Google has done it! They have made the biggest problem in the world a bit smaller! Communication. With Wave.

The communication problem

The biggest problem of humanity now is communication. With communication we become aware of knowledge, problems and can combine ideas to solve anything. With better communication better matches of people can be made and better ideas can come to fruition.

If you look inside any medium to large sized company or government agency you see structures of departments. Each have their own task and the chain of command connects them to keep them on the road. Over the years they all had different means of communication and these days almost all depend entirely on E-mail…

E-mail is the glue that keeps our society standing.

E-mail is locked in to each workers own mailbox and you communicate by sending a text to one others mailbox. E-mails are fragments of the discussion and it is very difficult to see the discussion as a whole. It is not easy to stitch the fragments together.

There are many 2.0 tools to fix the problems of e-mail. But none are really mainstream as e-mail itself. The 2.0 tools now seemed to be experiments awaiting to be picked for their parts to combine into something new.

The best text edit ideas combined.

Google looked at any tool for text based communication and took the best parts to combine it in one tool.

• They began to look at E-mail message and reply model. They picked the interface so people could quickly see what the new messages are and could quickly reply.
• They centralized the whole communication process like any 2.0 tool so discussions could easily be shared between people.
• They took the search capabilities of the google search engine so anything could be easily found.
• They took the instant way of communicating from instant messaging. Replies are added instantaniously.
• They took the real time appearing text from google docs and its collaborative writing.
• They took the inclusion of people in discussions from chat rooms.
• They took the tags/labels from gmail and social bookmarking sites like delicious to organize your waves..
• They took the history function from wikipedia, svn/cvs and google docs and even evolved it by opening it up with an instant slider.
• They took the linking to other texts(waves) from wikipedia and html so you can create a network of texts and overviews.
• They took the bots from IRC and evolved them into robots that listen in on the text to give instant reactions or text transformations. They can also post any text to another text medium. (expect tie-ins to create archaic e-mail, word docs, blog posts, social networks (facebook wall), twitters, wiki articles, forum threads, sms messages and anything text)
• They took the external widget model from google maps so a wave can be included into anything.
• They took the internal widget model from open social so you can include widgets into waves for games, polls, task lists, spreadsheets, presentations, anything…
• They took the protocol model form e-mail. Anybody can start a wave server and communicate with other wave servers. Discussions internal to one wave server will never leave to wave servers of others. It is an open standard. Anybody can create own servers and clients.

There is much more. The first implementation is a full HTML 5 web app with drag and drop support for the waves themselves and images with instant uploaders. The first robots include instant google maps tie ins, instant translation (wow) and very advanced natural language spell checkers.

Wave: The future of collaborative text

Wave is set to be the social glue of anything text. It is set up to combine the very best collaborative text ideas to create the e-mail replacement for the next century. It is here to solve many communication problems. Everybody can easily include it in any current 2.0 tool to create the ultimate inbox. Are you leaving a message/comment anywhere? And want to track it with probable reactions down? Expect it in your wave in-box.

Missing the focus: a Wave Tsunami

Wave is great to centralize any text discussion to one in-box. With the google instant search and tags you can find many stuff easily.

But you will be drowned quickly in waves when any text based communications from any site is centralized into one in-box. A true wave Tsunami. I don’t want all my messages in one in-box with only a search function. The in-box is a metaphor created for easy transition from e-mail but is not the right way to organize your waves. It is like the first car: a horse cart without horses.

In this time of information overload our main problem is focus. We need to filter the waves on context. Filter them for example on work for project A or own interests on hobby B or social life on sporting group b. We need tree maps (work>projectA) to navigate our contexts to see our contacts quickly. We need tag clouds, social diagrams, wave source maps. We need next gen wave organization tools.

The tags are already there to make this possible. But who is going to build the next gen wave client to create this focus?

Wavesurfer? Surfboard? Baywatch? oscillator/oscilloscope? Frequencies? Many names are possible for such an app

With such client based on personal context a true semantic web will become possible.

Everything about the Wave.

Yes, this blogpost is longer than normal but I wanted to create one holistic view. If you are not a big reader just scan the nice bits or go to the end

The Lift

The past week I was in Geneva, the city where HTTP/HTML or in other words the internet was invented. I visited Lift 08, a three day event to explore the social impact of new technologies. Together with Martin Kuipers I just let everything around me flood into my brain.

Lift 07 was a special event for us. Although I was not there, Martin’s enthusiasm triggered a whole process towards Lable. The ideas he brought back gave us the tools to finally knit together some thoughts of the past years. I had to go and see this Lift where foresighters came together.

Lift 08

This year was a 3 day event with 700 visitors from all over the world. The first day was full of community driven workshops at Geneva University with a Venture Night at the end. The second two days where full with talks on different subjects. Both days had also nice closures in the form of a cheese fondue and a nice party in the center of town.

There were many interesting people and I felt great having met some. Although looking around the conference room I felt many were addicted to being connected.

I chose to only open a dummy book and set myself in information absorb mode and tried to see a larger pattern. With everything around me you could smell the future, you just needed to look below the surface.

Online Environments

A big topic which was present in almost all talks where the online environments that are part of the latest technological hype. What are the implications of these environments and how could you make them succeed? How you could use them to teach people, and how to use them to change them?

We got for example an insight into the South Korean world of Cyworld. On how Koreans organized themselves online and how they depend on their mobile phone. Attention was the main currency and self branding the key. How almost-sync was the latest development towards real time intimacy. How Twitter was the western equivalent. South Korea is just miles ahead of these social communities. 98% of the 20s are on CyWorld.

The most interesting talk on this subject was by Pierre Belanger, owner of SkyRock. Although SkyRock is just another social network he described a future of social messengers. Where the social network became the new digital id of the future. He described a netamorphosis towards a net not centered around bandwidth but around code. A net that is not centered around one site but a multiform platform that could run on phones, instant messengers etc. E-mail is dead.

I immediately connected it to some other movements of people talking about Jabber as the next http. And he basically described the new backbone of the internet as a Social Operating System. Everything will center on chat. Two-way instead of one-way communication.

Connecting tech with people

There were also great talks about open social by Kevin Marks of Google and Grid Computing by François Grey of CERN. They both have methods of connecting the people and computers with information.

Open social is the glue for anything social centering around people/friends, activities and events and seems to also be the glue for the next generation of people.

The grid computing talk had some great insights on how to use people and their computers for science. How normal people became an important part by letting them be involved. This by being transparant and fun. A whole @home platform was born out of it that has much bigger cimputing power than any supercomputer in the world.

In everything you could feel online environments are on the verge of change. The current form is just a carriage without horses and we still need to evolve to the definite form.

Mobile phones

Most people in developing countries don’t have computers but they do have mobile phones. They share them, they connect with them. In China for example there are 4 people born per second, but 20 new subscribers of mobile providers per second.

The mobile is the most important connected device and it was interesting how Younghee Jung went out to those countries to let the people design the best mobile phone for themselves. It was very interesting to see the specific specific solutions for problems they live with. Like multi-simcard support, multiple address books, heart shaped phones, ultimate everything phone etc.

We also heard some insights on the future of the phone. How it would evolve to a simpler gateway to the world and that the phone contained the answer to future payment. How the iphone revolutionizes and by someone of Nokia how the iPhone is not the ultimate answer.

User Experience & Stories

A lot of talk was also about what story the technology is telling and the user relates towards it. The perception of a user completely relies on the story as they create context.

The most interesting was by Rafi Haladjian, one of the inventors of the wifi Rabbit Nabaztag. He told about setting up a platform called Violet built with ambient technology. A plarform with which you are informed non intrusively.

Why the rabbit:

If you can connect a rabbit you can connect anything.

He showed some great stuff like a future product of RFID stamps that a rabbit(or some other object) can sniff and after the object will react with something relevant. He saw only 2 or 3 objects connected to the rest of the world and saw a future we will connect the rest of the stuff in our homes.

It was also nice to have visited the discussion on the failures of ubiquitous computing the previous day. It seems that we are on the verge of creating smart houses, we only should make them start out dumb and grow their smartness for a more satisfying experience. It is all about making a growing emotional connection by growing an evolving story.

New ways of working

The Zentrale Intelligenze Agentur was a wow presentation for me and Martin. They described the way of working we as Lable were philosophizing about for the last year. I really feel that we are on the beginning of a new hierarchy less way of working. That people begin to see that hierarchy kills passion and creative/innovation efficiency. And now we were confirmed it is a global feeling.

Games are fun.

The game track was really fun. You should just see the entertaining Paul Barnett video if you have the time. He describes we shouldn’t build games anymore Vegas style by reproducing successes bigger, better, faster & stronger. Online games are just beginning and we don’t know yet what the rules are for them. We learn along the way and creating experience on how to set out a great story.

There was also a lot of talk about casual and more accessible games. People want more and more micro-sized content for quick experiences. How Facebook is also a game as it has a repeat until reward structure. Games should be a balance of Mechanics (rules of play), Dynamics (human interaction with rules) en Aesthetics (feel, design, emotion). Those last three just connected too good with our Lable vision of creating balance between Technology (structure), Human and Feeling. Those should be the main design rules of the future!

New view on location

Paul Dourish had some nice insights from aboriginals. How they looked very different to locations, territory, objects. Everything was defined by stories and their influence zones. This kind of thinking could make us very differently to navigation and location based information. He wanted to propose a new vocabulary for this tech: Nomad, pilgrimage, home, colony, asylum, diaspora, migrator etc.

Clash of Nature and Technology

Kevin Warwick, the human cyborg, was a show stealer. He described how he connected a ultra sound sensor to his arm neural system and how he gained a 6th sense of distance. That a human could just learn a sensor so fast. He also connected his neural system to his wive to create the first two brains in one neural system. How they shared the sense of moving hands. His brain was even connected to the internet to control a simple robotic arm thousands of miles away… Cyborgs are getting real… And it sounded like a real enhancement that did not sound scary anymore… But what about the spam you will get

We heard from Mieke Gerritzen how we should accept tech and how we should make it a part of nature. How everything is set to intertwine. How manipulating nature will become the next nature. I did not entirely agree because I think there is still lots to learn from current nature before we declare a next one. We should accept the golden ratio as the main ratio for growth and design.

Sustainability

We can’t continue to consume the way we are. A whole separate track was focused on the environment with key speaker Nobel Prize winner Andy Reisinger. The most head shifting tech featured was a space based solar array with power beaming to the earth as a way to solve future power problems. Also features were technologies to convert people to more sustainable ways of working by peer pressured social networks.

Foresight

We ended with some views on how to see the road ahead but where also warned to look at a higher level to see what other roads will cross this road. William Cockayne and Scott Smith took us on a ride on what a foresighter, like the main audience of Lift, should do to make good foresights.

A foresighter:

• Should be aware
• Scan Collect and Organize Patterns and deep currents and roles
  • Get out on the street
• Have a view but not ideologize
• Stay Grounded
  • Leave behind artefacts

These talks made me aware I am such foresighter. Not focusing on the now but the future by talking around and collecting information and feelings.

The Future

Scott left us with a quote of William Gibson:

The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

I think Lift changed that and created a place of were foresights are made visible. Foresights of a future where humans will live in balance with technology and feelings. A future where they would connect with each other and everything around them to create a more sustainable and efficient balance. We just need to digest everything around us to see how it should be done.

I recognized many pieces of my past journey and was confirmed I am on the right road. It is just about meeting the right people and making it possible.

Yes, it is all just about people.

Visit Lift site for more information. All talks can be viewed on tsr site.

Photo by mrtnk who was sitting besides me while taking photo. It shows the shoes of Lift organizer Laurent Haug opening Lift 08.

Above are some small ideas I penned down in one of my sketch books. Maybe you can make them useful in some of your future interface designs. They are all about including extra information in common interface elements.

1. Range slider with distribution curve

Price ranges or other type of ranges like for example the diameter of a screen, processor speed, analogue zoom range etc are perfect examples of information that is to be manipulated by range sliders. You select the range of the attribute you are searching in the product and the search application returns the results.

But what if you select a range that is very rare and combined with other search parameters return no results. The inclusion of the distribution curve tells the user which ranges are most common and are more likely to return results.

2. Distance selection with travel time

If you want to search for a new home or for example a restaurant in your vicinity most often you can select a range in distance to narrow down the search.

Why not include some small icons that show the travel time by some icons which represent the means of transportation and a time icon that shows the travel time? Green is minutes and red is the hours spend.

3. Scroll bar showing sections

Scrolling is a handy method of navigating through pages but it is for example not easy to go to the comments right away in a blog site. Most often a separate link is included.

Why not show the different sections of the page besides the scroll bar? When you hover over the colors you see what they represent and if you click on for example the purple bar you will go directly to the comments section. This can also be handy in large articles like wikipedia pages.

4. Loading bar with subprogress

Sometimes you have a separate loading bar to show the progress of a subprocess. Why not add some colors above the load bar to visualize the subprocesses. You can also mouseover them like on the scrollbar to see what they are.

Ideas inspired by my regular dose of infosthetics. I highly recommend this blog to any kind of designer.

Once this post would be written. My big unification post. What am I searching for…

Well I was searching for the ultimate goal of design. Design has only one goal. To improve, to construct, to unify, to become one and simple.

Design works with improving what already is. So it communicates better, so it works better, so it feels better. Our sense of beauty is based on better design. What feels better and simpler is more beautiful. Our sense of beauty selects better candidates to mate with so we have better designed offspring but it is also the selection method for what we create. We want to create something more beautifull, something better, something smarter.

Design movements are a big indicator. Design works on improving the parts until a part becomes better and rearranging attention and parts becomes necessary. Thats why a design movements become a hype. It is the celebration of a new insight.

We constantly learn, and learning is the basis of better design. Our information gets stored faster because it is simpler and more beautifull. The new learning is a step to better learning which also creates better design.

Then there is the us religion. Us is all about unification. About making things better as a whole. To improve ourselves. The us religion is the end vision of design. The dark side is about destruction, fear and hate. By design we could erase our dark side.

Design is about bringing us to a higher level. And this will never end.

All mediums have their own design movements. Think art with minimalism, dadaism, surrealism, futurism etc. Think Architecture with Bauhaus, rennaissance, avant-garde, modernism, postmodernism etc. They all look with a different perspective to the design. For example from an emotional, functional, technical point of view. But could also be centered around a philosophy, vision or religion. Design needs a certain look at the object to be designed.

A design movement is not only the idea/vision behind it but also encompasses a visual design, development style and structural design. Every architectural movement can be defined in those 3 ways. So can the web design movements.

Phase 0: The web

The latest medium, the internet, is still fresh. First there was chaos upon it’s birth. People didn’t know what it was and where it would go to. They saw the power of connecting the information by links.

Phase 1: Usability – uniformity in information

Then the people began to see the chaos and wanted to bring some form and order to the web. A big influentual person from that era was Jacob Nielsen. He brought rules and suggestions on how to improve all the chaos and to make the web a more uniform place. Where you could find your information. He looked at it from an information and functional viewpoint. He brought order and a certain visual (bit boring) style.

Phase 2: Search – finding information

In the next phase it was all about finding the information. The web became large so you needed a search engine to find content on what you were searching. Search engines came like: Hotbot, Altavista, Lycos etc. But in the end simplicity won. Google became the defining search engine of this age. Search engines dictated how pages should look structural and content wise to be indexed. Certain looks helped indexing. It was the time of top menu, sidebar navigation and a big content field.

Phase 3: Rich Internet – bringing emotion to the web

Next there was an anti movement to the previous 2 movements. The internet was still a place of images and text. People wanted to experience the internet. With the advancement of Flash it was possible to create experiences in flash to bring accross feelings. It was mainly used as product placement in the experience economy. Key technology was flash but people were also creating RIAs in DHTML.

Phase 4: Web 2.0 – connecting people

This phase was about getting people to connect on the web. It was about finding like minded people while looking for content. As with design movements in other fields Web 2.0 also had a clear visual style and tech of choice although this was not present on all web 2.0 sites. The tech of this movement was AJAX for making the community finding and building more fluent. But in the end it was all about connecting people as a reaction to only connecting information.

Examples of this movement are Digg, Youtube, Flickr, Wiki, MySpace, del.icio.us etc.

Phase 5: “Web 3.0″ – new forms of presenting information

The next wave will all about information again. We lived long with text from top to bottom. The next wave will all be about presenting information in new ways that are not top to bottom. The technology will be flash again or SVG and javascript will take the next tech leap. (SVG is already working in browsers and combined with javascript capable of doing dynamic animations)

Want to see some examples of web 3.0? Check out Digg labs, infostethics and Gapminder (also look at ted video for last)

Phase 6: “Web 4.0″ – dissolving web vs desktop

This phase will all be about dissolving what is online and offline. The browser will dissappear. Apps will be on the forefront. What will be the defining technology is still uncertain. It will be about XML for information. But what will the defining background technology be for application development? HTML is not designed for applications. So what will it be? XAML of Microsoft, MXML of Adobe or XUL of Mozilla? This is still a battle to be fought. The open standard will win, and Adobe and Microsoft are already opening up their standards for others but they will be in control. I think XUL is the best option because no commercial institution is controlling it, but XUL is not yet mature… Adobe already has released a quick development platform with flex.

Google is also working on web 4.0. Creating apps on the web. If they are smart they will work onto XUL and SVG as an open development platform for their future apps providing some basic functionality libraries like flex. I don’t think they would like that Adobe and Microsoft will control this era. I think that is why Google is such a fan of Firefox. (Webkit does also already support some XUL)

A battle will be which apps will be offline and online. You need offline components to do work while you are not on the internet. Mozilla brings this with XULRunner. Adobe with Apollo. And Microsoft with WPF and unannounced tech for the promised OSX support.

A more accessible and attractive web

This last battle is still a battle between corporations so lets concentrate on web 3.0. Making information more accessible and more attractive. Enjoy the web 3.0 wave!

Related:

• Evolution of design movements
  

My computer of choice is Apple. It needed some convincing with me but in January I switched and now I will not return to Windows. I have become a real fan. I discovered that Apple is a religion. You either believe it or don’t. (Or you are not aware it exists and what it is) There is no middle road.

Mac vs PC

Apple illustrates this perfectly with their latest batch of commerials. One person visualizes the dull PC. He can do his dull tasks but is boring, more complex than needed and ignorant of what the mac does. Mac explains he is a person full of stories, photos, experiences. A real living person. Simple and no nonsense.

Yesterday Apple released its latest OSX: Leopard. It will power all future macs and is technologically a competitor to Windows. The reactions on the web are mixed. Some are really glad with the new changes and some don’t seem to understand them. They seem to look at it in the wrong context. For example Windows evangelist Paul Thurrot in his dissection. I check his site and blog regularly to check what is happening in the Microsoft world from an experience and interaction perspective.

He says that every feature already existed in the software world outside OSX and Leopard does not add anything to the world. He calls it an insignificant release.

The Significance of Leopard.

Well as I said they look at it from the wrong perspective… Apple was never about features and copying. Apple looks at what already exists and adds the x-factor.

It is all about the experience!!!

To illustrate this I will go by all the 10 significant new features of Leopard according to Apple.

1. 64-bit support

Well does it matter to the normal users? No. They do not have to think about it. Current 32-bit apps work fluently besides 64-bit apps. But why is this important as a first killer leopard feature? Well we bring it into perspective with windows vista in a review from the above mentioned Evangelist:

…the x64 versions are also far less compatible than their predecessors, with both hardware devices and software, and these incompatibilities will ultimately make the x64 Vista versions less attractive to most users.

64 bit Vista review

With Leopard you don’t have a separate 64-bit version. It will switch unnoticably to 64-bit when needed. It always works and is compatible with all macs. (G5, mac pro and next gen intel macs.) So no driver problems, they are all included in OSX. Normal users will never know if they run 32 or 64 bit. As it should be.

2. Time Machine

Well you could restore old files on windows computers. But how many will know how to find or use this option? Apple does something completely different. They make the concept accessible to normal people who do not think in menus. The concept of getting files back from the past is strange but apple translates the most common cultural movie effect to make the concept clear to the user. It becomes an experience to back up and show off to friends. Even a computer illiterate could understand and use it.

3. Places

Well virtual desktops did already exist but I never seen them so cleanly implemented. The overview of all desktops and dragging apps between them… It now seems like something I would like to use. Was never a real fan of Expose and this solves my window space problem. It is easier to find back your windows when you sort your places on the context you are currently in. (communicating, designing, developing, checking news, listen to music etc)

4. Updates to Bootcamp, Front Row and Photo Booth

Bootcamp will be standard. Using windows will be more fluently. Why support windows with rotten registry and dll hell on OSX partition? Well this is marketing talk… The real reason is that virtualisation is not fast (without GPU power) and a Win32 compatibility layer is difficult to build right. Just look at the open source Wine. When wine will once work correctly we will have our windows support. (they are really working on DirectX now)

Front Row and PhotoBooth will now be available to all macs. These last two are the show off apps. (Although front row is one of the most used apps on my mac) These apps are designed to make other people jealous. They will of course not be shown until done. They will be improved to the last moment. Designed to impress when Leopard ships. See Core animation point later for more.

5. Spotlight updates

Boolean search. A much needed feature for the more technical inclined users. Now you can use AND OR and NOT. But the big hit is network search. I really would love to search work servers or nearby macs.

I really discovered the significance of Bonjour (the technique that instantly connects nearby macs after your permission) when somebody visited with a macbook. He had instantly internet and we could play some of the mac included games, use iChat to quickly sent files and listen to others music. Spotlight search to open folders really completes the picture in sharing.

6. Dashboard updates

I was first critical of dashboard but began to love it. It is my main source for weather, to do’s, calculator, gmail and tv guide. This new option to add snippets as widgets of all websites is I think a killer option. Now it is easy to add the stats of this weblog for quick viewing on my dashboard Dashboard is a real quick layer to quickly check some of your interests or news updates. And this small update makes it even more usefull. I don’t see the same use from the vista sidebar with it’s small screenspace.

7. Mail

Well the technical inclined people say they only need text. Luckily it is possible for people with emotions and personality to create emails with emotions and personality. I need to see if I will use the todo options. I am already more a gmail user and my post-its on dashboard also work. (maybe create and delete to-do from the desktop instead of mail) Notes could be an option for something I only found half functioning options. They also seem to add RSS feed support. Finally a good default place in the OS although I will continue to use Vienna. But it is again all about experience.

8. iChat

An app that is now completely build on sharing experiences. Just show your photos and presentations or go back to that special place (with photo/video on background) to tell what happened there. And you can watch the desktop of others to see work in progress or help the other user with computer problems. It is all about personality, not about sharing cold abstract text facts.

9. Universal access

Computers should be there for everyone. It is nice apple focusses so big on making their computers accessible. I think 1% of the population has a handicap. That is a huge market share in Apple proportions. It is good that they look after the less forunate. And we will all get older and more fragile.

10. Core Animation

On itself this is not an important feature. But look at what Core Image & Video did: Motion, Apperture, Photo Booth, Comic Life, instant Final cut and imovie effects etc. Just imagine what precoded animation libraries could do. First example was Time Machine, but imagine how Front Row 2.0 will look like when Leopard is done. I think you can also expect some new effects in OSX itself.

Conclusion

For the Leopard critiques: drop the rational robot man act. Look at leopard as a person with emotions. (maybe from a female perspective) Maybe then you begin to see what is really happening. Think nintendo Wii instead of sony PS3. Everything technically significant has already be invented for the OS, it is now about perfecting the experience of working with it and widen the market to all people!

I look forward to this significant update. It will not only enhance my computer but also my life!

Ted released a real cool video today on the multitouch displays I talked about in the earlier days of this blog. For those who don’t know, TED is an event that brings together thoughtleaders, movers and shakers to share their ideas. I recommend you to check out some of their videos.

These multitouch screens are really the future I think. They remove many of the current GUI and makes manipulating data much more intuitive. If you combine it with the latest intuitive data visualisation you can begin a whole new future in information navigation and manipulation. With some of trial and error it is maybe finally possible to get rid of the keyboards and mouses.

I see a world with much less abstractions in interfaces and languages and a future were direct manipulation gets closer and closer. I see new ways of getting insights into patterns in data and processes. I see new ways of learning, creativity and inspiration. I hope these tools become common soon.

I will just continue to play with my DS untill the time is here.

Well I think the winner of the next gen battle is here. The output of graphics and sound has evolved greatly in the past generations and Sony and Microsoft tried another leap there. But that leap is costly in research, which has to be paid back in the costs of the console. (599 euros for a new PS3?!?) But the input did not really evolve in the past generations. With the technological advancements since standardizing current controllers it is much cheaper to work in this input area. Nintendo did take care of it with their next gen console: the Wii

The output was already at a point that did not affect the immersion greatly. We already got rid of the flat rectangles and had walking 3D characters. But the input was still pushing buttons, which did not use most of the body we got used to use in everyday interaction. The Wii makes it possible to simulate those real life movements to the virtual world. Thus making it possible to be immersed better and quicker. Gamers are not longer zombies with flexible fingers.

Wii aims not at the casual gamer market that already exists, it aims at the rest. By making it easier, more intuitive to play and affordable, a whole lot more people will look to videogames for fun. The lineup already shows a great variety of fun games aimed at a general market. While Sony and Microsoft battle for the existing console owners Nintendo flirts with the not-yet-gamers, a much bigger market that can easily be lured with a cheaper price for more fun.

Some of the great advantages:

• Easy for beginners to learn and understand
• Immersion factor is much bigger by using more of the body
• Depth of sound also adds to immersion
• Cheap compared to the other consoles and gets cheaper
• Many great games from the past of Nintendo.
• Small and portable

In terms of getting it I think Nintendo got it. They looked at the experience and found the spot that lacked the most in the evolution. Gaming will never be the same again. It is indeed a revolution.

See Wii in action: Nintendo Press Conference 2006

I really like to have new gadgets. I don’t buy gadgets suddenly but search for them till the right one comes by. For almost 4 years I had a nokia 3510, I got it cheap, it was reliable with long battery power and was very easy in calling and sending SMS functions. The calender grew on me to warn me on appointments I would otherwise forget in my sometimes chaotic states of mind. The alarmclock was used almost every day as my wakening call.

Regularly I looked around for what was on the market. Phones that could take pictures, nice iPods with lots of space, colorscreens, portable gaming units, small better portable camera’s etc. But everytime they were not right for me, it would ment I would have to carry another gadget with me all the time or to swap my phone with a less reliable phone that had all these first generation version features.

When I saw those new walkman phones at first I was very skeptical, camera’s were not for me and is such a music player good enough etc. But after a while I saw this was the solution I seeked. A gadget that combined many features good and was easy to use. I waited for the next generation and it became the Sony Ericsson w810i.

Some life enhancements with the new phone:

• This phone had a much better calender. It can sync seamlessly and wirelessly with my mac for easy management. Paper agendas don’t work with me but such an ‘always with me’ phone calender does.
• I can take pictures anywhere at a good resolution. I always missed a way to save those moments worth remembering. Also possible to capture videos (capture the mood) and sound.
• I always have a mp3 player with me for entertainment.
• I have a way to move files that I always can carry with me. Handy for those unexpected moments.
• I can access the internet anywhere. (opera mini 2.0 is cool) It works with gmail, most sites I visit, this weblog, public transport planners etc.
• My contacts are now also safe and easy manageble on my mac.
• All this in a total package less and lighter than my old phone.

I am excited about this phone. Not because it is a new ‘cool’ gadget but it enhances my life significantly. This has always been my main method of selecting new gadgets and many cool ones did not survive this to be mine.

I discovered I am obsessed with new technology. Not all kinds of new tech but tech focussed on human interaction. Tech that can give you insights and true experiences. I scout my RSS feeds daily for new innovations and try to imagine what will become of that. Some obvious examples I share but others will go into my bookmarks for later reference.

On the road of my study I also encountered an area that is still a real barren land and needs new visions and tech. All by working on a simulation project that came on my road by accident. I was introduced into the world of Serious Games and I liked the way interaction and 3D environments came together to form learning experiences.

My graduation project will focus on an interaction design on how to maximize this learning experience both on the input and output side. My goal is to get an immersive and ‘fun’ experience that complies with the goals of the learning instrument. What is needed and to be avoided.

I am still in the first orientation phase and try to get my question as clear as possible and try to find people that can answer some of my questions. Well this is of course not a study that is done by the end of the grad project but I hope to get my ideas into a clear vision that I can share.

Car trouble at Akkrum

Histerical Machines

Drinking Robots (Bar Bot)

Robots you can control (You move me)

Robot DJs (Robolab)

Robo Tramp (Dirk)

Run Motherfucker Run

Nervous furry creatures that sense you are near. (Nervous)

Nazarenos

The rotating box with an attitude (Spatial Sounds)

Lasers which produce music when broken (http://www.beyondexpression.nl/)

And lots of DJs and VJs (Pictured: Addictive TV)

More info at STRP.nl

Yesterday I went to a new festival in Eindhoven called STRP. After a troublesome trip and car malfunctions we finally arrived. (the trip took 5 hours)

The festival took place in the Strijp building where Philips did some of the biggest technological discoveries like the audio cassette, video 2000 system (which was superior to the VHS of course) and the CD. (which we still use today and still upgraded to DVD and bluray) The building had a very industrial feel, you felt it was abandoned and it had a grotesque feeling inside. The big halls where filled with all kinds of cool technology, music and cool creative people.

Interaction was very important with all the displayed examples. Some needed direct interaction like furry creatures on the wall that began to shake and make noise when you came close, some went their own way but looked at you and you begin to notice after 3 looks the tramp is a robot. Also great was RunMotherfuckerRun, you run through empty cities and can choose your route by running to a side of the belt on selection moments. The belt had a very hypnotic effect and encouraged you to run hard. I did not notice how hard I runned until I stopped after a while.

Also great was the spatial sounds system. A box that rotated around and reacted on people standing close by, if you irritated it, it began to rotate very fast (100 mph) and create a very hard sound. It really absorbed me with its behaviour.

The evening and night were filled with music and VJ performances. There were some great shows and I really lost myself dancing.

Like all this kind of stuff: it can’t be explained, you have to experience it yourself. Next time I will be there again but hope to see more days of the festival.

Oh and thanks to Vince for driving us to STRP and back in the late hours!!! And thanks to Marlies for being our mother on the trip and taking care we were being fed!

PS: Soon I will post some photos of some of my experiences on the festival (taken by Nadia, I hope I will get them soon )