Archive for May, 2007

Microsoft Surface

I new step in ubiquitous computing: Microsoft Surface:

Surface is the first commercially available surface computing platform from Microsoft Corporation. It turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, interactive surface. The product provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. In essence, it’s a surface that comes to life for exploring, [...]

Society, technologies

Fairtilizer.com

Invited by Stretch, I tested fairtilizer.com , a new proto-web 2.0 application dedicated to music. The project is leaded by Olivier Rosset, a Geneva based developer famous for his work on v2music.
The project seems very promising and well done. If you want to have a look on my profile -> here (only for invited people [...]

Music Software, technologies

Top Secret Drum Corp.

Switzerland dominates the World’s Synchronized Drumming Discipline. I skill that we are very proud:

Freaky, Society

Anti-Mosquito Software

With the summer approaching, a legion of mosquitoes will invade your – office, home, living room… The solution is here

Quand l’été arrive, bien souvent les moustiques ne sont pas loin. Si vous en avez assez des moustiques, Anti-Moustique est fait pour vous !
Comme son nom l’indique, Anti-Moustique est un logiciel permettant de chasser les [...]

Freaky, technologies

Bias In Exposition To Personal Opinion

Reported here, a fascinating study that found that repeated exposure to one person’s viewpoint can have neerly as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people.

The researchers had over a thousand student volunteers read statements that were supposed to represent opinions of members of a group. In some cases, they read statements attributed [...]

Society, Sociology

Cultural Differences In Emoticon Uses

Livescience.com reports un interesting study about the culture factor in determining the importance of the eyes or the mouth to interpret facial expressions.
According to Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan, “in Japan, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth. This [...]

Mind and behavior, Society, technologies

The Intimate Joystick

Jenny Chowdhury is from New-York and she is the inventer of the Intimate controllers. This is game controllers into undergarments so that games are played through players physically touching one another. she says : “The goal of this project was to research and create objects that challenge the traditional notions and orientation of video [...]

Society, technologies

Proxemy In Second Life

Here can be found a very interesting and intriguing video about the “proxemy” phenomenon in Second Life.
Why do I blog this? Personal spaces in virtual spaces have always been a topic of interest in my lab under the impulse of the first research trend at craft about location and real and virtual spaces. It appeared [...]

Mind and behavior, Society

Google Eyebox

reported on Engadget , google announced a partnership with a company called Xuuk to distribute a device called Eyebox, a palm-sized cam that records how many time a object is viewed.

Xuuk says the EyeBox works up to 32 feet away and doesn’t require any sort of calibration, and that it collects no data other than [...]

Sociology, technologies

Is R2D2 The Real Hero Of The Star Wars?

A funny post of cognitive daily I shall report here about social bonding with robots:

In Star Wars, the real hero might be R2D2 — the only character who makes it through all six episodes without falling to the “dark side” of the force. R2D2 is a robot, but everyone in the film treats “him” like [...]

Mind and behavior, technologies