Giladon-line » news statue

Mediated Presence through Physical Objects

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:11:20 +0000

I went to BarCampLA last weekend in downtown LA and was pleasantly surprised at how organized the geek-fest seemed (thanks to Crystal’s hard work). Even though the schedule was packed by the time I got there, I managed to squeeze in a short talk: my take on mediated presence through physical objects (similar to the one I gave at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium in Sept).

In my talk, I presented four main points which I think are central when trying to understand presence in a mediated environment:

->tangible ->intimacy ->immediacy ->context

Tangible :: extracting the experience away from the screen and into physical objects around us

350 years ago one of the most glorious structures on Earth was completed because of an emperor’s great grief for his wife, who died while giving birth. He wanted their love to be commemorated for centuries to come. Its presence still awes and inspires people who visit the Taj Mahal. Presence takes on many forms around us: the presence of great civilization and power when visiting the Mayan pyramids, the presence of Jewish tradition by hanging a small mezzuza on the doorway, or the presence of a great tragedy, when two parallel massive light beams decorate the New York sky in tribute to 9/11.We easily relate to physical objects around us simply because they are there, next to us, in our space. Because they each hold a story or even a memory. We know how to interact with different items by their functionality, material or shape – everyone knows to handle paintings with care, as they are fragile, but a ball should be thrown around. Thats what it is made for.

Computers have so many functions, narratives and relate to so many different parts of our lives. Our interactions are extremely simple, when compared to the immense diversity of functions the computer serves in our lives. When we meet a good friend online, we cannot squeeze the computer and send them a hug, but rather type a series of characters and possibly throw some smiley faces on the screen. It is time to break out of the screen and adopt new ways for interacting with different functionalities that our computers ofeer. When we look at theatre, an actor performs and receives immediate feedback from the audience. His presence feeds the audience, who then react back. Theatrical presence usually refers to the relationship between the actor and the audience. In my view it is extremely important to experiment with ‘breaking the fourth wall’, taking things outside of the screen in order to and finding new methods of interaction with digital content.

Intimacy :: the ability and choice to be close, loving and vulnerable

I’m interested to figure out a way to enhance intimacy and support authentic connections across a distance. How can intimacy be represented in mediated spaces? For me, the most intimate means available to connect with a faraway person is through webcam (voice+image). The imPulse project explores the idea of creating intimacy across a distance by sharing an extremely private and internal attribute – a person’s heartbeat. It often takes much longer for us before we get to feel another person’s heartbeat. This project has gone through several iterations, the latest, a wireless module, presented at CHI’07.

Immediacy :: reciprocity and synchronicity

Immediacy relates to the timing and latency of data – how important is it to receive the information right now? The more synchronous a conversation is, the more attention it requires and the more intense it feels. A conversation is usually more meaningful when conditions allow for reciprocity to take place. But it is not necessarily more meaningful when the information is immediate. What interests me is to explore how immediacy and synchronicity affects the strength of a connection to a remote person or place; their presence.
I’ve just about had it with online social networks. Tools like facebook or twitter are great at first. They support asynchronous conversations with people I’d never tried hard enough to stay in touch with. But there are not enough tools which support the deeper, more substantial connections. That’s what I long for and that’s what I think is missing.
Keeping this idea in mind, the Kotel installation explores a real-time connection to a remote location by using live video streams. The cameras broadcast images from the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and are overlayed within an interactive display. This creates a direct, one-way channel between a person and that place. The display is controlled by touching a rock.

Context :: taking things out of context

Local cultural norms (or the context in which they exist) play a key role when designing objects for people to interact and connect with. By modifying an already known object it is possible to latch onto a user’s existing habits and take advantage of an existing relationship between the person and the object. Everyone knows how to hold a baseball bat or where to look for the ‘take photo’ button in a digital camera. It is Okay to spit in Canal street, but considered a sin a mere few blocks away in Soho.Though it is important to take into account these cultural and social norms, I find it extremely interesting to place an object out of its’ usual context – placing it in a new environment. When done correctly, there can be a strikingly powerful impression left on the viewers. For example, I will never forget an exhibit I saw in Israel this past summer, where real qassam missiles were taken from real-life bomb scenes in Sderot (an Israeli city bordering Gaza) and reproduced in a central Tel Aviv boulevard. Real rockets, real furniture in real scenes from the Sderot bombings. There was something so powerful about recreating these scenes, taken out of context, and placed in the central part of Tel-Aviv. By placing these scenes in a new environment the topic raised much more attention.

World News Wheels is a prototype I worked on, inspired by the shape and of Tibetan prayer wheels which can be found all across the Himalayas. Many believe that once turned, the prayer inscribed on them rises up to the heavens. It is the people’s duty to circumambulate around a given path, turning as many wheels on the way as they can. This is done twice a day, as the sun rises and sets. I was interested to take these objects and superimpose a new layer above them; one that brought images from events and happenings around the world. It is common for people to consume news in the mornings while reading the paper, and in the evenings when watching TV. In this project, I had hoped to shift the regular use of these object, which have pre-existing cultural context, into a device that helps consume news. This is part of a bigger idea to explore ways for people to have a more emotional connection to worldwide newsworthy events. What was interesting about this specific trial, was that for users, wheels are a highly appealing interface. Yet for those who recognized their similarity to the Tibetan wheels, the project took on a completely different light.

Its time to start learning RSS…

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 07:00:32 +0000

RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.

At the top level, a RSS document is a element, with a mandatory attribute called version, that specifies the version of RSS that the document conforms to. If it conforms to this specification, the version attribute must be 2.0.

Subordinate to the element is a single element, which contains information about the channel (metadata) and its contents.

With the addition of the sub-element of any RSS element can describe a video or audio file (actually any type of file).

has three attributes:

url says where the file is located,

length says how big it is,

and type says what its type is.

This way a workstation or aggregator can know in advance, without having to do any communication, what it’s going to get, and apply scheduling and filtering rules.

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Required channel elements

Here’s a list of the required channel elements, each with a brief description, an example, and where available, a pointer to a more complete description.

Element	Description	Example
title	The name of the channel. It’s how people refer to your service. If you have an HTML website that contains the same information as your RSS file, the title of your channel should be the same as the title of your website.	GoUpstate.com News Headlines
link	The URL to the HTML website corresponding to the channel.	http://www.goupstate.com/
description	Phrase or sentence describing the channel.	The latest news from GoUpstate.com, a Spartanburg Herald-Journal Web site.

Optional channel elements

Here’s a list of optional channel elements.

Element	Description	Example
language	The language the channel is written in. This allows aggregators to group all Italian language sites, for example, on a single page. A list of allowable values for this element, as provided by Netscape, is here. You may also use values defined by the W3C.	en-us
copyright	Copyright notice for content in the channel.	Copyright 2002, Spartanburg Herald-Journal
managingEditor	Email address for person responsible for editorial content.	geo@herald.com (George Matesky)
webMaster	Email address for person responsible for technical issues relating to channel.	betty@herald.com (Betty Guernsey)
pubDate	The publication date for the content in the channel. For example, the New York Times publishes on a daily basis, the publication date flips once every 24 hours. That’s when the pubDate of the channel changes. All date-times in RSS conform to the Date and Time Specification of RFC 822, with the exception that the year may be expressed with two characters or four characters (four preferred).	Sat, 07 Sep 2002 00:00:01 GMT
lastBuildDate	The last time the content of the channel changed.	Sat, 07 Sep 2002 09:42:31 GMT
category	Specify one or more categories that the channel belongs to. Follows the same rules as the -level category element. More info.
generator	A string indicating the program used to generate the channel.	MightyInHouse Content System v2.3
docs	A URL that points to the documentation for the format used in the RSS file. It’s probably a pointer to this page. It’s for people who might stumble across an RSS file on a Web server 25 years from now and wonder what it is.	http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
cloud	Allows processes to register with a cloud to be notified of updates to the channel, implementing a lightweight publish-subscribe protocol for RSS feeds. More info here.
ttl	ttl stands for time to live. It’s a number of minutes that indicates how long a channel can be cached before refreshing from the source. More info here.	60
image	Specifies a GIF, JPEG or PNG image that can be displayed with the channel. More info here.
rating	The PICS rating for the channel.
textInput	Specifies a text input box that can be displayed with the channel. More info here.
skipHours	A hint for aggregators telling them which hours they can skip. More info here.
skipDays	A hint for aggregators telling them which days they can skip. More info here.

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