workshop Interaction Design students at the Oslo School of Architecture &......

Edit The book is now available as both a free booklet and downloadable PDF.

Related things:

1. RFID & the internet of things Julian Bleecker, Arie Altena and I will be participating at......
2. Interfacing the ‘internet of things’ This is a design brief, one of many themes that......
3. Rob van Kranenburg at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Rob van Kranenburg talked at How......

RFID readers are small and cheap, encapsulating them in packaging and offering a standard USB interface makes for a versatile product. What we need to see now is some applications and platforms that make these products useful and desirable.

Mir:ror

Designed as a commercially available product, similar to the Nabaztag rabbit, the Mir:ror is intended to allow physical objects to work with online services. “Violet was inspired by a simple fact: the rift between the virtual world – everything happening on the other side of your computer screen – and the physical world we live in is growing, and growing fast.”

Mir:ror

Tikitag

Tikitag is offering a small, cheap USB reader that plugs into any computer with compatible drivers “Tikitag is an Alcatel-Lucent Venture based in Antwerp, Belgium which provides a service to link the real world with the online world.”

Tikitag

Bowl

The Bowl was created as part of the Touch project and designed to be an object that wouldn’t look out of place in the living room. “The Bowl is a simple media player that can be used by people of all ages, particularly young children. A bowl sits on the living room table and range of physical objects can be placed within it. When an object is placed in the bowl related media is played back on the TV.”

Bowl

ThingM

ThingM has been developing RFID-driven interfaces in their WineM concept for a while, and they have developed a smaller, USB version finished in wood.

ThingM / WineM

Airtag

Aimed more towards the high-end, for custom installations in retail environments, “the Airtag reader is a contactless reader for point of sale (POS). Easy to install it can be plugged to any cashier system, or standalone for smart poster.”

Airtag

RFID mon amour

For the sake of completeness, this was perhaps the first commercially available plug-and-play RFID prototyping platform. “Rfid mon amour 1.0 is a kit for designers, artists and architects, which allows the realization of interactive exhibitions in a very simple manner, without any specific knowledge of programming or electronics. The kit comes with an USB based RFID player, Mac OS X compatible software, 10 RFID tags and some sample videos.”

RFID mon amour

Related things:

1. RFID and physical social networks Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based......
2. iPhone RFID and NFC peripherals We are beginning to see RFID and NFC peripherals beginning......
3. More RFID-based products A Dutch company, Swinxs is developing a physical RFID-based console......

“With the new eTicketing System Touch&Travel from Deutsche Bahn (DB), the mobile phone serves as an electronic ticket on trains, buses, streetcars, subways, etc. The SIM cards inside the phones are provided by Giesecke & Devrient. The Touch&Travel project is initiated by Deutsche Bahn, the German railway, and the mobile operator Vodafone.”

This trial shows one of the ways that NFC changes the infrastructure required for a ticketing or payment service. In this case it is a lightweight, parasitic infrastructure that can fairly cheaply be added to other ticketing methods. The service relies on three elements:

• Passive NFC tags at stations that contain a unique identifier or geographic information for that location. In this case they are embedded inside what must be a cheap container of aluminium, a printed surface and glass. This doesn’t require power or a network connection, and serves the same function as a large, powered, and networked ticket machine.
• The mobile phone is the window into the service; it interprets the location/identification data, connects to the ‘cloud’ and provides an interface. This interface could show location, ticket prices, ticket options, time of journey, routes, transaction history, etc. Here there is the opportunity to create a service that offers more utility, value and experience than traditional ticketing.

• The mobile data network connects the user to the service, in many cases this data connection already exists, and doesn’t require infrastructural development. Of course here there are issues with underground metro systems that don’t offer mobile coverage.

  

  More details on the service/interaction design:

• By waving your NFC mobile handset over the so called Touchpoint before entering the train, located at the platforms, the system registers the beginning of a trip.
• The ticket is stored on the SIM card inside the mobile phone
• The conductor checks the ticket by scanning the phone with a portable reader.
• Having arrived at the destination, the handset is waved over the Touchpoint again. The system registers the end of your trip. The system processes the data and calculates the correct cost for the distance traveled.

• The passenger is billed once a month

  Of course the service requires that NFC handsets are easily available, or that the service is sold through SIM add-ons for existing mobiles (perhaps as an alternative to a contactless card like Oyster/Suica).

  I wonder how a service that relies so heavily on an ad-hoc infrastructure will be accountable to failure and who holds responsibility and the problem-solving ability for errors and misunderstandings?

  Thinking also about the parasitic; might multiple services compete with each other for approachable station space? In a de-regulated environment (I’m thinking of the UK here) who you touch might define what service you get…

  Related things:

  1. Touchable services: Art Server In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
  2. Touchable services: Underskog In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
  3. Touchable services: local interactions In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2008/05/touch-and-travel/feed 3 http://www.nearfield.org/2008/02/teaching-touch-ii http://www.nearfield.org/2008/02/teaching-touch-ii#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:28:33 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2008/02/teaching-touch-ii

  For the second year we are teaching an MA interaction design course called Tangible Interactions that is driven by the Touch project at AHO. Last year the course was largely successful both for students and for our research interests. It resulted in such projects as Sniff and The Bubbles of Radio.

  

  This year we are building on our experience and creating both a better formal framework and a more focused environment for industrial, product and interaction design with RFID. The course plan can be downloaded here.

  For the framework we have created a course compendium that introduces themes from ubiquitous, mobile and tangible computing as well as products and methods. Practically we have taken the RFID platforms from last year and are using them to get the students into interactive prototyping at a much earlier stage. We are also lucky enough to have Einar Sneve Martinussen working on Touch, and he is supporting much of the practical and theoretical side of the course alongside Mosse Sjaastad.

  

  For the first four weeks the students received four short design briefs that explored both the context of mobile, ubiquitous and tangible computing and the detail of with interactions with RFID. This has created great momentum and resulted in various vocabularies, material explorations, evidence and paper prototypes amongst other things.

  The students now start a major project based on the Touch design briefs, where they work through a number of iterations in research, ideation, concepting, sketching, prototyping and evaluating.

  The students have weblogs again this year: Alice, Christer, Fan Fan, Gudmund, Gunnar, Ingrid, Knut, Kyrre, Marianne, Martin, Natacha and Silje.

  More photos in the AHO interaction design pool at Flickr.

  

  

  

  

  Related things:

  1. Teaching Touch This spring we have an MA interaction design course dedicated......
  2. Tangible Interactions – summer exhibition This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions......
  3. Touch project interview In December 2005 I was interviewed for Printed and Disposable......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2008/02/teaching-touch-ii/feed 4 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/12/fictional-radio-spaces http://www.nearfield.org/2007/12/fictional-radio-spaces#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:41:39 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/12/fictional-radio-spaces In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in a research-driven course called Tangible interactions that investigated themes around RFID, NFC and the Touch project. This is one of the projects that emerged from the course.

  

  In this project called “the bubbles of radio” Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas used critical, visual design as a way of exploring the perception of many kinds of electromagnetic fields. The project answered the brief Fields and Seams that asks “How can we use the increasingly radio-saturated landscape for creative or functional purposes?”

  Inspired by Hertzian Tales by Dunne and Raby as well as other projects including Cell Phone Disco, Ingeborg explored many critical design products or services that would engage with the landscape of radio. Some of these early concepts can be seen on her weblog.

  Using inspiration from richly illustrated books on botany, zoology and natural history, Ingeborg arrived at the concept of an encyclopeadia of radio waves that contains a selection of fictional radio ‘species’. Armed with a well researched and advanced knowledge of the use, application and technicalities of each radio technology she created fictional visualisations of the ways in which radio waves inhabit space. These are creative expressions based as much on personal creativity as on technical or scientific data like range and signal strength. Six contemporary radio technologies were visualised: Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID, Wifi and Zigbee.

  Like all good scientific guides, the bubbles of radio includes a visual scale:

  

  The scale of radio is usefully measured at the scale of the device, at the scale of the body and at the scale of the building (see also Everyware on scale). The visualisations are thus placed in this context and we are left with the drawings themselves, where the shape, texture, direction and density gives us a sense of each technology. Click on the following for full size images:

  

  These visualisations are not intended to be technically accurate or to offer actionable information. Instead they provide a playful cue to reflect and consider radio as something tangible and physical to be experienced by other senses, not just through a screen.

  Just for fun, here are the latin names of each field:

  Bluetooth : Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae
  DMB : Spherum Elektrum Multanum
  GSM : Spherum Magnea Globalum
  RFID : Raptus Arphadus
  Wifi : Videus Fidelus
  Zigbee : Nevrotis

  Ingeborg then hand-crafted a pocket field-guide from these illustrations, in a physical form that even smells like an age-old dusty guide to flora and fauna.

  

  This book also included pattern samples; a mixture of wallpaper, fabric and textile patterns that could act as ways of identifying wirelessly augmented spaces or objects. Here is a pattern for RFID:

  

  And here is a pattern for Bluetooth:

  

  This project explored radio in a unique way. Ingeborg has created visual expressions of radio that are immediately accessible and beautiful. Although their usefulness is harder to define they have provided us with many opportunities to discuss and reflect on these intangible technologies.

  Download a poster (PDF) of all the radio visualisations here.

  

  See more student work from the Touch project.

  Related things:

  1. Making radio tangible Next week we’re launching some new work that explores the......
  2. Wireless in the world An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies......
  3. Immaterials: the ghost in the field This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID,......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/12/fictional-radio-spaces/feed 34 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/11/making-things-talk http://www.nearfield.org/2007/11/making-things-talk#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:37:21 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/11/making-things-talk

  Tom Igoe’s new book Making things talk arrived today, full of lovely projects and code examples. Tom’s previous book Physical computing has been the definitive reference for all hardware hacking that goes on at AHO and in the Touch project. Making things talk is structured into specific projects, and covers technology as part of practical examples.

  The section on RFID uses the ever-useful ID12 RFID readers with project examples created using Processing.

  

  The processing code was developed with Sara Johansson as part of the Sniff project in our tangible interactions course earlier this year, and it is great to see Sniff in a double page spread:

  

  From our initial reading the book looks like an excellent introduction to creating physical networked things, using a very wide diversity of technologies. The project examples are well designed and extremely useful in order to move beyond conceptually simple networked things. As a place to start prototyping with RFID this is a great complement to some of the other RFID books out there.

  

  Related things:

  1. Internet of Things booklet Rob van Kranenburg is creating what looks like an interesting......
  2. 50 things, places and people for 2008 On the last day of 2007 Dagbladet rounded up the......
  3. Future (NFC) phone is talk of festival! The Green Touch installation at DOTT07 in Newcastle that we......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/11/making-things-talk/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/03/bluetooth-21-incorporating-nfc http://www.nearfield.org/2007/03/bluetooth-21-incorporating-nfc#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:56:54 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/03/bluetooth-21-incorporating-nfc The Bluetooth people are now getting on the NFC bandwaggon, the following video shows Mike Foley of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group demonstrating features that are NFC-based:

  Bluetooth has historically lacked a compelling ‘user-experience’, with passcodes and security getting in the way of adept interactions. It’s interesting here to see how NFC is being introduced as the ‘user-experience’ component of Bluetooth, and how compelling it seems for these relatively mundane interactions.

  Related things:

  1. Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated......
  2. Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that......
  3. The first NFC appliance Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/03/bluetooth-21-incorporating-nfc/feed 4 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/03/physical-hyperlinks-presentation-at-xtech http://www.nearfield.org/2007/03/physical-hyperlinks-presentation-at-xtech#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:14:15 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/03/physical-hyperlinks-presentation-at-xtech Our presentation on Physical Hyperlinks has been accepted to XTech 2007. The presentation will be an overview of some of the concepts around physical hyperlinking, and perhaps some ideas about why it may not be a good interaction model for all situations. Here is the description:

  From Cooltown to CueCat, the physical hyperlink has been a recurring theme in ubiquitous computing. As the name suggests, this is about the interactions involved in getting information from the physical world into a mobile device. There are a number of recent projects including Yellow Arrow , Semapedia , Thinglink and Microsoft Aura that offer some form of linking or tagging of physical things with web-like content.

  Why is there such interest in these applications? Mobile devices are getting more complex and capable, but significantly they are aslo getting smaller. Everyday web-applications are generally difficult to use using small screens and limited text input, so we need ways of easily grabbing information, downloading applications and participating in these services. If we are to get out of the ‘walled gardens’ of operators menus, and towards a more open mobile internet, there must be simple ‘service discovery’ that will allow us to easily discover and use new things.

  Outside of Japan – where QR Codes are widely used and RFID-enabled phones are mass market – most trials have failed. Does this technology hold the key to integrating web applications with mobile phones and the physical world, or is it a fundamentally flawed interaction?

  We give an overview of the history of these interaction types and the different technologies involved. We have experimented with a number of prototypes in this area that we can demonstrate using RFID and Near Field Communication (NFC) to connect web-applications and services to mobile phones. By moving beyond the ‘hyperlink’ metaphor we are able to see new sets of applications that allow new ways of using mobile devices.

  Related things:

  1. RFID and physical social networks Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based......
  2. Hybrids: The social web in the physical world The Touch project has a new exhibition in collaboration with......
  3. RFID and unique physical form Lisa Smith is a Masters of Design student at the......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/03/physical-hyperlinks-presentation-at-xtech/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/everyware-icons-visualising-ubicomp-situations http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/everyware-icons-visualising-ubicomp-situations#comments Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:07:24 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/everyware-icons-visualising-ubicomp-situations In December 2005 Adam Greenfield asked me to work with him on icon concepts for his book Everyware. Here is Adam’s description of his book:

  “The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?”

  The icons were for the section headers of the book, covering the ideas that Adam felt were important around making aspects of ubiquitous computing visible. These were the suggested themes:

  • Augmented-reality information is available in this location
  • This object has invisible qualities (could be almost identical with the last of these four)
  • Warning: sensor field
  • Information processing dissolving in behavior (i see this as bits flowing through a handshake)
  • Media surface
  • Network dead zone

    I made a quick sketch that has some icons that are consistent with my earlier work on a graphic language for touch-based interactions. I’ve used the dashed line again to show borders and invisible geometry. Not all of these are successful, but I think they show some interesting directions for the future.

    

    Click for a larger size image. Download as pdf.

    I think in particular the Network dead zone, Warning: sensor field and this object has invisible qualities are particularly successful. The book used a set of icons inspired by these, you can see a selection on Flickr.

    Related things:

    1. From ubicomp to service design Mike Kuniavsky presented at ETech 2009 on the Dotted-Line World......
    2. The EU on the visibility of RFID The EU is conducting a new online consultancy on privacy,......
    ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/everyware-icons-visualising-ubicomp-situations/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/ambient-findability-in-practice http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/ambient-findability-in-practice#comments Thu, 07 Sep 2006 12:43:43 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/ambient-findability-in-practice Every time we run physical computing at AHO, some students want to make a system for finding lost things. So it makes me very happy that there is now a commercial product that does exactly that, so that we can move beyond technicalities to issues such as ambient findability in practice.

    

    The product is called Loc8tor, designed in the UK, built in China, it uses active RFID tags (frequency and standards unknown) and a directional RFID reader in a system that detects things up to 180 metres away.

    “Loc8tor is an innovative product using award winning patent pending technology that helps find important possessions and can even stop them from getting lost in the first place. By blending the best of old and new technology Loc8tor provides the first affordable personal homing device of its kind. For young and old, pet lovers to parents and gadget lovers to grandparents, Loc8tor is designed to be exceptionally easy to use and helps avoid that feeling of frustration when you mislay your valuables. From finding keys, handbags or mobile phones to ensuring the safety of your children, pets and personal possessions, Loc8tor’s versatility means it can be used in almost any situation by simply attaching the tag to any item you want to protect.”

    In practice one attaches the tags to important objects by way of key fobs, adhesive backing or containment, and then name the tags one by one through the interface on the handheld finder. When you lose something, you press a button, select the thing you want to find and the unit starts bleeping: the intensity of the sound, and the bars on the screen are proportional to your proximity to the lost item. Because it’s directional, you can turn around slowly in a circle, and find an initial direction, then repeat this a few times and you normally find the thing you are looking for. This part of the product experience works very well. This is a remarkable technical achievement, given the small size of the handheld, the longevity of the tags, and the intricacies of RF communication.

    

    Where this product fails miserably is in the interface. The arrangement of buttons and screen menus shows a lack of thought or design process: they are inconsistent, badly labelled, overly hierarchical, highly modal and very prone to simple errors.

    The designers thought it would be good to have two main modes: a ‘locate’ mode for finding things, and an ‘alert’ mode for warning when things go out of a specific range. The usability of this second mode is questionable, this kind of asset tracking I think calls for another kind of device. Trying to squeeze so much into the handheld interface makes the main menu long, adds extra buttons to the interface, and makes the product more obscure.

    When in ‘locate’ mode, a ‘signal strength’ indicators appears on screen in a formation that makes it look like directional feedback. But actually it’s just a fancy bar chart with a single axis. Quite confusing.

    

    Given that the act of losing something – or remembering to take things with you – usually happens in moments of stress: walking out the door, gathering things from around you, getting off the train, this interface is overly complicated for its intended use.

    Earlier this year one of my students Giulia Schneider worked on a concept that integrated tags and readers much more seamlessly into everyday objects and activities. She used inspiration from Nokia’s Mobile Essentials, studies of brand identity, and her own ethnographic studies to find important things and ways of augmenting them with findability. More on this soon.

    Related things:

    1. RFID peripherals Plug and play RFID-reading USB peripherals are all the rage,......
    2. Images of touch interfaces I’m happy to say that with great contributions from Nicolas......
    ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/ambient-findability-in-practice/feed 1