Future Applications Lab

Mobile2.0 at SIGGRAPH Asia 2011

2011-12-05T04:17:00.000-08:00

If you happen to be around Hong Kong in time for the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 conference, come by and join us in an exciting panel about the past, current and future visions of research within the Mobile2.0 project! The panel, entitled Mobile2.0 - The Future of Apps: Mashing It Up and Getting It Out There, will bring up some of the key research areas that have been covered within the time span of the Mobile2.0 project. The panel will touch upon the design and distribution of mobile services and applications within the past, current and future mobile market. We will discuss the delights of having worked with novel mobile service concepts in an era before the mobile app markets and how the current mobile markets change the way research is done today. The possibilities we find with changes to the mobile ecosystem over the past 5-10 years and the challenges this brings for a new era of services and service values to come in the future. Both from the perspective of the actors within the mobile ecosystem, but also from the perspective of the consumers in use of these services.

Hope to see you there!

Date of panel: December 14th, 4.15-6pm local HK time

Participants in panel: Lars-Erik Holmquist, Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost & Zeynep Ahmet

New visiting researcher: Matthias Korn

2011-12-02T12:47:00.001-08:00

Matthias Korn, a PhD-student of Aarhus University's Computer Mediated Activity Group in Denmark is our new visitor. Matthias is working with us within Mobile 2.0's location-based services theme.

Matthias' work focuses on the cross roads of citizen participation and mobile ubiquitous technology, and studies how location and 'being there' may support citizens in deliberation activities such as participatory planning. His research explores how mobile location-based services interweave physical and digital spaces and, specifically, how people make and experience the link between the two. Matthias' research ties into our work on location-sharing quite nicely, and it's great having him around.

Migrating robots at ACE'11

2011-12-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

One of the human-robot interaction concepts explored within the LIREC project is the concept of migrating agents; agents that move from embodiment to embodiment, allowing to pick whichever physical form fits the robot's task and user's context best. If the migrating agent needs to be perceived as one single character, balancing consistency of its behavior with the advantages of switching embodiments is crucial.

In collaboration with INESC-ID in Portugal, Elena Márquez Segura explored user reactions to migration, focusing on this balance. Elena spent about three weeks in Portugal, and together with INESC-ID's Paulo Gomes, studied children's reactions to the robot dinosaur Pleo, moving from its regular physical form, to a virtual character in a mobile app, and vice versa. Implementation and perceptions of the 'migration moment' itself play a large role in how children experience the move, and their interaction with the agent.

First publication, presented by Elena at ACE'11:
Paulo F. Gomes, Elena Márquez Segura, Henriette Cramer, Tiago Paiva, Ana Paiva, Lars Erik Holmquist (2011) ViPleo and PhyPleo: Artificial pet with two embodiments, Proc. ACE’11, Lisbon, Portugal. pdf

Lars Erik to Yahoo! Labs

2011-10-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

Finally a public note on some very big news! From January 1, Lars Erik Holmquist is moving to sunny California to set up a group at Yahoo! Labs in Santa Clara. Lots of luck - we're expecting lots of surfin' and sunscreen in your future!

In the mean time, Henriette Cramer has taken over as project leader for both Future App Labs projects, Lirec and Mobile 2.0, so direct any questions about the project and collaborations her way.

New master student: Miguel!

2011-09-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

He's been here for a while now, so it's time for an announcement: Miguel Pais is our new master student!

Miguel (on the left, hidden behind his laptop) is working with Nao, the robot, within the Lirec project. Together with our project partners at INESD-ID in Portugal Miguel will be exploring how robots' social cues can mediate people's interactions with each other.

Columbus in Personal Ubiquitous Computing

2011-08-17T02:03:00.000-07:00

A paper entitled Mobile exploration of geotagged photographs, authored by Mattias Rost, Henriette Cramer, and Lars Erik Holmquist, published in Personal Ubiquitous Computing is now available online through the following SpringerLink.

Abstract:

Columbus is a mobile application that lets users explore their surroundings through geotagged photographs, presented to them at the location they were taken. By moving around the physical world, the user unlocks photographs and gets to see and experience them in unison with their location. During two consecutive field trials, we investigated how the application was used and experienced and how photographs and locations are explored together. We found that previous experience with the surroundings people was exploring affected how they experienced the localized content. We report on the system’s design and implementation, the trials as well as resulting insights that can be used by other developers of locative media applications.

We'll be at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm

2011-08-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

We will naturally be at MobileHCI 2011 starting in two weeks from now. MobileHCI will be held i Stockholm, Sweden, and is organized by Mobile Life Centre - the very same centre where we are based! We are all thus very involved in the organization, and will personally make sure it will be an outstanding conference for all.

Besides taking part in the organization, we will also be presenting. On wednesday during the first paper session in Riddarsalen, Henriette Cramer will present the paper 'Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-sharing Using Foursquare' , by herself, Mattias Rost, and Lars Erik Holmquist.

Another, more unconventional presentation takes place after the conference dinner at Munchenbryggeriet, where Lars Erik will be DJ:ing under his alias Got To Have Pop.

You will also see us throughout the conference during various other things, but do not hesitate say hi!

2nd workshop on Research in the Large at UbiComp'11

2011-05-16T07:17:00.001-07:00

We're organizing a 2nd edition of our 'Research in the Large' workshop at UbiComp 2011 on September 18th in Beijing. The workshops will deal with the shared challenges and practical strategies to deal with the challenges inherent to wide deployment and dealing with large-scale data sets. More information at the workshop page.

Organizers: Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost (Mobile Life/SICS), Frank Bentley (Motorola Research) and David Ayman Shamma (Yahoo!).

SICS Open House

2011-05-05T03:26:00.000-07:00

FAL is participating in the SICS open house in Kista. We are showing many demonstrations including Pic-In, SubwayArt, Mobile Mash-ups and the Flower Wall (above). Henriette Cramer talks about studies of emergent location-sharing practices and location mash-ups.

We are in the semi-final of the Ericsson Application Awards

2011-05-03T05:42:00.000-07:00

Two applications, developed by Mobile 2.0, were selected for the semi-final of the Ericsson Application Awards (EAA). Both of our submissions are based on recent work on mobile image recognition.

In the EAA student category we entered our application "MobileArt" in the competition. With MobileArt users can receive information about art pieces in the Stockholm subway by just potining the mobile phone camera at them.

The application "Pic-In" entered in the EAA company competition is a tool for users of location-sharing service foursquare. The application can recognize places based on photos. Users can now share a location by - you guessed it - taking a photo of it.

The winners of the semi-final will be announced at May 28th, so stay tuned for further announcements.

If you want to see, how our applications work, just have a look at the videos below.

New people at FAL

2011-05-03T05:41:00.001-07:00

We have been joined by two new people who will work in the LIREC project: Anders Green and Elena Márquez Segura. Here is how they introduce themselves!

Anders: My research is focused on Human-Robot Interaction with semi-autonoumus service robots. I have a background in computational linguistics and a special interest in communicative quality in relation to interaction with embodied devices. Topics of interest include user-centred interaction design and evaluation for advanced human-robot interaction and challenges related to increasing usability in multimodal dialogue systems for human-robot communication. My thesis is entitled Designing and Evaluating Human-Robot Communication: Informing Design through Analysis of User Interaction.

Elena: I did my bachelor and master in Telecommunication Engineering, Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros, Sevilla, Spain. I am currently studying a second master in Interactive Systems Engineering at KTH, with expected graduation in June.I am really interested in tangling up technology and design, in balanced bottom-up/ top-down design processes, aiming creative, fun, and engaging experiences. I am particularly interested in full body, gesture-based interactions to create embodied and aesthetic experiences.

Back from South By South West!

2011-03-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

A group from FAL went to the South By South West Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, to talk to start-ups and hear about the latest in mobile and location-based services. Among the companies we interviewed were Bump, TangoTab, MapDing, Yobongo, View.io, HeyTell, Locaii, Ditto and Skylines. And some of us also made a splash at the SXSW fashion scene!

Open post-doc position, 1yr, available now!

2011-01-18T02:13:00.000-08:00

The Future Applications Lab is looking for a new post-doc! We are looking for recent Ph.D. graduates from all over the world with a strong interest in robotic artefacts and interaction design.

You'd be working with us in creating practical guidelines that can be used in the design and evaluation of long-term robot ’companions’. You can contribute in many different ways: creating novel concepts for robotic interactions; by investigating the ethical and sociological ramifications of robots and robotic artefacts in everyday life; by performing user tests and ethnographic studies; and much more. The post is for one year. More info in this pdf.

New Master Thesis Student

2011-01-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

We welcome Javier Jiméndes that will write his master thesis in the LIREC project, during the Spring 2011. Javier has a background in interaction design, and will conduct an experience centred study on a robotic eating aid.

'Ethics, logs & videotape'. Large-scale ethics workshop at CHI2011

2010-12-06T07:26:00.000-08:00

App stores have made distribution of research apps to thousands of users incredibly easy. There is more user-generated content around than we can manage to analyze; Millions of tweets, public status updates and shared locations are waiting for us. These are huge opportunities, but researchers now also run into some interesting ethical questions.

Procedures, regulations and ethics - especially in an international and intercultural setting - are unclear and the notion of informed consent is changing. Can we just use all data that is out there? Is someone's tweet intended to be quoted in a research paper? How do we deal with permissions if we use data from users of freely available applications? Do we need to tell people about all our research plans? Is anyone downloading our app a participant?

Asking a million users for a signed consent form is not a feasible option. Notices and messages in apps telling people about our research plans will probably be skipped. If they are read, there is no guarantee they are actually understood. Sometimes researchers cannot even know who the people providing content for their studies are.

Not studies would be missing a huge opportunity, but a discussion is in order. Do we have added responsibilities if we log people’s actions? Can we always be sure there will be no adverse effects for our unwitting ‘participants’?

Join us for a discussion at the CHI2011 workshop we're co-organizing in Vancouver, Saturday May 7th: ETHICS, LOGS, and VIDEOTAPE: Ethics in Large Scale User Trials and User Generated Content.

Position papers due January 14, 2011.
Co-organised by Donald McMillan, Alistair Morrison, Matthew Chalmers (Univ. Glasgow), Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost (Mobile Life), Wendy Mackay (Univ. Paris Sud) and Adam Greenfield.

Meet us at NordiCHI'10!

2010-10-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

Alex Taylor (Microsoft Research), Mattias Jacobsson, Ylva Fernaeus and Sara Ljungblad are organizing the:
2nd International DESIGNING ROBOTIC ARTEFACTS WITH USER- AND EXPERIENCE-CENTRED PERSPECTIVES We look forward to have lively discussions about existing myths in robotic designs, and what we as researchers and designers consider to be down-to earth research in the field! The Workshop is held on Oct 16, Sunday, at Reykjavik University.

SHORT PAPER presented on Tuesday Oct 19 at 15:00 in room H:
Blue-Sky and Down-to-Earth: How Analogous Practices can Support the User-centred Design Process, (Sara Ljungblad and Clint Heyer, ABB)
See you at NordiCHI'10!

Robots as our future companions?

2010-10-13T06:33:00.000-07:00

32 robot researchers met up at Mobile Life Centre and SICS to discuss their current research on how people can live with robots and interactive agents in the future. The meeting is held within the EU project LIREC (Living with Robots and Interactive Companions), a collaboration between six universities, two research institutes and two companies spread across 7 European countries. The project also includes experts in etology, studying peoples relations to dogs and how this knowledge can be transferred into robot design.

Mattias Jacobsson, Ylva Fernaeus, Henriette Cramer, Lars Erik Holmquist and Sara Ljungblad (WP10 leader) from Mobile Life are contributing to the project. We are conducting studies of robots in naturalistic environments, collaborating with swedish startup robot companies, and are exploring user-centred robotic design. Read more about LIREC activites at SICS.

UbiComp 2010

2010-09-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

The whole Future Applications Lab will attend UbiComp 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark on September 26-29! We will present two posters, GeoLocation in the Mobile Web Browser and φ²: Exploring physical Check-Ins for Location-Based Services and organize the workshop Research in the large. We hope to see you there!

Mobile Mash-ups and a tribute to Marc Weiser at APPNATION

2010-09-06T05:26:00.000-07:00

APPNATION is a new conference and exposition focusing on the burgeoning consumer applications economy. It will focus on social and mobile apps across all devices and platforms and the editorial focus will be on the business conversation including monetization, new media business models, advertising and marketing best practices, and consumer insights and analytics. APPNATION will take place September 13-14 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.

Of particular interest is the closing keynote event:

A Tribute to Mark Weiser, the Father of Ubiquitous Computing, and the Rise of the Mobile Mash-Up

Panelists:

Lars Erik Holmquist, Mobile Life Centre, Swedish Institute of Computer Science
Mike Kuniavsky, Orange Cone, author of Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design
Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of the Ubiquitous Computing Area, Palo Alto Research Center
Mattias Rost, Mobile Life Centre, Swedish Institute of Computer Science

The panel will look back at the dawn of ubiquitous computing at PARC, and ahead with the rise of mobile apps and beyond.

The conference can offer a discounted academic rate with 50% off the regular fee for full conference passes ($397 net cost). Simply go to online registration at www.appnationconference.com and use the code: DIFC50

Most Wanted at Ung08

2010-09-01T03:34:00.001-07:00

We have finished study of Portrait Catalog under the disguise as Most Wanted during the Ung08 youth festival! The festival lasted four 5 days during which a countless number of teenagers visited the tent, more than 400 had their picture taken and around 300 installed the app!
We are now analysing the data from the study.

DIS 2010 Conference

2010-08-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

Mattias Jacobsson, Ylva Fernaeus and Rob Tieben made a rendezvous in Aarhus, Denmark where they presented the paper entitled "The Look, the Feel and the Action: Making Sets of ActDresses for Robotic Movement" at the Designing Interactive Systems conference. Plenty of amazing research were presented together with live demonstrations of art and technology pieces e.g. lumiBots. The contrasting artistic music like the improvisational jazz and the ambient live band during the wonderful -probably the best in the world- conference dinner are things that attendees will remember for quite some time.

Be the Most Wanted at Ung 08!

2010-08-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

FAL and Kulturskolan are running a mobile mugshot competition for youths 13-19 years at the Ung 08 festival! You can get your photo taken and share it using our mobile app, the Portrait Catalog. The best networker (who shares the most pictures) will win a phone from our partner Sony Ericsson. The event runs until Saturday, July 14. Here are some pictures from the Most Wanted tent in Kungsträdgården, Stockholm...

Portrait Catalog at Ung 08

2010-08-04T04:40:00.001-07:00

The Portrait Catalog is a mobile phone app that lets you share a picture of yourself with your friends. The twist is that you can only get a picture directly from another person via Bluetooth, so to collect pictures you have to meet people in real life! We will be giving away the Portrait Catalog at the Ung 08 festival, a 5-day event for youths between 13 and 19 organized by the City of Stockholm. Users will also have a chance to get their personal photo taken, and share this through Facebook and become the festival's Most Wanted. To encourage the use of the app we are giving away Sony Ericsson Xperia phones as the prize for the coolest photo and for the best networker - the person who has shared the most photos during the festival! You can find us at Kungsträdgården in Stockholm during August 8 to 14.

Lecture on Designing Digital Artifacts

2010-06-21T05:54:00.000-07:00

Lars Erik Holmquist recently held a remote lecture on Designing Digital Artifacts, as part of the course Advanced Contextual Design at Keio University. The lecture was recorded (as PowerPoint slideshow with voiceover) and is now available for viewing in two 30-minute segments. You can view the lectures by clicking on the links below, or download the files to view later.

The first part of the lecture introduces the concept of digital artifacts and puts in in the context of the development of interactive and embedded computing systems.

Click here to view the first part or download for offline viewing (307 MB .mov file)

The second part gives a number of examples of digital artifacts designed by the author and collaborators, drawn from over ten years of research.

Click here to see the second part or download for offline viewing (299 MB .mov file)

Stockholm LOVE Digital Flowerwall

2010-06-02T09:48:00.000-07:00

Between 6th and 19th of June we will present the Digital Flowerwall at the Stockholm LOVE festival together with KTH. Please come and visit us at the ICT pavilion set up at "Skeppsbron" and try it out! Kudos to GoldWare for providing additional hardware.

The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up

2010-05-30T15:46:00.001-07:00

Lars Erik Holmquist has a guest post at CrunchGear (also featured on TechCrunch) about the past, present and future of mobile and ubiquitous computing. It relates ubicomp research - including many FAL projects - to the possibilities that have opened up with new infrastructures, and argues that the rate of innovation in mobile services is about to take a quantum leap. Follow the link to read the whole article:

The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up by Lars Erik Holmquist

Foursquare + Spotify = Spotisquare!

2010-05-28T02:13:00.000-07:00

Mobile 2.0 just released Spotisquare - a mobile web app that connects music to places!

Some places just remind us of a specific song, sometimes we feel places could use a little music. The idea is to have people share what music fits a place and the people that go there. Beats to navigate the city centre, some nice ambient to go with that scenic view? Or maybe you want to share that awesome band you saw at that one club? Life needs a beat. By making collaborative playlists anyone can express their experience of a place using music.

Spotisquare connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. It is a mobile web app that adds music to places. Point your mobile browser to m.spotisquare.com. You can just use Spotisquare to check-in on Foursquare, but it also connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. When you find a venue that has a Spotify playlist, you can listen to it in Spotify, and also add your own songs to it. You can add a playlist to a venue with our connector.

φ² scanner for foursquare released!

2010-05-24T03:57:00.001-07:00

Mobile 2.0's excellent intern Sebastian Büttner just released φ² Scanner, an Android app to check-in using barcode stickers to foursquare.

Mobile 2.0's φ² project explores different ways of physical check-ins for location-based services and the connection between ‘the visible and virtual’. This is all part of Mobile 2.0's bigger location-based services project, which involves both user studies on people's usage of existing services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Brightkite, etc), and development of new concepts for location-based services (such as making hidden services visible at physical locations).

Download the first φ² app & generate your own barcodes at phi2.mobilelifecentre.org.

Digital Flowerwall in the spotlight

2010-05-20T05:34:00.000-07:00

Since early May Autonomous Wallpaper, or the “Digital Flowerwall” as we would like to refer to it nowdays, is being exhibited here in Kista at the newly inaugurated Digital Arts Centre (DAC). This project has been a bit cold for a while, but has recently attracted renewed attention and will be demonstrated during the Stockholm LOVE festival! In a nutshell people can send digital pictures from their mobile devices to the wall (via Bluetooth or mail), and then plant a seed on the screen (using a pen) that will grow into a beautiful flower that is based on the sent picture.

Research in the large!

2010-05-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

We’re organising a workshop on Research in the Large: using app stores, markets and other wide distribution channels in research at UbiComp2010, Sept 26th in Copenhagen, large.mobilelifecentre.org (with an associated special issue for IJMHCI).

Distribution of mobile applications has been greatly simplified by mobile app stores and markets. Both lone developers and large research and development teams can now relatively easily reach wide audiences. This provides a huge opportunity for both iterative development and gathering research data. However, an overview of successful strategies and ways to overcome the challenges inherent to wide deployment in a research context is not yet available. How do we need to adapt evaluation and research methods? How do we address validity & ethical concerns when doing research on such a large scale? As researchers from both industry and academia we need to share our experiences so we can make the most of this opportunity.

Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost and Nicolas Belloni (FAL/Mobile 2.0), together with Frank Bentley (Motorola) and Didier Chincholle (Ericsson) are organising a workshop at UbiComp2010 to do exactly that. Go check out the workshop call, send us your position paper and/or contribute to the associated special issue of the International Journal of Mobile HCI. More info at large.mobilelifecentre.org

Business Models in the Mobile Ecosystem

2010-04-28T01:40:00.000-07:00

On June 13th, Xia Rue Xue will present the paper titled "Business Models in the Mobile Ecosystem" at the Global Mobility Roundtable conference in Athens, Greece. The paper is the result of Xia's Master thesis, and is an analysis of current business models in the mobile ecosystem. It uses case studies from a set of Scandinavian companies with different roles; a device manufacturer, a network operator, and a set of small startups focusing on the mobile market. The companies' business models are described and the relationships with other stakeholders in the mobile ecosystem.
Come to the conference and discuss the paper, and other interesting topics in Athens. The conference is from 13th-15th of June.

New Intern: Sebastian Büttner

2010-04-27T07:32:00.000-07:00

Since two weeks Sebastian Büttner is working with us in the Mobile 2.0 group. Sebastian is a student of the German Darmstadt University of Technology. He will work on his 'diploma thesis' at FAL & Mobile Life Centre until the end of September. He will be focusing on new concepts for location-based services, in particular by integrating objects, tagged with barcodes or RFIDs into location based services to improve those and make them easier to use.
We're all quite excited to see what he'll come up with - physical check-ins, revolutionary integration of the 'real and virtual'? We'll keep you posted.

Talking about games technology!

2010-04-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

Two of us involved in the Wii Science project will be presenting our findings and concerns (so far) in the project at the workshop "Video Games as Research Instruments", to be held at CHI2010 in Atlanta, GA (USA). The Wii Science project is a collaboration with Stanford University together with two primary schools, one in Stockholm, Sweden and one in Palo Alto, USA. In the project, we're looking into how we can use the technology in the Wii Remote to create tools for children to use when they familiarize themselves with the practice of scientific experimentation when i.e. learning about force, energy, kinetic, momentum etc. With the Wii Remote, we not only have the opportunity to use existing solutions that we can modify and write software for, but also design for physical exploration in interesting ways!

GeoChat on Ericsson Labs

2010-03-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

GeoChat for Android just made its appearance on Ericsson Labs website. Ericsson Research who run Ericsson Labs have rebuilt our Java ME version of GeoChat for Android to utilise their enabler APIs. Their version is now instead using Mobile Java Communication Framework, and their own Maps API.

GeoChat is a map based chat application that let you create chat rooms over geographical regions on a map. In order to talk to people also interested in a particular location can join in and chat with a chat room put at this location. By placing the chat rooms at different zoom levels the chat rooms can have different size, where a chat room on street level can symbolize a particular café, and a room on country level can symbolize a whole country.

A video of GeoChat can be found here, and the Android version can be found on Ericsson Labs website.

Announcing two doctoral student positions in Media Technology at Södertörn University

2010-03-08T04:08:00.000-08:00

Here is a chance to work at Södertörn University in close collaboration with FAL and the Mobile Life Centre! Lars Erik Holmquist is also a professor in Media Technology and will hire a Ph.D. student to work on Mobile Media - follow this link to read the full announcement. The relevant position to apply for is Position 2 in the announcement!

Note: The last day for application has been extended to April 30!

Human-Robot Interaction in Osaka, Japan

2010-03-03T23:18:00.000-08:00

This week several FAL members are attending Human-Robot Interaction 2010 in Osaka. Henriette was co-organizer of the HRI Pioneers Workshop for new researchers in the field, and also presented a poster on attitudes towards robots. Ylva presented a paper in the Collaborations with the Arts Workshop, together with artist Ulla West. Also at this workshop, Lars Erik organized a brainstorm session. Finally, Rob Tieben's video on ActDresses was featured in the video program.

One highlight was the presentations by Japanese companies on the latest robot technology, including Sanrio subsidiary Kokoro, which manufactures many well-known robots, including the Geminoid (together with Osaka University and ATR) and HRP-4c (together with AIST). Can the lifelike Hello Kitty robot be far off? Another highlight was the keynote speech by Kazuhiro Kosuge on the Dance Partner Robot, in which he compared human-robot interaction to a dance with a robot follower reading the human lead. Also, the panel on Social Responsibility in Human-Robot Interaction with Hiroshi Ishiguro, Illah Nourbakhsh, Peter Kahn and Vanessa Evers raised a lot of interesting questions on how robots are presented to the general public and the future we claim to be building as robot researchers.

Below are some pictures of the robots present at the conference reception. The picture above shows the human-robot play we got to see in a traditional Japanese theatre.

Portrait Catalog on Video

2010-03-03T02:52:00.000-08:00

In the following video Mattias Rost is presenting and demoing a mobile application called Portrait Catalog. Portrait Catalog is an application for sharing and collecting portrait photos of friends. The portraits are sent over Bluetooth from one person to the other, but portraits cannot be forwarded once received. The application is inspired by the act of sharing portrait photos in elementary school, where youngsters eagerly exchange their portrait picture with their friends when the photos arrive. The application was developed during an internship at Sony Ericsson in the early summer of 2008.

Columbus on Video!

2010-02-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

This week we post a video on a mobile application for exploring the world through geo tagged photos. By having to physically move around the physical surroundings to unlock photos geotagged at locations visited, the aim is to bring back a sense of exploring when browsing through geotagged photos.

The application is here presented by Mattias Rost.

Meeting with Bestic

2010-02-19T06:35:00.000-08:00

Today we had the pleasure of meeting with Ann-Louise Norén from the company Bestic. The company is in the process of introducing their product - a robotic arm assistance tool for eating, to the market. Our initial discussions focused on how we could study the end user perspectives on such technology and in particular look at longer terms of interaction and social aspects. We are very much looking forward to dig deeper into actual practice and use of robotic materials!

Video of the week: Context Photography

2010-02-17T04:21:00.000-08:00

This week we post a video of an old project called Context Photography, here presented by Maria Håkansson.

Here's a description of the concept. Watch the video for a demo of the mobile application!

When taking a picture, would it be possible and interesting to capture something in addition to the visuals of the scenery? We explore if e.g. sound, temperature and pollution could be used as parameters in a digital camera and how these phenomena could be "visualised" or "represented" in a picture. The fundamental idea is to go beyond the traditional parameters (light, speed and focus) used in both analogue and digital cameras, and widen the concept of what a camera can capture. Digital technology opens up for new dimensions that can affect photography! This means that digital cameras no longer have to resemble their analogue counterparts. Unlike the editing of a picture in e.g. Photoshop, we want the (new) parameters to affect the image in real-time.

We have collaborated with a focus group of open-minded and explorative Lomographers, as well as with other dedicated amateur photographers. They were not primarily our end user group, but a source of inspiration (and also participants in design sessions) when designing the camera prototype.

Kick-Off workshop of the Playful Experiences project

2010-02-15T03:03:00.000-08:00

Playful Experiences is a new project in the Mobile Life Centre. The main purpose of the project is to understand what constitutes enjoyment of using a product; what kinds of experiences the product can elicit, and how to design something that evokes certain kind of experience. The kick-off workshop of the project took place in a beautiful cosy house in Bergianska trädgården, Naturens Hus. Together with 3 researchers from Nokia Research Center in Tampere and a group from the Mobile Life Centre (Ylva, Henriette and Nicolas) discussed and decided what we want to achieve in this project. From the playful experience of flirting to language differences around the word "playfulness", the discussions were intense and promising for the next steps of the projects. You can read more on the project on the Mobile Life website.

Video of GlowBots

2010-02-10T02:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a video of GlowBots!

GlowBots are small round robots that displays visually appealing shapes on a color-intense hypnotizing display. Interacting with the robot encourages it to seek out and communicate its shape to other robots. Through their rich interaction a flora of shapes emerges that entices interest and engagement in an open ended fashion for joy and entertainment.

GlowBots are here presented by Mattias Jacobsson.

LIREC meeting in London

2010-02-05T02:30:00.000-08:00

Ylva and Sara are going to London 8-10 of February to attend a LIREC meeting. Their ambition with the meeting is to discuss how to work with scenarios as a design-tool in robot research, and to go from this towards design requirements.

I'm back!

2010-02-05T01:53:00.000-08:00

After being on parental leave during 2009, I'm now looking forward to face new interesting research challenges! I'm very happy to soon start developing forecasts about future scenarios of technology use, in a collaboration project between Wireless@KTH, Mobile Life and several industry partners. I'll also continue my work in the LIREC project about everyday robotics and ethics. Furthermore, I'm hoping to soon contribute with new funding and interesting projects at the Mobile Life Centre!

Cheers,

Sara Ljungblad

LIREC project in New Scientist - Learning to love to hate robots

2009-12-15T02:14:00.000-08:00

Maria Håkansson has been interviewed in New Scientist about our long-term study of the robotic toy dinosaur Pleo in the homes of families. Read the article here!

SIGGRAPH Asia in Yokohama

2009-12-10T01:48:00.000-08:00

Lars Erik Holmquist chairs the Emerging Technologies section of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, in Yokohama, Japan. In Emerging Technologies, attendees experience works that show how computer graphics and interactive techniques are evolving to adapt to new technical, social, and environmental conditions. We collaborated with Södertörn University to produce a teaser video for the exhibition:

Maria receives grant from Nokia Research

2009-12-08T04:23:00.000-08:00

Maria Håkansson has received a personal grant from Nokia Research Center Helsinki to do a user study of location-based services from a non-urban perspective! The project is planned for January-March 2010.

Rob Tieben working on ActDresses

2009-11-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

Rob Tieben is working since september on the actDresses project: changing the appearance of robots in order to change their behaviour. Feed-back and feed-forward at the same time, incorporated in tags, wearables, or perhaps even robot clothes.
Rob is a student from the University of Technology Eindhoven, he is with us for 3 months and he is sharing his thoughts and ideas about the project on this blog

Henriette Cramer joins as a Postdoc at FAL

2009-11-11T03:02:00.000-08:00

Henriette Cramer is a new ERCIM postdoctoral fellow at SICS and the Mobile Life Centre.

Henriette's done her PhD-research at the University of Amsterdam, where she focused on user interaction with autonomous and adaptive systems. Her experiments and user studies looked at people's reactions and trust when they interact with systems that appear to take their own decisions (e.g. spam filters, on-screen art recommenders, social robots). She's been looking at themes such as system autonomy vs. user control, transparency and systems' social behaviours such as proactivity, touch and empathy. Her work shows that people can show quite interesting unanticipated behaviour based on their perceptions and understanding of a system. She's also shown that 'features' suggested in the literature such as social behaviour and explanations for results cannot be directly applied in every situation.

More on her blog.

Book Release!

2009-07-13T02:24:00.000-07:00

On July 17th the book titled Multiplatform E-Learning Systems and Technologies: Mobile Devices for Ubiquitous ICT-Based Education will be released. The book features the chapter Tools For Students Doing Mobile Fieldwork which is written by Mattias Rost, and Lars Erik Holmquist.

Here's the abstract of the chapter:

Students are not always sitting at their desk when learning new things – they are also out in the world. We present a set of tools we developed to support groups of students who are doing field studies. Initially, we gave the students a wiki for gathering field notes and their group work material. Based on observations on how they used it and collaborated, we developed additional tools to run along with the wiki. These include a mobile application for capturing data (photo, video, audio, and text) and automatically uploading to the wiki, and a set of web tools which run on top of the wiki for increasing the awareness between students, and for browsing the captured data. We describe the implementation of these tools and report on the experience from having students using them on their own equipment during the course.

You may order the book here.

Tangible and Embodied Interaction @ Liseberg

2009-06-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

FAL had an internal conference in Göteborg this Tuesday, which we spent at the Lindholmen area, where the Viktoria Institute is located. In the evening, we visited the Liseberg amusement park to experience some intense interactions...

2009-06-12T05:52:00.000-07:00

Today two of our B.Sc thesis students - Johan Sundin and Victor Luque successfully presented their project entitled "Autonomous RFID Robot With Behavior Combination". This is part of the ongoing ActDresses project where we currently are implementing research prototypes to demonstrate how dressing things up and accessorizing can be thought of as a way for doing tangible programming. The robot is built from scratch and features omni-directional wheels, a rotating IR-detector and an RFID-reader that can read multiple tags simultaneously.

Push!Music on Video

2009-06-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

Push!Music is a mobile music sharing application that uses ad-hoc wireless networking to allow co-located people to share music between each other. This can be done in two ways. First, songs can autonomously copy and send themselves to another player based on similar music listening histories. Second, users can personally recommend songs to others simply by sending them. The Push!Music project was part of the European Union project ECAgents, and has been covered in e.g. a demonstration at UbiComp 2005, and a paper at ECSCW 2007.

Watch the video below where Maria Håkansson and Mattias Rost demonstrates Push!Music!

New Video: Push!Photo

2009-06-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

Push!Photo is a mobile photo sharing application. It runs on wireless handheld computers, and photos can be made public and immediately accessed by anyone nearby. The application also automatically searches for photos on nearby devices to find interesting and relevant photos based on the context and history of the users. Push!Photo shows how it is possible to share digital photos in a mobile setting just as easily as paper photos. The Push!Photo project was part of the European Union project ECAgents. It was first demonstrated at UbiComp 2006.

Below, watch as Mattias Rost gives a demonstration of Push!Photo!

2009-05-29T05:06:00.000-07:00

Mattias and Ylva visited KTH on the 26th of May for a presentation of Nao - a small humanoid robot developed by a french company - Aldebaran Robotics. Nao will for instance replace Sony's canine robot Aibo as a standard platform for RoboCup and is at the same time very open source oriented. Also - if you order four of them, you get the fifth for free!

Working and Living with Robots

2009-05-25T04:23:00.000-07:00

Ylva and Mattias participated in a two days workshop at ABB in Oslo, May 14-15.
Apart from learning a lot about different kinds of robots, we also presented some of the results in LIREC, had a full day of brainstorming on novel interaction styles, and tried out two ways of programming industrial robots (during which Mattias managed to prove the fundamental difference between simulation and reality...). Very fun!

On the move – sharing music, inspiration and fun

2009-05-25T02:36:00.000-07:00

Maria Håkansson has been invited to contribute with a text about Push!Music and mobile music sharing in issue #22 "Seizing the moment" of Vodafone receiver. Read it here!

Successful PhD defence

2009-05-25T02:14:00.000-07:00

On February 26, Maria Håkansson successfully defended her PhD thesis "Playing with Context: Explicit and Implicit Interaction in Mobile Media Applications" in Man-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University.

Opponent was Assistant Professor Eric Paulos from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. The evaluation committee members were Professor Jonas Löwgren, Interaction Design, Malmö University; Docent Annika Waern, Mobile Life Centre/Stockholm University; and Professor Árni Sverrisson, Sociology, Stockholm University.

Maria is currently working at SICS and in the Mobile Life Centre.

Postodoc position available!

2009-03-19T04:12:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the availability of a number of postdoctoral positions at the Interaction Design and Innovation Lab at SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. The lab is closely associated with Mobile Life, a research centre at Stockholm University in cooperation with the telecom industry.

We are looking for recent Ph.D. graduates from all over the world with a strong interest in mobile technology and interaction design, who want to work in a dynamic research environment in Sweden. You can contribute in many different ways: by inventing and implementing new and exciting technologies and interfaces; by performing user tests and ethnographic studies; by running design workshops and creating novel concepts for mobile interaction; and much more. The lab is organized in two groups: the Future Applications Lab, led by Professor Lars Erik Holmquist; and Involve, led Professor Kristina Höök. In the Future Applications Lab, we use an approach called grounded innovation to invent and test new technology that could become products in 5-10 years time, including context-aware mobile services and social robots. In Involve, we are interested in exploring affective and bodily interaction, and involving users both physically and cognitively in what we call an affective loop.

The positions are offered through the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) Fellowship Programme. Positions are typically for 12 months, or 18 months when the fellowship is split between two of the ERCIM institutes. The fellow at SICS will receive a monthly allowance of 2 580 Euro. Costs for travelling to and from the institutes will be paid.

To apply, you need to go through the ERCIM application page:
http://www.ercim.org/activity/fellows

This page also contains detailed application requirements. Make sure to mark your field of interest as "E-Mobility -> Mobile Applications and Human-Computer Interaction for mobile devices" and your desired host institute as SICS. In addition to applying through the ERCIM web page, you should also inform us of your application by e-mailing your CV and a cover letter stating your research interests to Lars Erik Holmquist (see below).

The deadline for applications is April 30; successful applicants should be able to start in the summer of 2009.

MORE INFORMATION

The Interaction Design and Innovation lab at SICS is located in Kista, Sweden, about 20 minutes by subway from the centre of Stockholm. For more information about us, please refer to:
http://www.sics.se/groups/interaction

The Mobile Life Centre is also located in Kista. For more information, please refer to:
http://www.mobilelifecentre.org

ERCIM aims to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase co-operation with European industry; c.f.
http://www.ercim.org/

For questions, please contact:
Lars Erik Holmquist, lab manager
Interaction Design and Innovation, SICS
leh@sics.se -- +46 703 55 85 00

Lars Erik Holmquist appointed professor

2009-02-13T09:04:00.000-08:00

Lars Erik Holmquist has been appointed professor in Media Technology at the Department of Communication, Media and IT at Södertörn University. Initially, Lars Erik will spend about one day per week at Södertörn while keeping his position as manager of the Interaction Design and Innovation Lab at SICS, group leader of the Future Applications Lab, and as a research leader at the Mobile Life Centre.

Forthcoming PhD thesis defence

2009-02-09T07:05:00.000-08:00

On February 26, Maria Håkansson will defend her PhD thesis "Playing with Context: Explicit and Implicit Interaction in Mobile Media Applications" in Man-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University.

Opponent is Assistant Professor Eric Paulos from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.

When: February 26, 13.00 (1 p.m.)
Where: Lecture hall D, Forum-building, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV), Stockholm University
Address: Isafjordsgatan 39, Kista

Abstract:
This thesis contributes with insights into how aspects of the surrounding physical and social context can be exploited in the design of mobile media applications for playful use. In this work, context refers to aspects of the immediate surroundings – outside of the device – that can be identified and measured by sensors; for instance environmental aspects like sound, and social aspects like co-located people. Two extensive case studies explore the interplay between users, mobile media, and aspects of context in different ways, and how it can invite playful use. The first case study, Context Photography, uses sensor-based information about the immediate physical surroundings to affect images in real time in a novel digital camera application for everyday creativity. The second, Push!Music, makes it possible to share music both manually and autonomously between co-located people, based on so-called media context, for spontaneous music sharing.

The insights gained from the designs, prototypes, and user studies, point at the value of combining explicit and implicit interaction – essentially, the expected and unexpected – to open for playful use. The explicit interaction encouraged users to be active, exploratory, and creative. The implicit interaction let users embrace and exploit dynamic qualities of the surroundings, contributing to making the systems fun, exciting, magical, ‘live’, and real. This combination was facilitated through our approach to context, where sensor-based information was mostly open in use and interpretation, ambiguous, visible, and possible to override for users, and through giving the systems a degree of agency and autonomy. A key insight is that the combination of explicit and implicit interaction allowed both control and a sense of magic in the interaction with the mobile media applications, which together seems to encourage play and playfulness.

Welcome!

Two posters at HRI

2009-01-19T07:18:00.001-08:00

The group will present to short papers at the Human-Robot Interaction conference (HRI), were we present some of the recent work on ethics performed in the LIREC project. Both papers are based on workshops held during the fall, one at nordiCHI in Lund and one at the ArtBots festival in Dublin. The two topics discussed concerns the intersection of third wave HCI and HRI, and what could be thought of as a "robot cargo cult". We think both these themes may open up for lots of interesting discussions, so if you are in San Diego at the time please come and hang out by our posters!

ActDresses to TEI

2009-01-19T07:07:00.000-08:00

Ylva and Mattias will participate in the Tangible and Embedded Interactions conference, presenting a conceptual paper on the ongoing project actDresses, in which we explore the design space of controlling and programming robots by dressing them up. The picture sequence above shows one of three interaction scenarios that we are currently working on. More information on this project is available at the actDresses webpage.

Photography study at CHI 2009

2009-01-07T02:14:00.000-08:00

Sara Ljungblad will present the paper Passive Photography from a Creative Perspective: "If I would just shoot the same thing for seven days, it's like... What's the point?" at CHI 2009, the annual ACM SIGCHI conference on Computer-Human Interaction. The paper describes a study of Sensecam, a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention. The paper is based on work conducted with Richard Harper at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. The CHI conference will be held in Boston, USA, on April 4-9, 2009.

Autonomous Wallpaper at Smart Space

2008-12-14T10:02:00.000-08:00

On Dec 11 Autonomous Wallpaper was shown as a demo at Smart Space by Heidi Harman in Herning, Denmark. This one day conference focused on smart materials, smart living and smart green, and attracted an audience consisting of architects, designers and researchers. Autonomous wallpaper exemplifies a future wallpaper that creates a dynamic flower pattern from images that are sent by bluetooth (e.g. images taken and sent by a mobile phone). Currently, this is installed as a projection on a wall, complemented with an ultrasonic sender. This way, the users can physically point to the wall to "place" one or several flowers that will grow from their picture.

Mobile Life in TechCrunch and CrunchGear!

2008-12-04T02:26:00.001-08:00

John Biggs from leading technology blog CrunchGear visited the Mobile Life Centre in Kista and reported from our current research! Each article contains a video of the demonstrations. Some of the news also made it to partner site TechCrunch.

The featured systems included:

GeoChatting application lets you pick a friend in your general area

GlowBots: Robots that learn what you like

Mobile Life Subway Demo: Meet me on the 6

Affective Diary: Your computer knows when you're blue

Workshop at CSCW

2008-10-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

Mattias Rost will participate in the workshop: Beyond the Laboratory: Supporting Authentic Collaboration with Multiple Displays, at this years CSCW conference in San Diego. The workshop is on Saturday and he will attend the rest of the conference starting on monday.

Robot Workshop at NordiCHI'08

2008-10-17T02:09:00.000-07:00

Ylva, Mattias and Sara, together with Alex Taylor from Microsoft Research, UK are arranging a robot workshop at NordiCHI'08 on the 19th of October. The workshop will discuss the intersection between HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and Human Robot Interaction (HRI). The participants are an interesting mix of designers, robot researchers, and HCI people... and we look forward to many interesting discussions!

See you in Lund!

The workshop:

http://www.sics.se/~majac/workshop/

The NordiCHI conference:

http://www.nordichi2008.org/

ArtBots

2008-10-08T02:20:00.000-07:00

Mattias, Sara and Ylva participated in this years ArtBots exhibition in Dublin. On site we held interviews with all the artists on their perspectives on working with robotics materials and their thoughts on ethical issues related to robotics. We also kept a small area open for gallery visitors to reflect upon questions like "Why should we be afraid of robots?" and "Why do we love robots?" and put them up on a wall as post-its, for other visitors to view.

UbiComp closing panel

2008-09-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

Lars Erik Holmquist will take part in the closing panel at UbiComp 2008 in South Korea. The topic of the panel is the past, present, and future of ubicomp as a field, a research area, a technology direction and as a conference. See you in Seoul!

Demo at UbiComp in Seoul

2008-08-21T02:48:00.000-07:00

Mattias Rost, together with Fredrik Bergstrand, will give a demo of a new mobile application called Columbus at UbiComp 2008 in Seoul, South Korea. Columbus is an application for exploring the world around you through photos. Going to a physical location will enable you to see photos taken at this location, while photos at other locations are not accessible until the location is visited.

Journal paper

2008-07-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

Mattias, Ylva and Lars Erik recently got a paper published in a Special Issue on Human Interaction with Domestic Robots for the Journal of Physical Agents. The paper details the whole development of GlowBots as well as a preliminary user-study and can be downloaded here.

Workshop at NordiCHI

2008-06-04T03:35:00.000-07:00

Ylva, Sara and Mattias, together with Alex Taylor from Microsoft Research, will host a workshop at NordiCHI, on the theme of human-robot interaction and interaction design. The workshop will broadly aim to examine the intersections between HCI and HRI and how the two fields might learn from one another. Read more about the workshop call here.

Science Café

2008-05-08T02:14:00.000-07:00

Gullan and Gulle are two new Pleo robot FAL-members that accompanied Ylva Fernaeus and Mattias Jacobsson at an event at Stockholms Kulturhus - LAVA, sponsored by Sveriges Ingenjörer. High school students had the opportunity to sit down, have a “fika” and talk informally with the robot researchers to get insights into the field and ask questions during a couple of Science Café sessions. Our guest performance was very much appreciated and we hope that we managed to inspire a new generation of engineers and researchers.

Successful Ph.D. defence

2008-04-29T01:15:00.000-07:00

On April 25, Sara Ljungblad defended her Ph.D. thesis Beyond Users at Stockholm University. The opponent was Professor Bill Gaver from Goldsmith college, and the evaluation committee included Jonas Löwgren (Malmö University), Annika Waern (Mobile Life, Stockholm University) and Lisbeth Svengren-Holm (Stockholm University School of Business). The thesis goes beyond a user-centred design approach to explore potential future applications and modes of interaction, including digital photogaraphy, robots and tangible interaction. Sara is currently an intern at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and will join the LIREC project at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science later in the year.

CHI 2008

2008-04-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

The annual ACM SIGCHI conference on human-computer interaction, CHI 2008, took place in Florence, Italy. FAL's Mattias Jacobsson came back briefly from his stint in Idaho to present a note on the see-Puck, the display that was used to implement the GlowBots (see picture below). Co-author Lars Erik Holmquist also attended, as did Ylva Fernaeus (but only for the parties!) As usual, the technical program was packed and the social program even more exhausting. See you in Boston in 2009!

Being Human book launch

2008-04-05T02:46:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Research have produced a new book, Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in
the Year 2020. It was the result of a workshop on the future of HCI last year, and FAL's Lars Erik Holmquist is one of the contributors. The book was launched at an event in London on April 2. One of several media attending and reporting from the launch was BBC - you can read their report and watch some video online.

New video featuring GlowBots

2008-04-05T02:43:00.000-07:00

New Scientist have just published a video called The rise of the emotional robot which features the GlowBots from the Future Applications lab - chack it out from YouTube, below, or on the magazine's video page!

Human Robot Interaction

2008-03-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

The third conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2008) was held in beautifully located Felix Meritis of Amsterdam March 12^th – 15^th. Mattias and Ylva attended a workshop on Coding Behavioral Video Data led by Professor Peter H. Kahn, Jr. from University of Washington. During the workshop the FAL-duo presented some of the gathered video from preliminary user studies with GlowBots and discussed different possibilities for coding such intricate data. The conference itself was also relatively senior dense, and with a much larger attendance rate than expected it was a given success.

First out on the video session was GlowBots – A Love Story, receiving a fair amount of applauds. In summary, the conference felt to be more tilted towards human and robot rather than interaction – leaving a lot of space open for us to explore.

Designing Interactive Systems

2008-03-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) took place in South Africa on February 25-27. Maria Håkansson and Lalya Gaye presented a full paper, Bringing Context to the Foreground: Designing for Creative Engagement in a Novel Still Camera Application, about the Context Photography project.

The closing keynote was given by Professor Bill Gaver of Goldsmith College, who soon will be coming to Sweden to act as opponent for Sara Ljungblad's Ph.D. thesis.

And of course, there were some opportunities for more relaxing activities, like a very small safari...

Tangible and Embedded Interaction

2008-02-22T03:32:00.000-08:00

FAL-member Ylva Fernaeus went to present a theoretical full paper at the TEI'08 conference in Bonn, and also got selected to participate in the closing panel. The topics to be discussed in the panel were the "where, when, why and what of tangible interfaces", which resulted in quite some interesting (and amusing!) discussions. Below is a picture from the panel:

A general theme at the conference seemed to be how tangibles are moving from research prototypes with focus on "the interface", towards real applications and products, and how these are actually taken into use.

Ubiquitous Content in Tokyo

2008-02-17T08:47:00.001-08:00

Keio University recently organized a symposium to spread information about the Ubiquitous Content project and the XTEL platform, a hardware/software solution for rapid prototyping of physical interaction. FAL leader Lars Erik Holmquist was guest speaker at the symposium, along with robot researcher Yoshiyuki Sankai, who is a pioneer in the field of Cybernics and developer of a human robot suit.

Lars Erik also attended an exhibition with student project created using the XTEL platform, as well as other interesting examples of hardware/software interaction. It was fun to meet the talented Keio students and researchers and see some of their work! We hope to be using the XTEL platform in the Mobile Life Center and look forward to more collaboration with Keio, in particular the new Media Design Graduate School.

Here we see Ishizawa Takaaki, one of the XTEL system designers, proudly displaying boxes of the hardware board, along with students showing installations built using the platform. This included a soft toy to control an on-line avatar; a system for sharing images between friends and family; and finally Michihiko Ueno's shape-changing textiles.

Not everything was built using XTEL - there were many other interesting projects from Inakage Lab, Okude Lab. and Wakita Lab. Below we see Midori Shibutani with the Fabcell project, a color-changing dress based on thermo-chromatic textiles, and Yu Uchida with the interactive shadow installation Kage no Sekai.

Glowbots at home

2008-02-14T04:52:00.000-08:00

We are currently conducting a long term user study of the GlowBots in a home environment.

The GlowBots are just starting to settle in the friendly family who has been taking care of them for the last month. The robots seemed a little shy in the beginning but now they have started to display a lot of unexpected talents:

An important observation is that since the robots don't seem to like daylight the children tend to switch off the light as soon as it is time to play - which of course means that their father has to do the cooking in the dark! Technology that really make a difference...

Internship at Ugobe

2008-01-18T03:38:00.000-08:00

Next week Mattias Jacobsson will travel to Boise, Idaho to do an internship at Ugobe Labs. The people at Ugobe have created an innovative atmosphere, developing technology that take robotics to the next level, where sustained interaction with artificial creatures would actually be realized for the first time. Their first product - Pleo, was just hatched before Christmas, and has very reasonable price-tag.
Mattias will work on making robotics more appealing from a community perspective by working close with their researchers and look at issues concerning sustainable interaction. He will also explore the middle ground between entertainment robotics and mobile technology.
The internship is sponsored by a personal mobility grant from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.

New member of FAL

2008-01-18T01:47:00.000-08:00

Ylva Ferneaus has just started working at the Future Applications Lab! She received her Ph.D. degree from the department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University in March 2007. The title of her thesis was Let’s make a digital patchwork, and it explored social, bodily and cultural forms of computer programming. At FAL, she will work in the European projects ECAgents - Embodied Communicating Agents and LIREC - Living with Interactive Companions, where she will explore novel robot technologies, with special focus on qualities that people are attracted by, and how these could be further addressed in research.

New intern

2008-01-16T07:18:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Belloni is a new intern at the Future Applications Lab, who will be located at the Mobile Life Center in Kista. Nicolas is in his last year at a school of engineering called CPE Lyon (diploma equivalent to a M.Sc. in Electronics, Informatics and Telecommunications) in Lyon, France. For the last 5 months he has been an Erasmus exchange student at KTH in Stockholm, where he discovered the Mobile Life Centre. He will be doing his last internship (equivalent to a Master Thesis) on the Mobile 2.0 project for 6 months. Taking as a starting point several earlier projects about social mobile applications, including the Hummingbird and Push!Music, he will focus on how to combine social awareness and positioning in specific contexts like public transportation.

Acceptance at WMUTE 2008

2008-01-03T06:14:00.000-08:00

Tools for Students Doing Mobile Fieldwork, by Mattias Rost and Lars Erik Holmquist got accepted for WMUTE 2008, being held in Beijing, China, 23-26 of March. The work presented describes three tools designed for students learning ethnography, and has been conducted within the iDeas project.

The see-Puck at CHI 2008

2007-12-18T05:01:00.000-08:00

The see-Puck: A Platform for Exploring Human-Robot Relationships by Mattias Jacobsson, Johan Bodin and Lars Erik Holmquist, was accepted as a note presentation for CHI 2008, the annual ACM SIGCHI conference on human-computer interaction. The paper details the development of the see-Puck, an extension of the EPFL e-Puck platform which was used to develop the popular GlowBots demo. CHI takes place in Florence, Italy on April 5-10.

Viktoria Institute 10 years old!

2007-12-06T05:15:00.000-08:00

On December 5, Viktoria had an open house to celebrate that it is now 10 years since the institute started (in the summer of 1997 to be exact). FAL showed several recent demos: Ubiquitous Graphics (below), Push!Music, Autonomous Wallpaper and Glowbots. Unfortunately the historic Hummingbird demo, which would have shown several examples of inter-personal awareness devices dating back all the way to 1998, had to be canceled due to a bicycle accident...

Rome visiting FAL

2007-11-30T04:47:00.001-08:00

This week we had a visit from Rome. Valerio Sperati is a Ph.D student from CNR-ISTC / La Sapienza, and will work with us in a collaboration project for ECAgents. The plan is to combine aspects of our different approaches to explore how we can make even more interesting robot-applications.

News brief in Computer about Autonomous Wallpaper

2007-11-23T00:56:00.000-08:00

The latest number of Computer (IEEE Computer Society) has a news brief about Autonomous Wallpaper. The system allows users to send pictures (e.g. taken with their camera phone) to their living room wall. The system then calculates a unique "agent" from each picture, which is represented in the form of a flower with several branches. The colors of the flower are based on the original picture. Several flowers can affect each others growing behavior and cross-pollinate. The user can physically position each flower on the wall due to a modified positioning system. An ultrasonic sender and receiver calculate the position, send this to the computer that calculates the flowers, and a projector is used to display the flower on the wall.

Read the news brief in Computer, IEEE Computer Society, nov 2007, (Vol 40, No. 11)
by Lina Dailey Paulson

Project website

Pin&Play published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

2007-11-15T04:51:00.000-08:00

The latest number of the Personal and ubiquitous computing journal includes an article written by Sara Ljungblad, Maria Håkansson and Lars Erik Holmquist. The article "Ubicomp challenges in collaborative scheduling: Pin&Play at the Göteborg film festival" describes studies and prototyping activities that investigate how Pin&Play as a ubiquitous computing technology could support paper-based practices. The results illustrate the benefit of learning from a real world practice, and point towards challenges that appear when physical paper practices are traced digitally.

Konichiwa!

2007-11-13T02:24:00.001-08:00

Lars Erik is going to be in Tokyo on November 18-23. He will be visiting Keio University's Shonan-Fujisawa Campus and the Keio SFC Open Research Forum in Roppongi Hills. Other meetings and engagements include Sony Interaction Laboratory, Sony Ericsson, The Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies, and The Wimpy's. If you are in Tokyo and want to meet up, do get in touch!

Greetings from Sony Ericsson

2007-11-08T03:32:00.000-08:00

Maria is currently doing a 3-month internship at Sony Ericsson in Lund, Sweden. This internship will run during October-December 2007 and is part of the new Mobile Life Centre where Sony Ericsson is involved as an industry partner. Maria will do a small qualitative user study on mobile sharing, as well as take part in activities at the Experience Lab where she is located.

GlowBots - a Love Story @ HRI 2008

2007-11-08T02:43:00.000-08:00

Mattias Jacobsson will present a short video clip related to our GlowBots project at HRI 2008. We have also released a lot of code and documentation for the software and hardware.

Abstract:
We present a small episode describing how a young girl meet a swarm of GlowBots for the very first time.
The film-clip was captured at the Emerging Technologies exhibition, SIGGRAPH 2007, where we experienced an overwhelming attention with more than five thousand visitors laying their hands on our group of GlowBots. In this particular case the young girl is instructed by a staff member and immediately starts to play with the robots. She is really touched by the beautiful patterns showing on their round LED-displays and picks them up, shake them and gently puts them back down. Her interaction with the robot encourages it to wonder off and communicate its pattern with other robots. The result is an ongoing dialog between the robots about the latest fashion in attractive patterns. The robotic design is based on a previous study where we interviewed owners of rather unusual pets such as snakes, spiders and lizards. We have then tried to transfer some of the qualities found in their interaction and relationships with their pets to explore the design-space in everyday robotics. GlowBots is the first proof-of-concept robotic implementation that came as a direct result from this study.

Maria and Lalya at DIS 2008!

2007-11-08T02:30:00.000-08:00

Maria and Lalya got their full paper "Bringing Context to the Foreground: Designing for Creative Engagement in a Novel Still Camera Application" accepted for DIS 2008. The conference takes place in Cape Town, South Africa, during 25 February - 27 February 2008.

Abstract
Sensor-based interaction has enabled a variety of new creative practices. With ubiquitous computing, designing for creative user experience with sensor-based devices benefits from new opportunities as well as new challenges. We propose a design approach where surrounding context information is brought to the foreground to become a resource for interaction, available at hand and in real time to the users. We illustrate this approach with our project context photography as a design case. Context photography consists of taking still pictures that capture not only incoming light but also some of the additional context surrounding the scene, with real-time context information visually affecting the pictures as they are taken. Based on the design and use of our context camera prototypes, this paper brings insight into implications of our approach to the design of sensor-based ubiquitous computing systems for creative purposes.

Good luck Lalya!

2007-11-01T02:36:00.000-07:00

October 31 was the last official working day for Lalya Gaye at the Viktoria Institute and the Future Applications Lab. She will still hang around for a while, work at the IT University and most importantly present her Ph.D. thesis in Spring 2008! During her time in FAL, Lalya worked on many exciting projects. Perhaps the most wellknown was Sonic City, a groundbreaking context-aware music generation system which has been presented at several conferences and books. Among other things, Lalya also created the Bashocam for collaborative photo sharing, was an organizer of several Mobile Music workshops, and contributed to the Context Photography project. We wish Lalya all the best in the future, and if you have a position for a researcher or teacher with a unique competetence combination of art, technology and lindy hop, you know where to find her...

Pre-seminar for HCI thesis nov 5th

2007-10-31T03:06:00.000-07:00

On the 5th of november Sara Ljungblad has a seminar about her thesis draft "Experience centred Innovation" at DSV in KIsta, Stockholm. Professor Jonas Löwgren will act as "opponent" and discuss the draft.

Abstract of the thesis:
How can experiences be used as a resource for innovation in HCI (Human Computer Interaction)? This thesis presents the design philosophy "Experience Centred Innovation" which attempts to capture qualities of experiences and transfer these into innovative designs and forms of interaction for digital artefacts. Innovation is approached in the design process by matching "the design material" with qualities of experiences, studied in a human practice. The practice is referred to as a marginal practice, and is chosen to be relevant for the intended design outcome instead of representing potential users. This is different from a user-centred design process within HCI that focus on intended users as a basis for design. The research is design driven, and builds on several empirical design cases. Experience Centred Innovation contributes with (1) the concept or transferable qualities as a resource for innovation (2) novel design outcomes, and (3) transfer scenarios - design method for capturing and transferring qualities of experiences.

Pictures and video from Wired NextFest

2007-10-30T07:15:00.000-07:00

The demonstration of Glowbots at Wired NextFest was a big success! You can see some pictures here. GlowBots are small wheeled robots that develop complex relationships between each other and with their owners. They were designed using the Transfer Scenarios method, presented at CHI 2007, and are a result in the European project ECAgents - Embodied Communicating Agents. Wired NextFest is a four-day festival of innovative products and technologies that are transforming our world. Below is a Glowbots video from Artfuture - tracking cutting-edge creativity from around the world...

The Future Applications Lab Blog

2007-10-30T07:03:00.000-07:00

The Future Applications Lab Blog is now replacing the old FAL-webpage. Here you will find updates on what happens regarding our work. To find more information about us you can find links on the right.

Peace out,
Mattias Rost, Future Applications Lab