Barron of Blog Wife, Libby, and the Pursuit of Happiness

CHI 2006: Third Day

The third full day of CHI went very well, with a healthy mix of interesting papers and presentations. At night I (and some colleagues) went to the "Hospitality" events hosted by several of the companies and universities. These are essentially big parties with free food and free drink.

IBM's was particularly nice due to a live band playing. Google's was disappointing because they ran out of food by the time we got there. Microsoft's was lame because they didn't have any alcohol (what, you think giving out nerf arrows is going to make up for it? I think not!).

We were on our way over to the University of Michigan's area when the fire alarms went off in the entire mall (which we were attached to). We pondered staying behind and plundering all the unattended food and drink, but determined that it would be wiser to err on the side of caution. Who wants to risk staring in a re-enactment of The Towering Inferno?

It took the six fire engines that showed up almost an hour to determine that it was a false alarm. After that the parties were pretty much over, so the group I was with headed out for a quick bite to eat before returning to our respective hotels.

Looking back over the day, here are some of the projects/presentations that deserve a mention:

• Embedded Phenomena: Supporting Science Learning with Classroom-Sized Distributed Simulations
  Tom Moher, my adviser here at UIC, gave a great presentation on all three of the embedded phenomena that our group has created: RoomQuake, RoomBugs, and HelioRoom. While I obviously think the world of him and his work, it was great to see that his paper also won a coveted "Best Paper" award (only 3 papers received this honor from the 600 papers submitted).
• Add a Dash of Interface: Taking Mash-Ups to the Next Level
  Ben Metcalfe (project lead for BBC's developer network), Bret Taylor (project manager for Google Maps) discuss the current state of publicly available APIs and how users are combining the services with interesting results. There was talk about security and the technical aspects of providing developers access to these public APIs. The discussion only touched briefly on what I see as the biggest threat to mash-ups: if companies that provide such free access to data streams could (or should) realize profit from that access. For instance the very powerful mash-ups that are using google maps (e.g. visualizing the results of rising ocean levels, finding sexual predators near your home, seeing where all your online contacts live) depend on Google continuing to provide them free access to their mapping data and API. I fear the day that these free data streams begin to contain advertisements or demand payments.
• Visual Exploration of Multivariate Graphs
  Easily one of the more beautiful applications, PivotGraph (paper) is a very slick visualization technique for graphs with nodes that have several attributes each. The basic idea is that you can pick a handful of attributes to compare across the entire graph (similar to pivot charts in Excel). What makes this project so cool is the very beautifully rendered graphs and smooth animated transitions between comparisons. I know eye candy cannot sustain meaningful work, but oh it is just so sweet!

The pic for this blog entry is of three people playing "Age Invaders," an interactive game designed to include the elderly and youth in a physical game of space-invaders. Yes, you read that correctly. They balance the playing field by slowing down the children's firing speed. There are also "online" players who can see the entire board and insert things like blockers or health bonuses.

To be honest I thought "Age Invaders" was lame because it tried to target itself as a unifier between different age groups. Yeah, right. It was a cool game to play with peers... period. This doesn't make it unique, but at least it's a more believable use.

[note: This post has been backdated to correspond with the date of the events described]

CHI 2006: Second Day

Today was supposed to be my "course" day, where I attend a class that focuses on one topic for the entire day (9:00am-6:00pm). The topic I selected was "The Usability Engineering Lifecycle," which at the time seemed to be more interesting than it sounds. About 60 minutes into the course three things were obvious to me:

1. The presenter was trying to sell us her new book about the usability lifecycle.
2. The material, while well organized, boiled down to common sense knowledge on how the development cycle of interfaces should ideally progress.
3. There was no way in hell that I would waste my day missing what could be some very cool papers in the other sessions.

Ninety minutes into the course we had our first break and I made a dash for freedom.

I am glad that I left that course because I caught some very interesting papers. I am not going to parse through the entire day, but here are a few that caught my attention:

• Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massive Multiplayer Online Games
  A thorough examination of how time is spent by players in World of Warcraft (currently over 6 million active accounts). Interesting notes about spikes in game usage (such as the large increase leading up to level 40, when users can own a "mount" that is used to ride around the game world). Read more on PARC's blog.
• Interweaving Mobile Games With Everyday Life
  Study on how individuals were able to fit a mobile game, called Yoshi's Game, around their everyday lives. The game has players shuttling food between plantations and Yoshi's (small furry animals). The game uses existing infrastructure (personal wireless routers) as either plantations (secured wireless networks) or as Yoshi's (unsecured wireless networks). No data is transmitted over these wireless routers - they just act as physical location markers in the "real" world. Pretty cool concept.
• Designing for the Opportunities and Risks of Staging Digital Experiences in Public Settings
  The paper presented Uncle Roy All Around You, by far the coolest mixed-reality game I have heard about since the I Love Bees phenomenon of 2004. Unlike the national audience that I Love Bees captured, Uncle Roy only ensnares a dozen or so players at a time. But it takes those players through an alternate reality of espionage and adventure in public places, where the player isn't sure who is playing the game and who is not. Read more in this New Scientist article.
• TinyMotion: Camera Phone Based Interaction Methods
  This is one project that I am really looking forward to seeing in the market. TinyMotion is a software tool that runs on camera-phones; it essentially converts a camera (any camera, technically) into a virtual mouse. You can do such interesting things as tilt and swivel your phone to scroll through menus, draw text or images (though, in practice, writing text in this manner is cumbersome), or play some pretty cool games. All this using a flick of the wrist. It can act like an accelerometer, but without the need for additional hardware. Very cool.
• Z-agon: Mobile Multi-Display Browser Cube
  Pictured on the right, Z-agon cubes are devices with a video display on each of it's six sides. As you rotate the cube the images on each side can remain the same or change based on the cube's movements (so that it you can scroll over a much larger virtual landscape). While these cubes have a "wow" factor, I believe that in their current form they are not practical. At least one improvement that I think should be made: make it a two-sided device. The user could still flip it over on any of the four edges to follow a continuous virtual canvas, but without the need for 4 additional screens (so the product is cheaper and lighter) and it would fit more easily into your pocket.

[note: This post has been backdated to correspond with the date of the events described]