Fade to Play

I was directed via Nicolas Nova’s site to this pervasive game called La Fuga involving RFID tags.

RFID tracks La Fuga players as they make their way through the Mazzinia complex, trying to escape.

Every player receives a console consisting of a specially designed PDA worn on the wrist. Between the PDA and its wrist strap is a passive RFID tag with a unique ID number used to locate and identify each player during the game.

“RFID provided an easy way to identify every player individually,” says Josep Cabestany at Négone, a Madrid-based developer of interactive games. The company invested €16.3 million to design and produce the technology on which La Fuga is based, and to convert the bank into the equivalent of a three-dimensional game board.

The PDA communicates to the game system by means of wireless technology developed by Négone. A player uses the console to answer the questions, and to receive information such as score, battery level or time left.

“The game system activates the quizzes, the doors and the tricks in response to the detection of the tags. This allows the system to keep track of the gaming information of each player and generate each player’s game individually,” Cabestany says.

Relevance: The first instance I know of involving RFID tags in a pervasive game. Are there any other games out there?

18-year-old Katie Barnard’s prom date text-messaged her one hour before the big night that he couldn’t make it. (Laura Leyshon for the Globe and Mail)

This Globe and Mail article once again highlights a trend in teen/college dating today. Mobile and digital technologies are being used to supplement actual voice communication such as a phone call or a face-to-face meeting. Everyone uses Facebook and on Facebook is where you find out how your ex’s are doing, who your friends are dating, and about the dating status of _potentials_.

Stephanie, a 22-year-old living in Toronto, has a different problem: She broke up with her boyfriend in the real world, but can’t remove his presence from her virtual life. She hasn’t logged onto Facebook in four months, except to delete his name from the status line on her profile — “that’s kind of replaced getting rid of old letters and postcards.”

His face is in her photo albums, his friends are on his contact list, his comments archived on her wall. She’s not pining, she says, but it would be tempting to peek at his page. “You just have to click a button and you can instantly see how their whole world has changed since you left it.” She misses being on Facebook. “You have to cut off your relationship with this whole online world to cut off your relationship with one person.”

Relevance: An excellent article outlining some of the privacy concerns felt by today’s teens and young people as they balance the need for companionship with their desire to remain in touch with their friends using the _it_ social networking tool which right now is Facebook.

Sally Ryan for The New York Times

For those people that have visions of the elderly playing bridge and relaxing in rocking chairs while living out the end of their lives in retirement homes, this New York Times article may come as something of a shock.

Dick Norwood, 61, a semi-retired businessman who lives in a community for residents 55 and older in Crest Hill, Ill., spotted the Wii in a mall in December. After playing Wii bowling with two other couples at home, he persuaded Giovan’s, a local Italian restaurant, to begin a “seniors only” Wii bowling league, where nine couples now show up every Thursday.

“When I started calling people about it, they had no idea what I was talking about, and they were laughing at me saying, ‘You want to start a bowling league on a video game in a bar?’ ” he said. “Well, we got there the first time, and we were there for six solid hours. In the past, I probably would have agreed that video games are just for kids. But I’ll tell you, at our age when you bowl for real, you wake up with aches and pains. Those balls aren’t light. But with this you’re getting good exercise, but you’re not aching the next day.”

Relevance: Perhaps video games can make our brains smarter. I am wondering whether there is any research with the elderly and pervasive games or even alternate reality games? I am wondering about how they might collaborate differently vs. college students in a game played in an urban setting.

I was directed to this month’s online edition of Vague Terrain which focuses on a locative theme.

Vague Terrain is a web based quarterly publication showcasing work from various national and International artists, musicians, and writers. The quarterly samples the focus and methodologies of academic and art journals, and examines contemporary issues in an immediate and accessible manner that reflects the nature of the web. Content consists of curated visual, audio, and written works.

The guest editor is David McCallum.

When I was first asked to edit the journal, it was to be on the subject of mobile technology due to my experience with projects such as the Warbike, an artwork that creates music from WiFi networks through which a cyclist rides. But to consider mobile technology is not to marvel at the ability to watch TV on one’s cell phone—merely shifting content created for one medium to another—it is to consider the implications of our new-found ability to take it with you. Watching TV on the subway is not the same thing as watching TV in your home.

The latest PDA and cell phone developments are easy targets for theorising about mobile technology, but a device as simple as Sony’s Walkman in 1979 drastically altered the ways in which people communicate in public. Although it innocently allowed you to take your music out of the home, it actually created an entirely new set of communicative gestures using headphones: disregard for others by playing music too loudly, taking headphones off to signal an openness to engage verbally, putting headphones on to avoid contact in public.

What changes when we take it with us? The parameter is space, or place. The term locative, in many ways, gives one the impression of a device with some artificial intelligence that allows the little thing—if I’m forgiven to personify our cute gadgets—to know something about the space in which it’s situated or moving through. Of course, artificial intelligence, especially confined to the current power of mobile processors, is nowhere near smart enough to truly understand anything about space. It cannot contextualise the same way that you or I would if placed in a foreign space. What it does do is give us information based on the space according to the parameters and design that we’ve set up for it. It doesn’t give us information outside of the media we’ve chosen, but this still allows for a great amount of surprise and discovery.

The renewed interest in space generated by mobile technologies such as the cell phone, and location-specific technologies such as GPS, has spread to areas beyond the high-tech. People are finding connections between their perceptions of space and those of the Situationists in the twentieth-century, and the wanderings of the Surrealists before them. Communities are forming psychogeography societies to explore their urban surroundings. Civic interest and concern in urban centres is not only healthier than ever before, but gaining momentum.

Relevance:  How is mobile technology changing how I view my space?  As I use a laptop, finding a free plug on a campus built before laptops were prevalent is a challenge.  Why don’t classroom have more plugs?

This workshop is being organised by the labs/groups I am affiliated with. It should be great if you can attend. Please contact lavana@cs.ubc.ca

Workshop: Getting in touch with Large Display: hands-on practical experiences with the development of interactive large display installations

Date: Thursday, March 29th 4:00 – 6:00 pm,

Location: Room 1001, Forest Science Building, 2424 Main
Mall (Main Mall and Agronomy Road)University of BC
http://tinyurl.com/3863yf

Synopsis: The increasing use of public large screen digital
displays offers a new way of reaching consumers with high
impact audio and video. Currently, most commercial displays
are passive broadcast devices, similar in a way too large
screen TVs in public locations. However, research is
underway into how to transform these devices from passive
one way displays to highly interactive two way channels
allowing consumers to influence the presentation and even
upload their own media. This interaction can be driven via
a variety of means but one gaining popularity is to allow
consumers to use their own personal cell phones as
interaction device as well as upload/download and even
split screen presentation. While there is a variety of
opportunities for this type of technology, the upcoming
Olympics in Vancouver 2010 offers a chance for Vancouver to
showcase interactive public screens, the associated media
content and build on the success of the FIFA World Soccer
Championship in Germany 2006.

This workshop will discuss research work underway in the
area of public interactive large screens and will highlight
the opportunities and challenges for technologists and
media artists in their use. A particular focus will be on
existing experimental deployments as well as steps
Vancouver can make to prepare and deploy this technology in
advance of 2010.

Speakers:

1. Dr Rodger Lea/Nicole Arksey – Intro, Urban Screens background, in-home large screen project
2. Dr. Adrian Friday – eCampus, goals, status and experiences
3. Dr. Sidney Fels/Tony Tang – UBC large screen research work

******20 free parking passes are available for the first 20 people who RVSP*******
**********Please indicate in your email when you RVSP*****************

UBC Directions

Transit:
Take any bus that states UBC as its destination — in
Vancouver, bus routes #4, #9, #17, #25, #41, #43, #44, #49,
#99 B-Line, #258 and #480 will all take you to UBC.
Skytrain passengers can get off at Broadway Station and
then transfer onto the #99 B-Line bus to UBC

To get to UBC by car:
Drive westbound along either 4th Avenue, 10th Avenue turn
left when you get to Wesbrook, drive past the UBC hospital
and turn into the Thunderbird Parkade (yellow building).
Walk southwest on Thunderbird Blvd toward Health Sciences
Mall Turn right at Main Mall

Parking Information
Thunderbird Parkade 6.00 All day SE Thunderbird Blvd. -
Located on southeast sector, south of the University
Hospital.

Call for Papers
IRIE: International Review of Information Ethics

Issue No. 008; Vol. 8; December 2007

Special Issue: Ethical Challenges of Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous Computing (an idea introduced by Mark Weiser, and often bracketed with slight modifications under the concepts of Pervasive Computing or Ambient Intelligence) imagines, in the extreme case, the entire mesosphere saturated by ICT. In this fantasy, ICT will accompany all aspects of our life. Our everyday world will be made intelligent, and all our actions, at all times and everywhere, will undergo some kind of ICT support. We will be appropriately guided, monitored, and provided with our needs and desires.

More prosaically, Ubiquitous Computing systems generally consist of interlinked capacities for memory and data storage, for perception and environmental sensing, and for the interpretation of contexts and situations. These activities might be carried out using various kinds of technology. And indeed, a whole host of technical research fields are
working toward this goal, from mechatronics to materials science, from network engineering to computing and AI research. And of course, ubiquity or omnipresence will never be total. For technical, economic, and other reasons, there will only be pockets where Ubiquitous Computing systems come into effect. Nevertheless, the present research scenarios entail applications which will have more or less impact on every domain of life, from leisure, jobs, and health care to domestic policing and war.

Any ethical discussion of Ubiquitous Computing is inherently problematic because we are dealing with emergent technology. We must take into account its potential, without knowing how far this potential can be realised in detail, and without knowing the fields in which pervasive ICT will find acceptance. Nevertheless, any research program that may so radically infiltrate our daily life requires some kind of ethical framework, to complement and counterbalance economic and militaristic motivations, and to provide direction with respect both to traditional values and to our hopes for the future.

The case of Ubiquitous Computing brings into sharper focus two key problems in theoretical ethics that have already attained a special position in applied media ethics: on the one hand, determining the reality which will be influenced with our acting, and on the other hand, determining the subject to whom these actions will be attributed and who will intervene in reality. In certain sense we may say that Ubiquitous Computing diminishes the confrontational character of reality. Ubiquitous Computing environments will necessarily perceive and act upon subjects as ideal types, or stereotypes. Situations may be reduced to typical moments. Ambivalence and ambiguity may be lost. Moreover, the more invisible, pervasive, and transparent these systems become, the more they disappear and are taken for granted, the harder they will be to confront. If the mechanisms by which these systems produce and ascribe identities, situations, and contexts are unavailable for engagement by the subjects of the system, then those subjects may lose the skills and resources necessary to negotiate the construction of these identities, situations, and contexts. It may simply become necessary to accept the system’s reification of the typical.

The experience of the world and the self will therefore undergo a transformation in intelligent environments. This gives rise to countless ethical issues whose analysis must go hand in hand with the development of such systems. The key questions just posed must be supplemented by additional specific problems, concerning, for instance, the anonymous generation of cognition, possible changes in the ethos of cognition, privacy and the formation of trust in intelligent worlds, and finally, the context sensitivity of the system and the related intrusion in our sphere of understanding.

The 7th issue of IRIE will tackle the ethical challenge of ubiquitous systems and therefore furnish a contribution to the establishment of an ethics of Ubiquitous Computing. This ethics is anchored in the field of media ethics, yet it may call into question the fundamental issues in this field, insofar as the entire mesosphere appears as disposed to such media. Thus, the boundaries between media and the what they mediate may be radically questioned.

Deadlines

Deadline for submission abstracts: June 15, 2007
Notification of acceptance to authors: August 15, 2007
Deadline for submission of full articles: November 15, 2007
Publication: December, 2007

Possible Topics

The production of reality (as concrete contents) and the production of Wirklichkeit (as opposed to the individual and an embedding of reality)
- Medialization of the physical world
- Interpretation of reality and environments using context sensitive and adaptive systems
- Modelling of acting and behaviour through context sensitive and adaptive systems

Privacy, Surveillance, Trust
- Privacy in intelligent interactive environments
- Surveillance, data protection and personal freedom
- Ubiquitous systems and trust

Manufacturing of the Acting Subject
- Identity formation in intelligent environments
- The Other in intelligent environments
- Self-perception in intelligent environments

Cognition in intelligent environments
- Generating cognition in intelligent environments
- Anonymous generation of cognition and cognitive acquisition
- Transformation of the cognitive ethos

Problems of Ubiquitous Computing in special fields of application
- Health Care
- Economy and work
- Living in a smart home (and other fields …)

Rules of the game
Potential authors must provide an extended abstract (max. 1500 words) by 31/05/2007. The abstract can be written in the mother tongue of the author though an English translation of this abstract must be included if the chosen language is not English. IRIE will publish articles in English, French, German, Portuguese or Spanish. The author(s) of contributions in French, Portuguese, or Spanish must nominate at least two potential pee reviewers.

The abstracts will be selected by the guest editors. The authors will be informed of acceptance or rejection by 15/08/2007. Deadline for the final article (3.000 words or 20.000 characters including blanks) is 15/11/2007. All submissions will be subject of a peer review. Therefore the acceptance of an extended abstract does not imply the publication of the final text unless the article passed the peer review.

For more information about the journal see: http://www.i-r-i-e.net

Contact
PD Dr. habil. Klaus Wiegerling (Universität Stuttgart, D), Prof. Ph. D.
David Phillips (University of Toronto) manage the special issue as guest
editors. Please send the extended abstracts by e-mail to both of them:

Prof. Dr. David Phillips, davidj.phillips@utoronto.ca

PD. Dr. habil. Klaus Wiegerling, wiegerlingklaus@aol.com

Technorati tags:

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Kris Pichovich, teacher at Sunshine Academy in DDO, teaching a class with the aid of a laptop, a projector and a smart board – part of the Lester B. Pearson school board’s computer training program.

Photograph by : Richard Arless Jr./The Gazette

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