The fact that I have been using various Nokia phones and attending multiple Iron Maiden concerts (5 at last count) over the years led me to this amazing demonstration of the improving audio quality of Nokia cameraphones. While I have been a big fan of the N95 camera but I always complained about the audio quality when recording video in loud environments. This video that I recorded at the Iron Maiden show in Concord in 2008 shows how the N95 struggled with clipping and noise issues when the environment was too loud.
Now fast forward 2 years and I went to another Iron Maiden show in Concord a few weeks ago with an N900 and recorded the following video clip. In this video I am once again in the front row of the pit but am offset to the right and am in fact standing right in front of a 6 foot high speaker stack. Both video were copied off the phone and directly uploaded to Youtube with no editing of any sort.
As you can see the N900 video has much better audio quality and is actually good enough to understand the song lyrics despite the fact that I am actually standing in a noisier location. Additionally the video is in true 16:9 widescreen with fewer compression artifacts than the N95 video. It is also better at dealing with the low light levels and the background lights pointed at the screen.
I have to give kudos to Nokia for continuously improving the performance of their devices and cant wait to play with the N8 when it comes out in October.
P.S.: All the photos below were taken with my N900 at the same concert. You can also see two other videos I shot below
As many of you know I purchased a Lotus Seven replica called the WCM Ultralite S2K late last year to make it a street legal track toy. While the Ultralite may maintain the spirit of the original Seven, as you can see below, it has a distinctly different shape and has generally larger dimensions to accommodate drivers of all sizes. In order to move this extra bulk (relatively speaking) around it comes with the incredible F20C engine out of the Honda S2000. The end product has some astonishing performance figures:
Weight: 1300 lbs Horsepower: 240 bhp Redline: 9000 rpm Power to weight ratio: 400+ hp/ton 0-60 mph: 3.5 seconds
My particular car was the first prototype built by World Class Motorsports and is the actual car used in most of the magazine tests. The original owner of the car then sold it to an active PCA member who took fantastic care of the car and documented his changes. He also had the car made street legal under the California SB100 exemption for kit cars. After a few years he ended up selling it and the car went through 2 other owners before I found out that it was on sale again and jumped at the chance.
The first and most immediate thing that hits you when driving the Ultralite is sheer mind-blowing acceleration. When I bought the car it was on a set of fairly old 235 width Falken Azenis. Now while the Azenins are actually pretty good tires for autocross, they have nowhere near enough grip for the ridiculous horsepower of the Ultralite. The very first time I tried a hard acceleration run I spun the rear wheels in 3rd gear and got a full on fishtail moment at 60+ mph. This is the only car I have driven where you have to rev match on upshifts or the rear wheels will happily lose traction Even within the same gear the acceleration is phenomenal. The car pulls pretty strongly below 6k rpm but once you go above the 6k threshold the VTEC cuts in an it feels like someone has hit the fast forward button. Plus with the 9k redline you have plenty of time in the powerband and dont have to keep rowing the gears. Also despite the fearsome power, I do have to say that the Ultralite is actually a very benign handling car. The rear gives you plenty of notice before it steps out and you can easily use the throttle to play with oversteer through the bends (see opposite lock below ).
Driving the Seven is very visceral experience where you can see, feel and hear every mechanical thing on the car. While you are “one with the road” it is a very different experience than what you feel in a Lotus Elise. The Elise is delicate, nimble car and will eagerly follow your every command while the Ultralite is like a raging bull that you have to manhandle into position before you step on the throttle and hold on for dear life. It is very much of a “mans car” where the controls are very heavy and you end up smelling of oil and gasoline after every drive.
While the car was in running, registered and mostly-drivable condition when I bought it, I nonetheless had several improvements in mind before it would be truly track worthy. While this car is likely to be a project car for the rest of my life, for the more immediate future I plan on a series of “Setting up a Seven” blog posts about work I have already done including the safety setup, wheels/tires, exhaust, suspension, etc… In the meantime enjoy this video of Rob doing a run at the last Lotus Club autocross of the 2009 season.
Polyphony Digital has announced a new feature in Gran Turismo 5 which will allow you to upload data from an automotive data logger and recreate your laps within GT5. The technology currently requires the use of the CANBUS data along with a Denso GPS controller and will initially be built into the Toyota FT-86G. As the owner of a Race Technology DL1, I can only hope that one day we might be able to use this technology with existing track day dataloggers.
In the meantime check out this video of a Lexus IS-F lapping the Fuji circuit with its virtual recreation side-by-side.
A couple of days before my scheduled return flight from Chennai to SF I was thinking about the wonderfully uncomfortable economy seat and decided that it would probably be worth it to pay a fee and upgrade to business. This was on a Friday night (flight was on Sat night) and the Cathay Pacific office in Chennai was already closed so I went to their website to see if I could upgrade online. After spending some 20 minutes looking through their website I had to admit defeat and decide to instead give their office a call on Saturday morning to see if I could do the upgrade over the phone instead.
So on Saturday morning I give the Cathay Office a call and ask them how much they would charge to upgrade me. The woman on the phone takes my ticket number and a couple of minutes later comes back saying that is not possible to upgrade me. When I ask why she says that while there was room on the flight, tickets that have been booked via the SFO office can only be upgraded from SF. At which point I incredulously asked her if she understood that I actually wanted to give the airline some extra money for a flight that I was going to be taking anway. By giving them the $$$ I would get a little more comfort and they would get some more money for transporting the exact same person on the same route. While she did understand my point she claimed that the rules were iron clad and that there was no way to actually upggrade without getting approval from SFO which would take at least 2 business days. In the end I just had to give up and put the phone down – no point talking to someone if the rules prevented her from taking my money.
So on Saturday night I finally get on the plane and midway through the Chennai-Hon Kong flight the stewardess comes over to me and says that I have to talk to the ground staff after we land. Apparently there was room on an earlier flight from HK to SFO anf they were moving everyone to this flight (and saving ppl 3 hours off the stopover). Eventually after we land the ground staff collect the 200 odd folks who were moving the the earlier flight and escort us over to the ticketing area to get a new boarding pass. Since I was getting a new boarding pass I decided to once again ask if I could be upgraded. This time the ticketing agent says that while it is possible I would have to pay for upgrading all 4 flights (SFO-HK, HK-MAA, MAA-HK and HF-SFO) even though 3 of the legs were already complete. I ask her how much this would be and she quotes me $4400 to upgrade. This is at a time when I could have purchased a brand new one way MAA-SFO business class flight for just over $2000. Cursing the dumbass airline rules I say I’ll just stick with economy at which point she informs me that all the window and aisle seats are already full and I’ll have to be content with a middle seat. Now at 6ft 1 inches tall I cant really fit in a middle seat so I ask if it would be possible to get an exit row seat. She says that there is a $100 charge for exit row seat which I gladly agree to pay to get some additional leg room. I pull out a crisp new $100 bill from my wallet (long story but I did not have my credit cards with me) to pay for he upgrade when the ticket agent tells me that they cannot accept $100 dollar bills and that $50 is the largest US bill they will accept. Quite annoyed by this new wrinkle I ask for the way to the nearest money changer so I can convert the $100 bill to either smaller USD for to equivalent HK$ when she tells me that all the money changers are behind the security wall and I cannot get to them without a boarding pass and I wont get the boarding pass till I pas the upgrade fee. Incredibly for the second time in 24 hours I had come up to a situation where I had money that I was willing to give to the airline for more comfort but the airline was refusing to take my money!!!! Despite all my pleading there was no way around this new wrinkle and in the end I had to accept a boarding pass for a middle seat. The ticketing agent did take pity on me and said that she would make a note in the system so that her colleagues at the boarding gate could change me to window or aisle seat if they found a vacancy.
When I did go to board the airline the stewardess there stopped me and gave me a new boarding pass for a window seat. I was pleasantly surprised by this change and was absolutely blown away when I get to the seat and find that it was actually a window exit roaw seat. After twice pleading with the airline to take my money for an upgrade I ended up getting upgraded to a more comfortable seat on an earlier flight for free. While I can complain about the upgrade I can only hope that Cathay Pacific realizes that occasionally you will have passengers who are willing to pay for upgrades and they need to make it easy for them to get those upgrades. It is absolutely ridiculous to refuse to upgrade a person because they bought their ticket from a different office or are paying with $100 bills. By upgrading they get some extra money for zero additional fuel spend while the customer gets a more comfortable seat to travel in. By refusing to take my money on an empty flight you just irritated me for no reason and made it very unlikely that I will ever fly Cathay again.
The folks at Yahoo oneSearch just announced the new oneSearch Shortcut application with a new auto-locate feature that determines the users location using cell-tower positioning and wi-fi triangulation. This combines with the existing voice search and oneSearch clusters to create what is in my opinion the best mobile search experience in the business (especially on Nokia S60 devices). Read on for a quick description of the user experience:
The Shortcut application starts off by showing you a small text entry field on the idle-screen of you mobile phone. The text field has a small note telling you to hold down the “Call” button and speak. I think I’ll give Slumdog Millionaire a try.
Once you have said the search term the app “thinks” for a couple of seconds before showing you the search term for confirmation. Just hit the “Search” button to start the search.
Which results in a search results page that automatically determines your current location (Sunnyvale, CA in my case) using cell-tower and wi-fi beacon positioning. Additionally since oneSearch knows that “Slumdog Millionaire” refers to a movie, it automatically displays the movie information along with the showtimes from the nearest theaters. You can even use the “Buy Tickets” link to buy your tickets so you wont have to wait in line when you get to the theater. Click through on the image above to see the full search results page which includes things like the trailer, official website, movie reviews, etc…
And of course movies aren’t the only thing you can search for this way, Shortcut helps you find any local content (restaurants, stores, etc…) based on your auto-locate location, as well as regular web content. And for those of you who prefer typing it also has search assist which allows you to auto-complete your search terms. In my opinion this integrated solution that allows users to find information (local and otherwise) by just saying what they want is the ultimate mobile search experience. Get it on your Nokia S60, Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone by visiting http://mobile.yahoo.com/onesearch/shortcut.
P.S.: For those of you who remember my Foodfinder hack from YRB – yes that’s exactly what auto-locate does
P.S.S.: I do work at Yahoo! but these are as usual my personal opinions and do not reflect on the views of Yahoo!
I’m lucky enough to have a job that has taken me to several different countries and one of things friends keep asking me is how each trip was. This is a really tough question for me to answer since I’m really not much of a tourist, I have no interest in visiting the local monuments and museums which means that I generally dont get out much when I’m at conferences etc… And this isnt restricted to business travel either – my vacations usually involve visiting people rather than the places they live.
The one thing I do like doing on trips is sampling the local food and drink. I’m willing to try a good number of dishes and an even greater number of drinks. If you were to ask me how my average trip went I will give you a monosyllabic answer, ask me about the cuisine and its quite possible that I’ll bore you to death. As a sample I’m going to list some of the more interesting things I tried during my last two trips to Finland and Korea.
Finnish Meatballs
If you’ve ever been to IKEA with me you’ll know that I am a big fan of the Swedish meatballs they sell there. So when we ended up going to a traditional finnish restaurant (the famous Seahorse restaurant) for lunch I absolutely had to try the “Finnish meatballs”. The dish itself was awesome and I am now even more impressed at how good the Ikea version is.
Vendace fish in brine
Vendace fish is a another traditional finnish delicacy which consists of these small headless (decapitated really) fish pickled in brine. A sweetish flavour and an interesting texture make it something I will definitely recommend.
Reindeer burger + steak
This was one of the things I tried just to see what it was like. The burger was excellent though to be honest I wasn’t that impressed with the steak which was a little to tough for me.
Tar Schnaps
This was probably the bravest thing I had on my trip. The drink is made by actually dissolving tar – the same tar used to make roads – in alcohol. I wasn’t sure if I should try it but when the finns who were taking us around told us that it was a local delicacy I had to try it for myself. The most surprising thing is that it is actually a very mellow shot and totally not what you’d expect when someone describes it to you.
Absinthe
I finally got to try Absinthe for the first time. My favourite part of the drink is theatrical production involved in actually making the drink (in the video above). The bartender starts with placing a shot of absinthe in a bath of water and soaks a sugar cube in the drink. He them places the cube on a spoon over the glass and pours the drink over the sugar cube. He then sets the cube on fire and lets its caramelize before dropping it into the drink.
The drink itself has a 70% alcohol content and is served with a jar of water so you can dilute it to . Once you add water to it the drink becomes cloudy and supposedly releases the flavours though I really couldn’t tell any difference. I have to admit that in the end the drink was too strong and I gave up with about 20% left
Koskenkorva 60% Vodka
I bought a bottle of this to make some more homemade Salmiakki Koskenkorva. The 60% alcohol content should make it a very interesting batch.
Leijona
This is another drink I picked up at the duty free shop. I was trying to get some Fisu but since they were out of stock the attendant suggested I try Leijona instead. Having tried it I have to say its in a similar vein, has more menthol than fisu but not as much as white opal, definitely worth trying.
Korean multi course meals
While in Korea I didnt really try anything too out of the ordinary. I did get to have a couple of multi-course Korean dinners which are long sedate affairs and give you a chance to taste several different things. The first one was a 9 course version at the official dinner reception for Ubicomp 2008. As you can see it consisted of a variety of different items including the ’5 kinds of side dishes’ as a separate item. Most of the items contained meat which meant that vegetarians didnt always get to eat their fill.
After the end of the conference a group of us decided to try out vegetarian version of the same meal. The restaurant consisted of private booths that had paper walls and sliding doors. You had to take off your shoes before entering and sitting cross-legged on the floor. It was a six course meal that was so incredibly filling that I barely even touched the desert. I was so busy eating that I forgot to photograph the food
Geumsan Insamju
This is a ginseng based korean folk liquor which actually has a real ginseng root in the liquor bottle. The company claims to have been making it since the Age of the Three Kingdoms (1399) and says it has medical properties. The smell reminds me of cutting grass on a wet day while the 43% alcohol content really does hit home.
Bok Boon Ja
Bok Boon Ja is a sweet raspberry wine which is staple at korean celebrations – I haven’t opened this bottle yet so I cant really comment on the drink.
Masu box souvenir
And finally I cant talk about all this liquor without mentioning my all time favourite conference souvenir – these wooden Masu boxes (sake cups) that they gave us at Ubicomp 2005 in Tokyo.
Update: I have since tried the Bok Boon Ja and I have to say that it is spectacular. I’m usually not a big fan of wine but I really like the fruity smell and aftertaste from this wine. I highly recommend it especially to people who like sweeter wines.
I’ve recently had the pleasure of using a N95 8GM NAM (N95-4) that was provided to me by Nokia as part of the WOM World program. I actually have both the original N95 and an N95 8GB (N95-2) but both of them are euro 3G which meant that I was stuck at EDGE speeds on US AT&T network. I’ve had a couple of weeks to play with the device and the big differentiator was of course the blazing fast internet speeds (see the speed test results below). Uploading ZoneTag photos and seeing Zurfer images was so fast that I would just continue using the 3G network even when I had an available WiFi access point.
Since I have an unlimited data plan on my phone, I obviously had to see if I could share my 3G connection with my other devices, namely an N800 Internet Tablet and my MacBook Pro (Tiger). This however was not such a simple process – it appears that the 3G versions have made small changes to their connection protocols which have rendered my existing connection sharing steps useless. The even more annoying part was that the steps in setting up the connection would all work just fine but when you actually tried to use the connection it just wouldn’t work I tried a bunch of internet searching and after considerable trial and error I was able to get connection sharing to work. So in order to spare the next poor fool the trouble I’m writing up this tutorial on how to share the 3G connection from an N95 8GB NAM with first an N800 Maemo and then with a MacBook Pro running Tiger. As always there are no warranties or guarantees – use at your own risk.
Connection sharing between a 3G Nokia phone and the N800 OS2008 Internet Tablet
The following steps should tell you how to share the 3G connection from your Nokia to your N800 Maemo tablet. They have been tested to work between my N95 8GB NAM (with US AT&T service) and my N800 OS2008 though they should theoretically work for different Nokia phones and various tablets including the N810
Pair the N800 with your Phone
Switch on the N800 and go to Menu -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Phone
You should now see a dropdown menu listing the “Selected Phone”. Click the “New” button.
The tablet will take a few seconds to do a bluetooth scan before listing all available devices. Select your phone from the list and click “Ok”
The pairing screen will display a code. Hit Ok and then enter that code into your phone when prompted to do so. Accept the connection request from the tablet.
The Tablet will now display the “Operator Setup” screen. Hit next to continue
Select USA as your country and hit next.
Select AT&T Internet as your mobile operator and hit next
Tap “Finish” to save your settings
Setting up the connection on the Tablet
You will now have gone back to the “Phone” window on the tablet with the name of your phone selected in the dropdown. Hit the “Ok” button to save your phone.
Open the “Connectivity” icon in the Control Panel and click the “Connections” button
Click the New button to open the “Connection Setup wizard” and click “Next” to continue.
Enter the connection name and set the connection type to “Packet Data”. Hit next to continue.
Change the Access Point Name to be “wap.cingular”. If you do not do this it WILL NOT work. If you are using a carrier other than AT & T you should set it to be the access point name you use on your phone. You can get it on the phone by going to Menue -> Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Access points. Click on the access point you use on the phone and use the text you find under “Acess point name”. Do not use the connection name since that can be different from the access point name.
The dialup number is *99# while the username and password are blank. Hit “Next” to continue.
Tap “Finish” to save the settings
Using the Connection from your N800 tablet
To open the connection on your tablet click on the connection icon (between the volume and battery icons) in the top right of the screen
Click “Select Connection” to see a list of connections and available WiFi access points.
Select the connection you just created and click “Connect”
The phone will prompt you about accepting a connection from the tablet – hit “yes” and the tablet will connect to the phone and display a message saying “Connect to XXXXX”
You are now connected over 3G.
You can disconnect the connection at any time by clicking the connection icon and hitting “Disconnect”
You can avoid the connection prompt by going to Menu -> Tools -> Bluetooth page on your phone. Click right on the D-pad which will show a list of accepted connections. Find your N800 on the list, click on options and “Set as authorized”. This will allow connections without requiring your permission every time.
Connection sharing between a 3G Nokia phone and Mac OS X
The following steps should tell you how to share the 3G connection from your Nokia to your OS X machine. They have been tested to work between my N95 8GB (with US AT&T service) and my MacBook Pro running Tiger though they should theoretically work for different Nokia phones and various versions of OS X (requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 and higher for iSync) .
Install the iSync Plugin
You MUST go through this process first – I have found that without this the connection may not successfully complete.
The first step is to download the Nokia iSync plugin for the N95 which is available here. It is important to download the exact version needed for your phone – I have found that the N95 plugin does NOT work with the N95 8GB.
Once you have downloaded the dmg file double click it to open the image and then double click on the installation package.
Follow the steps in the wizard to install the package.
Pair Mac with Phone
Make sure bluetooth is turned on and set to discoverable (visibility shown to all) on your phone.
Go to “System Preferences” and click on “Bluetooth”.
Click the “Set Up New Device” button and then hit “continue” on the wizard that pops up.
Select the device type to be “Mobile Phone” and click continue.
The Mac will then take a minute or so to scan for any mobile phones within Bluetooth range and give you a list. Select your phone from the list and click “continue”
The next step is for the computer to gather information about your phone. This will take another minute or so, just wait till the process is complete and click “continue”
The mac will now display an eight digit numerical code and prompt you to enter it on your device. Your phone will be displaying a prompt to enter the passkey on the phone – enter it and hit ok (on the phone). The phone will then display a message asking if it should accept an incoming connection from your computer – click “yes”.
The next step is to setup the services you want you computer to access on your phone. For sharing your connection you need to check the box saying “Access the internet with your phone’s data connection” and set the radio button below it to be “Use a direct, higher speed connection…”. Now hit continue.
The next screen will setup connection strings for your phone. Leave the username and password blank and set the GPRS CID string to “*99#” (without quotes). Select “Nokia Infrared” as the Modem script and hit “Continue”.
Your mac and phone are now setup to share their connection – hit the “Quit” button.
Using the connection
Go to the “Network” tab in system preferences and set the Show dropdown to “Network Status”
Select the “Bluetooth” option and click the “Connect” button.
This will have opened “Internet Connect” with all the right configurations. Click the “Connect” button
Your phone will prompt you to accept a connection from your laptop – say “Yes”.
In a few seconds your connection status will say “Connected” and you will be free to surf the net at 3G speeds. In fact a good portion of this blog post was written on my Mac over 3G
Possible issues
It can get quite annoying to have your phone keep prompting you to allow the conection. You can get around this by going to Menu -> Tools -> Bluetooth page on your phone. Click right on the D-pad which will show a list of accepted connections. Find your computer on the list, click on options and “Set as authorized”. This will allow your laptop to make connections without requiring your permission every time.
Occasionally I have had issues disconnecting the 3G connection. Sometimes the status keeps saying “disconnecting” while other times it says its ready to connect but throws error messages to verify your connection settings. I’ve found that a reboot of the computer and the phone usually fixes it.
I had an interesting experience this morning – my cellphone (which is set to get automatic time updates from the cell tower) suddenly reset its time back by 8 hours and as a result my cellphone alarm didnt go off. When I got up it said that the time was 11:30 pm when it was actually 7:30 am. I tried restarting the phone and even forced a network time update but the phone stubbornly said that the time was 11:30 pm and there was nothing I could do about it. When I was driving to work the phone finally set itself to the correct time and the alarm started going off about 2 hours later than it was supposed to. It appears that the cell tower closest to my home has some problem with its time server and has been giving incorrect time updates to all the phones in my area – as soon as I drove away from home the phone connected to a different tower and got an accurate time update.
And while this meant that I was late for work, the more interesting thing is that I’ve had to re-evaluate the reliability of the cellphone clock. I have gotten so used to using the cellphone clock that there was even a period of time when I went without a wrist watch and always used my cell to tell the time. The fact that the cellphone gets time updates from the nearest cell tower has always made it more reliable in my eyes. I never had to worry about day light savings times and the time would automatically set itself to the current timezone when I was traveling. I do not own an alarm clock and both Nithya and I rely on exclusively on our cellphone alarms. Even in at work we always assume that the time from the ZoneTag cellphone is more accurate than the time from the users digital camera. And while this is usually true, this mornings mixup has driven home the fact that cellphones aren’t 100% infallible – guess its time to finally buy that alarm clock.
[tags]time, clock, mobile, cellphone, network time, time update[/tags]
Helping organize the Mobile Spatial Interaction (MSI) workshop at CHI 2007 has made me very sensitive to the usage of the term MSI. Most people see Mobile and Spatial attached to Interaction and immediately start talking about location aware applications and services. However as someone who has spent the last few years working on location-aware applications, I have always felt that MSI and location-aware apps are two slightly different classes of research. As a result I’ve been spending some time thinking about how to define MSI as well as understanding how it differs (if it differs at all) from the current of location aware applications. My definition of location aware will of course be highly biased by projects like FireEagle, ZoneTag and Zurfer)
Location
I define location aware systems as systems that know the users absolute position. The accuracy of the location will of course change as will the source input (IP, Cell tower, GPS, user sumitted), used but by definition all location-aware systems can locate the user down to some arbitrary level of accuracy. The available accuracy may vary widely from country to city to zipcode to lat/long, and typically the best possible accuracy comes from GPS receiver which has an average error rate of about 30 feet.
MSI on the other hand requires not only the users physical location but also their spatial orientation (heading at a minimum but possibly including information like tilt, height, etc…). Typically MSI also requires a greater level of location accuracy – most spatially aware systems cannot do much with city level location and generally require at least GPS level location accuracy. In many ways you can consider the MSI grade location (and orientation) to be the logical conclusion of ever improving location aware technologies.
Interaction
To me the greatest difference between location aware and MSI applications is in terms of the interactions that they can enable. A location aware application has more of a “smart†interaction where the app tailors the content based on your location. ZoneTag is an excellent example of a location aware app that suggests tags based on your current location. To the user it appears to be a smart application that just knows what the user probably wants.
MSI interaction on the other hand can go much deeper than just smart apps. Sure it would be awesome to have a version of ZoneTag that showed the tags for the object you just took a picture of but that’s the obvious and (relatively) easy part. To me the real killer app for MSI is in enabling the creation of tangible* intuitive user interfaces. Interfaces that actually interact with their physical surroundings will not only have greater adoption (due to easy learnability) but peoples innate curiosity and playfulness will make the interaction more pleasurable (if you’ve ever seen a group of tenured professors act like children at a SmartSkin table you know what I mean ).
Magic
Ubicomp researchers have been trying to make these intuitive interfaces for years but have been hampered by the artificial nature of the sensing technology. With mobile phones becoming more powerful and increasingly including things like GPS, digital compasses, accelerometers, tilt sensors, etc… it isn’t going to be too long before every person is walking around with an MSI/Ubicomp enabling device in their pocket. If MSI researchers have their way people will no longer have to squint at tiny screens, explicit interfaces will disappear and users will directly query and interact with their real world environment. We still have a long way to go before we get there but projects like Air Messages, Point and Find, relateGateways, etc… are beginning to show how users can interact with the real world. They are opening a while new set of research questions about how people will react to such technology – I don’t know what the killer app will be but I’m pretty sure the interaction will be indistinguishable from magic.
* I am using the word tangible since even gestural MSI is situated in the physical environment.
[tags]MSI, Mobile spatial interaction, location-aware, lbs, research[/tags]
The following is a post I wrote for the YRB blog. My readers get the bonus YouTube footage directly embedded on the page
A few weeks ago when the research community was looking at CHI, Formula 1 racing fans were looking at Germany to watch a very different event. Nick Heidfeld was driving a F1 car around the famed Nürburgring-Nordschleife circuit in Germany. “The Green Hell” as it is popularly known is one of the toughest race tracks on the planet and last hosted an F1 race back in 1976 when Niki Lauda’ near fatal crash put an end to F1 at the track. It has since been used only for sports car racing and also as a public access race track. On April 28, BMW organized a special event where several of their racing cars would be driven around the ring including 3 laps in their 2006 BMW F1 car. The event had F1 fans all over the world speculating about possible laptimes and thousands showed up to watch the event live.
At this point you are probably wondering what this has to do with YRB. The answer is media: the very first images and videos of the event came from Flickr and YouTube. This is not new to the world of journalism, public citizens have been scoopingthe pressfor years. With the rise of the Internet, bloggers have started breaking stories and are often authorities on specific topics. However this event was a bit different because it was specifically conceived of as a public relations opportunity. The BMW PR machine had been hyping the event for weeks and had a full team there to capture the event in its full glory. Within 24 hours of the event they released a slickly edited video showing the highlights around the lap. It included onboard footage, helicopter shots and even video from chase cars. Despite all the effort and the fairly quick turnaround time, the corporate PR machine was beaten by a handful of people with cheap camcorders and Internet access. Not only was the fan media the first to be available, it also showed many things that the official video did not. You could see things like the size of the crowd, the sound of a distant F1 engine, the wait for the car to go past, there were even a few shots of the camera car.
This kind of situation leaves the consumer with an interesting choice: On one hand you have the quick and dirty fan media which is immediately available and on the other hand there is the better edited professional media which is available with some delay but usually more comprehensive. The consumer now have to decide which source they want their information from and that will depend on the topic and its time sensitivity. This choice is going to become even harder in the future as fans start editing their media more and the professionals speed up their editing process. I believe that in the end trust and authority will become the deciding factor – all else being equal users will choose the source that they trust the most.
At YRB we are very interested in both sources of media and are studying how people collect, consume, share and remix media. We don’t know what media sources will “win” but we do know that this is a very interesting time for research.
RT @cjmartin: Fun to see one of @rnair's photos (http://flic.kr/p/aPeaf) featured in this video created using CC Flickr photos: http://b ... 2010/08/18
Just got Sir Stirling Moss to sign my Lotus F1 heritage poster 2010/08/14
Even within the same gear the acceleration is phenomenal. The car pulls pretty strongly below 6k rpm but once you go above the 6k threshold the 
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