The 2008 presidential election marks a new frontier in electoral politics, as both the John McCain and Barack Obama campaigns have created profiles on popular social networking Web sites. If the race for the White House were being staged on Facebook or MySpace, John McCain would lose by a landslide. Barack Obama has over 1.9 million supporters on Facebook, compared to McCain’s 500,000. On MySpace, the other major social networking site, the race is nearly identical. Obama has approximately 600,000 friends, compared to McCain’s 117,000. Even on the video-sharing site YouTube, Obama’s videos have been viewed over 14 million times, compared to a paltry 800,000 views for McCain’s content.

What is wrong with John McCain? Why don’t more people like him online? Both candidates have made strong efforts to engage voters over the Internet. Both candidates have extensive, media-rich Web sites complete with blogs, videos, and stores selling t-shirts, buttons, yard signs, books and DVDs. The answer, then, is that Obama’s campaign is consistently more effective, and more adroit at using new communication vehicles.

Online, Obama is just more fun to be around. McCain’s Web presence has a stodgy, corporate, box-laden design with horsey graphics where every page loudly exhorts you to “RECRUIT 5 FRIENDS.” McCain’s site also sports a clumsy derivative of the 1978 video game Space Invaders, renamed “Pork Invaders,” where players shoot vetoes at invading pigs. When players successfully clear a level, they are rewarded with a screen of text discussing McCain’s senatorial record on earmarks. By contrast, Obama’s Web site is clean, elegant, glowing with hope, transparency, and the tasteful use of PhotoShop filters. Obama offers content technophiles might actually want: cell phone ring tones, background images for your PC desktop and buddy icons for your Web chat program.

Both campaigns have created sites that allow you to sign up for a personal Web page on the candidates’ sites. You can choose to dwell in McCainSpace, or have a part of my.barackobama.com. In mid-July, as the conventions were rapidly approaching, I signed up for membership on both of the candidate’s Web sites. I was able to complete the process in less than 15 minutes on Obama’s site, and had my very own part of Obama’s Web world. By contrast, it took four days for McCain to approve my entry into McCainSpace. While Obama only asked me to add a post to get my personal page started, McCain wanted me to commit to a fundraising goal of $200 and a recruitment goal of five friends. Both experiences have good and bad points, but it was rather off-putting that McCain treated me (and my five friends) as merely a source of funding.

I also attempted to befriend both Obama and McCain on MySpace. Obama reciprocated within 10 hours. It took McCain three days to return my offer of friendship.

Part of the credit for Obama’s online success goes to Chris Hughes, the 24-year-old cofounder of Facebook, who left the company to join the Obama campaign in early 2007. But the real credit for Obama’s online success goes to his ability to appeal to the online culture of visualati that produces the media that is propagated on the many content-sharing Web sites.

For example, YouTube has been crowded with citizen-created videos supporting the Obama camp. Various iterations of will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video have been viewed more than 10 million times. The MadTV parody of Rihanna’s steamy Umbrella music video, the slightly less risqué “I’ve got a Crush on Obama,” and the bizarre Barack OBollywood video – a video remix of Udit Narayan’s song Chori Chori Hum Gori – together have been watched over 18 million times, raising Obama’s visibility.

While the candidates continue to spend time and campaign dollars to engage voters through Web-based media, I am left wondering what will happen to the candidates’ Facebook and MySpace profiles after the election season is over. Will the profiles become new venues for political outreach? Or, will these sites, in the tradition of most campaign promises, be quietly left behind?

People-centered narratives serve as a starting place for the design of graphic, interactive, product and environmental experiences. Research, modeling, team ideation and experiential prototyping are employed throughout the three days to produce tangible final presentations that can be brought
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This is my talk from yesterday in Helsinki at Pixelache University. There are pix here

Could the biosphere be saved by six glass lamps, six speakers, 36 ultra bright leds, six diy mono amplifiers, a diy arduino-based six channel led dimmer, a six channel soundcard, a midi controller, a midi interface,one computer, and a max-msp application ?

It all depends on how radical and open-minded we are prepared to be in the search for alternatives to physical travel.

Traveling without moving has become an economic and environmental imperative. Matter is more expensive than energy; energy is more expensive than information; it is cheaper to move information, than people or things. So what is to stop us moving less, and and tele-communicating more?

Telecommunications companies have invested heavily for years in telepresence systems with the aim of reproducing as closely as possible the sensation of ‘being there’. Hewlett Packard describe their system, Halo as “the ultimate collaborative environment… a telepresence solution that brings meeting attendees from around the globe into an environment that feels as if they are in the same room”.

The entertainment industry has also been busy – motivated by the fact that people will pay theme park operators a dollar a minute to experience sophisticated simulations. The small-screen computer games industry is already bigger than Hollywood; social website proprietors are also keen to add functionality; so big money is at stake.

Presence researchers are testing myriad ways for us to interact with virtual worlds in this ‘fakespace’ race: Computerized clothing that recognizes physical gestures; accelerometers that track movements of the body; sensors that track eye movements (first developed by shop designers); joysticks that allow interaction with 3-D magic wands; feedback systems that measure force, pressure, or vibration; remote operation systems that translate human movements into the control of machinery.

With so-called haptic interface devices, you feel the motion, shape, resistance, and surface texture of simulated objects.Telerobotic manipulators, that incorporate actuation, sensor, and control technologies, permit us to achieve dexterous manipulation of virtual objects.

Sound is also being designed for “acoustigraphic” environments in which 3-D sound is combined with stereoscopic vision to help you hear the sounds of traffic in the distance and wind rustling the leaves of nearby trees. A Displaced Temperature Sensing System enables you to feel the temperature of a remote location – real or unreal – as if you were there.

Down the line, technology developers that tiny micro-lasers will scan pictures directly onto the retina of the eye – an effect already experienced by military pilots. A company called Cyberware has developed 3d whole-body scanners which create representations of people – avatars – that can act for corporeal people in “inhabited information spaces”. The business plan is that you’ll be scanned in AvatarBooths – as happens now with passport photographs in railway stations. Having digitised your body, you’ll send it out into cyberspace where it will meet and hang out with other avatars. (The project was was nicknamed Immortality R Us by fellow researchers).

Other developers dream of scaling up such effects to create virtual electronic crowds. A project in Europe called eRENA focussed on information spaces inhabited jointly by audience members, performers, and artists: they would explore, interact, communicate with one another and participate in staged events.

Remote sensing may also be used to create immersive representations of otherwise inaccessible places. Real-time sonar and acoustic tomography data could become a display of undersea terrain and objects. An acoustigraphics library would stream the noises made by fish into the mix.

BEING THERE – - – NOT

Evelina Domnitch (who is here at Pixelache) and Dmitry Gelfand directly convert sound into lightwaves by employing a phenomenon called sonoluminescence. They create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices.

The problem with these intriguing ideas is that it would never occur to telcos to develp them. Despite five decades of effort, the promise of virtual presence ushered in by the of the videophone, which was launched with much kerfuffle by IBM at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, has not been met. Huge investments in virtual environments, mobile communication and biosensors have delivered modest results at best. Tele-presence communication has not matured as an experience, nor as a market.

Even its advocates remain unimpressed: The head of videoconferencing of a large British TelCo told me that he and his colleagues avoided used their own system if they possibly could.

A reality check for technology optimists: whilst high bandwidth videoconferencing has strugggled, simpler forms of remote communication have boomed – POTS they call it in the telecoms trade, or “Plain Old Telephone Service”. Two billion people now have handsets because they want POTS – not because they want virtualty. The lowest bandwidth communication, texting, enjoys the highest volume by far.

TelCos are needlessly obsessed with Being There-ness in a literal sense. As MediaLab rsearcher Skip Ishii points out, the human eye has something like 40 million receptors in it. Many millions more receptors are to be found in our ears, up out noses, in our skin and on our tongues. (There are dense clusters of receptors elsewhere on the body, too – but this is a family readership, so I will not dwell on those).

Even if you could capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitise them, and send them down a wire – you’d still never get near the sensation of Being There. Why? We’d just know, that’s why. Our minds and our bodies are one intelligence.

Subliminal perception, perception that occurs without conscious awareness, is not an anomaly, but the norm. As Tor Norretranders has explained, most of what we perceive in the world comes not from conscious observation but from a continuous process of unconscious scanning. During any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information that our senses pass on to our brains. The conscious part of us receives much less information than the unconscious part of us.

This is why technology simply cannot and will not recreate what it is like to be in a meeting with people somewhere else. People, who have bodies, cannot inhabit virtual space. Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor, puts it more poetically: “Tele-hugs won’t do it.”

The fact that we inhabit bodies, and not networks, frustrates games designers. They complain about the “uncanny valley” dilemma. Game designers once hoped that crisper 3-D graphics and faster response-times would deliver a more realistic experience. In the event, higher bandwidth and faster speeds does nothing to increase our sense of an environment being ‘real’.

The uncanny valley effect was explained by a robotics engineer, Masahiro Mori, to explain why almost-human-looking robots scare people more than mechanical-looking robots. The uncanny valley of Mori’s thesis is the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting.

Cognitive pyschologist Andy Clarke, author of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again adds that the biological brain is populated by a vast number of what he calls hidden ‘zombie processes.’ These underpin the skills and capacities in which successful behaviour depends.

“Being embodied is our nature as earth-born creatures” says the English philosopher, John Gray. But our infantile enchantment with digital communication blinds us to this fact. Our tendency to undervalue embodied knowledge is one of the root causes of the sustainability crisis.

OUT OF THE SILOS

Telepresence sucks. It’s an insult that telcos should expect us to meet in hideous sterile rooms in front of huge screens.

But sustainabiity demands that we compromise; the biosphere cannot support the perpetually growing movement of goods and bodies around the world. We have to make the best we can of mediated presence.

So we have to keep on trying. But there are more interesting tasks for design than the use of brute bandwidth to achieve ‘Being There’ verisimilitude. The communication quality of cyberspace can be enhanced by artful and indirect means.

A first task is to escape from our disciplinary silos. Engineers try to coax more bandwidth out of pipes. Psychologists study communication behaviours. Philosophers talk about embodiment. Artists make beautiful interfaces. But they barely know that each other exists – let alone pool their knowledge and resources.

Some designers have tried out a more poetic and multi-dimensional approach. Twelve years back, in The Poetics of Telepresence, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby looked at the potential of fusing physical and telematic space. They asked, why should videoconferencing always be face to face? why limit contact to speech, or sight? They proceeded to use radio to trigger heat devices remotely, and proposed other techniques to evoke, and not just replicate, the shared experience of the remote body.

Half a decade ago in Italy, design researchers in a project called Faraway also looked at long distance communication between loved ones who are physically distant, but emotionally close. The team explored what happens when gesture, expressions, heartbeat, breathing, alpha- and beta-rythm informnation are incorporated into long-distance communication. The idea was to increase the sense of presence of a loved person over distance – but indirectly.

Replicating heartbeats is not the only way to go. Seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin marveled at the capacity of the aura of an original art work to spur our imaginative engagement wth a situation. Or think how much the religions achieve with the use of icons as aids to devotion; if lumps of bronze help millons of people commune with a deity, surely we can enhance telepresence using other kinds of objects.

Think of photographs. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about kissing the picture of one’s beloved. “When we kiss a photograph, we do not expect to conjour up a spectacular manifestation of the person in the picture represents – but the action is nonetheless satisfying”.

Evolutionary psychologists believe that magical ways of thinking may be hardwired into us, and cite as evidence the human capacity to invest inanimate objects with meaning…souvenirs, heirlooms, chldhood toys, objets d’art, dolls, totems, talsmans, and charms.

It’s probably a matter of timing. Here we are at Pixelache, and the world needs artful telepresence more urgently than before. Can we please get on with it? Now!

Posted by John Thackara at March 16, 2008 05:22 AM

]]> http://www.asomatic.com/from-myspace-to-fakespace-how-close-are-we-to-travel-without-moving/feed/ 1 http://www.asomatic.com/usable-witchery/ http://www.asomatic.com/usable-witchery/#comments Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:46:46 +0000 michael Yaniv Steiner has been running a class at the Visual and Multimedia Design graduate programme from the University of Architecture in Venice a few weeks ago. Its approach was slightly different from classical physical computing classes, starting with the name of the class: Usable Witchery. Students learned magic tricks with coins and cards, and then built up some Animatronics elements trying to humanize machine and robots to look and feel more like humans.

I'm just going to give a summary of the course as i feel its spirit might be relevant to the interests of many readers. But i'll keep it short as i've decided a while ago not to cover anything i haven't had the opportunity to see nor experience myself. Rules are supposed to have exceptions, right?

Usable Witchery investigated how products could be less a result of technical thinking, and become more "humanized", natural and intuitive. As Yaniv told me recently: "I will trade many functional elements to magical and slightly more poetical element in any of my devices. I hope the student will apply it one day as they go and work for IDEO and Nintendo J."

Image by Yaniv Steiner

He explains with further details this association between magic and interaction design in a list of reasons why advanced technology can be compared to magic. According to him, interfaces are actually doing the same to some extent. His text illustrates the point by giving examples of interaction procedures, viewed from this frame of reference: calculators displaying, without revealing how, the correct series of digits, mountains of information "leaping" invisibly in the air, "hold" switches, etc.

But still... Harry Pottering design students?

"Regarding the animatronics part, I feel it is dealing with humanization of machines in relation to Physical-Computing," he goes on. "We all saw the blinking LED - Blink; and how motors can move robotic limbs with the grace of "Marvin the paranoid android". We conducted experiments with ways to humanize these artifacts, making them closer to the way we, humans, interact and communicate with the world around us. And thus giving a small humanized illusion."

Image by Synodic Month

Tons of images from Usable Witchery.

Related entries: Yaniv Steiner's talk on rapid prototyping process and Opensourcery (where Zach Lieberman learns a few tricks from Mago Julián.)

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

They say rooting out insurgents is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If that’s true, this tank is in trouble.

(By German artist Hans Hemmert.)

via like cool

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Feb 29, 2008, 9:56AM

“Is this your city?” asked the young man. “It’s yours.” The angel answered.

RMB City has been created by Cao Fei’s avatar China Tracy as an experimental utopian world for the 3D online virtual community of Second Life. Institutions and investors have been invited to buy buildings in RMB City and program events and activities within them where other Second Life users can participate. Thousands of young people in Asia and around the world are embracing Second Life as a “parallel universe” on the Internet.

RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China’s current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country’s future.

Lombard-Freid is providing China Tracy, as Chief Developer, with retail space for a New York RMB City leasing office and showroom. The public is invited to view an RMB City model, promotional videos, detailed RMB City photographs and go online via laptops providing real time links to RMB City under construction in Second Life.

The pure white RMB City Model proposes an ideal futuristic city in three dimensions for viewers outside of Second Life. China Tracy’s RMB City video projected onto a reflection pool showcases the myriad details of the metropolis – exposing layers of urban activity and the dense beauty of its architecture.

Also on view i.Mirror, Cao Fei’s quasi-documentary of China Tracy’s adventures in Second Life over a 6 month period premiered at the last Venice Biennale. i-Mirror the 3-part machinima of her Second Life experience inspired Cao Fei aka China Tracy to build RMB City.

Cao Fei’s recent exhibitions include: Brave New Worlds at the Walker Art Center, and Laughing In A Foreign Language at The Hayward Gallery, London. The 10th International Istanbul Biennial, the 52nd International Venice Biennale, the Lyon Biennial, China Power Station: Part 1, at the Serpentine Gallery, and China Power Station: Part II, at Astrup Fearley Museum of Modern Art. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo retrospective at Le Plateau, Paris.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2008, 3:08PM

Of the work he says:
With the advent of the Internet, billions of images are now freely available online and constitute a dense sampling of the visual world. Using a variety of non-parametric methods, we explore this world with the aid of a large dataset of 79,302,017 images collected from the Internet. Motivated by psychophysical results showing the remarkable tolerance of the human visual system to degradations in image resolution, the images in the dataset are stored as 32×32 color images. Each image is loosely labeled with one of the 75,062 non-abstract nouns in English, as listed in the Wordnet lexical database. Hence the image database gives a comprehensive coverage of all object categories and scenes. The semantic information from Wordnet can be used in conjunction with nearest-neighbor methods to perform object classification over a range of semantic levels minimizing the effects of labeling noise. When very many images are available, simple image indexing techniques can be used to retrieve images with similar object arrangements to the query image. If we have a big enough database then we can find, with high probability, images visually close to a query image, containing similar scenes with similar objects arranged in similar spatial configurations. If the images in the retrieval set are partially labeled, then we can propagate the labels to the query image, so performing classification.

Mark Richards has captured the beauty of computer equipment in his photography series, Core Memory.

via coudal

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Jan 14, 2008, 11:39AM

“Personas are misused to maintain a “safe” distance from the people we design for, manifesting contempt over understanding, and creating the facade of user-centeredness while merely reinforcing who we want to be designing for and selling to.”

You can request a copy of the article by contacting Steve at steve at portigal dot com and telling him your name, title and organisation.

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia
reBlogged by michael on Jan 14, 2008, 1:55PM

Whilst Google uses satellite imagery, photographs and map overlays to create their mapping systems, China’s Edushi uses intricate (and quite incredible) computer-based drawings to create their city maps. Edushi will ‘virtually represent’ many Chinese cities – a part of Hong Kong is shown above (and that’s the city-demo you can use on their site). Each proposed city map will be complete with virtual community, game-like emulation advertisements and directory features. Try not to spend quite a bit of time here exploring and marvelling at the remarkable (and zoom-able) bird’s-eye views of Hong Kong.

It’s interesting to draw parallels with the pixel-illustrations of eBoy, but thus far, Edushi doesn’t feature giant destructive robots and scantily-clad women riding missiles. Via PSFK.

Originally from One Plus One Equals Three by Andrew Haig
reBlogged by michael on Dec 12, 2007, 9:22PM