First snowfall in Beijing this year in 2010! And the most snow in 60 years, ah memories of back in Toronto! http://ping.fm/WKu5q #beijing #snow #2010

Listening to a research talk on mobile learning approaches via culturally inspired group games from Tian Feng from ISCAS #mobilelearning

Google Chrome OS: An new OS for the 21st century?

I'm sure that everyone has heard of the Google Chrome OS, Google's foray into creating an operating system running on Linux where everything is centered around the browser especially Google Chrome. Well, the Google Chrome OS has already been reviewed, with source code available. Engadget has the story. Apparently, the Google Chrome OS is much different than regular operating systems, it has been designed in the beginning for simplicity, security and ease of use.

Google Chrome OS is not meant to totally replace existing OSes like Windows, MacOS or Linux. In my opinion, it is meant for totally web-based computing. There are certain things where a native application is much faster and you can do more than with a web-based application. However, with AJAX and JavaScript, the performance of web-based applications is nearing that of native applications, which makes the game change. But it reminds me now of how the computer will become just like a dumb terminal in the 1960s and 1970s before the PC era. All you need to do is just boot up and everything is on the web, just like before on the mainframe server. Now that everything is going to the cloud, what does this leave for the native client?

Will the PC return back to a dumb terminal? Will rich native clients be replaced with web-based applications running in a browser. Will a browser-based OS make the computer more secure so therefore there isn't any loopholes to have viruses running on the native system exploiting ports from native applications like Outlook and the OS?

What do you think?

All in one email, instant messaging and social networking in one client: Nokia Messaging http://ping.fm/fu6Y1 #nokia

Exertion Interfaces talk from Floyd Mueller

Today, I attended a talk from Floyd Mueller who is visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and is a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne. He is talking about exertion games.

Abstract

Exertion Interfaces are interfaces that require intense physical effort. Their recent success stems mostly from their use in games, as demonstrated by the Wii and Natal. It is believed that these games facilitate not only physical health, but also more social play than traditional computer games. Over several years, Floyd has investigated the influence of technology design on exertion games. His research has contributed to an understanding of how people play computationally-augmented exertion games and how we can support exertion and social play in future designs. Floyd's research has produced several prototypes, including 'Jogging over a Distance', a system that allows joggers who are located in different cities to motivate one another while running using mobile technology, which was used last month between expat joggers in London, UK and Melbourne, Australia. Floyd will focus on the 'Jogging over a Distance' work to describe challenges and opportunities in using mobile technology to enhance people's fitness activities through a distributed social approach that aims to enhance the engagement with the activity while it occurs, unlike most pedometer work that focuses on post-reflection after the exercise.

Floyd is talking about how Dance Dance Revolution and the Nintendo Wii really changed the face of gaming using physical activity. There is an exciting research for engaging people over the internet using physical activity. For example, a group of cyclists come together and can connect with and cycle with other cyclists over the internet using Skype video conference. How to do the design between exertion play and social play? According to Floyd, we need to focus on mediated environment which can extend opportunities for social interaction.

The first research project was on Table Tennis for Three which involved a table tennis table with one side showing a screen and video conference to show the remote players. A player uses the table tennis racquet to hit the ball onto the screen which the other player on the other side will see and will hit the ball.

The second research project was Jogging Over a Distance, using spatial audio for showing whether your partner in jogging is close to you. Using a heart rate monitor, joggers can then speed up depending on the other partner in order to catch up to that person based on the spatial audio.

The third research project was Remote Boxing, which is boxing over a distance where users would hit the screen and get points for doing so when they saw objects appear on the screen.

All in all, very interesting research work and something that really brings HCI and ubiquitous computing to real every day life.

China HCI seminar series in Beijing - First session

China HCI Seminar Series
October 26, 2009

This is what I wrote from the first session in the China HCI Seminar Series which kicked off last night. This seminar series is meant to foster research and collaboration among HCI researchers in the Chinese community as well as abroad. It was held at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. There was lots of people for the first session, so the turn out was really great like a large lecture hall! There were two talks after introduction by the organizers and distinguished Chinese HCI researchers.








Prof. James Landay, University of Washington, Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia

Jonathan Grudin: A Moving Target: The Evolution of HCI

Keynote Speech

HCI started with Human Factors and Ergonomics with operation and data entry from 1905 to 1945, and then came the invention of general-purpose computers. HCI was one of five major IS research streams since 1967 (Banker and Kaufmann). Then there was HCI in Information Systems for managerial use. Finally Computer-Human Interaction happened in the 1980s with the beginning of the CHI conference and the establishment of SIGCHI. There was a focus shift from non-discretionary use to discretionary use. The Computer-Human Interaction stream started from the work of computer-engineer interaction and the work done at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The actual goal behind human-computer interaction actually started with the work of Grace Hopper.

According to Jonathan, there is a shifting focus of interface development from the large hardware mainframes, to the PCs, and now in groups and mobile devices where it is used collaboratively. The graphical user interface (GUI) changed the field of human-computer interaction in 1985 with the Apple Mac computer. Jonathan showed a curve of Moore’s Law showing how as you move the number of years, there is a longer tail on the curve. The next big impact was in 1995 where there was unanticipated changes in audio, video and graphics. Now, if we continue the curve, what is the next big bomb and it is predicted that it will happen in 2015. Design started coming into HCI since 1995, but we have been neglecting design for a decade or so. There is now new research trend into emotional design.


History and evolution of HCI


Interface development

The amount of information will dramatically increase exponentially and increasingly significant focus in HCI. H.G. Wells made a quote which sounds very much related to what the vision of human-driven Web 2.0 systems is, and this was in 1905! There is now the emergence of information schools. James Martin from 1973 talked about the era of information scarcity and according to Jonathan, we are still in the age of information scarcity. Now, there is a merging of the physical and virtual world. We can learn something from the kids domain like WebKinz where kids can buy a stuffed toy, enter the code, and then can enter the virtual world where they have to feed their toy and can share with other kids’ toys. He says why this can’t be the same in the adult world like buying a car?



Desney Tan: Creating Novel Human-Computer Interaction with Physiological Sensing
Computational User Experiences Group, Microsoft Research
Desney's web site


Following Jonathan’s footsteps, the next big thing in the evolution of computing paradigms is natural user interfaces. Mind reading devices are now hitting the consumer market, and is now becoming a science. At Microsoft Research, Desney and his team is looking into classifying brain activity tasks and uncontrolled game tasks with greater than 80% accuracy. The goal is to have only a few sensors as possible with high accuracy. They can use the brain sensors to accurately classify images based on brain activity using EEG. Another goal is to take science fiction like Minority Report as reality, and use detection of hand gesture recognition. At Microsoft Research, there is Project Natal which is controller free interaction which will be shipped with Microsoft XBox. In order to make this reality, they use EMG armbands to use muscle stimulation in order to detect gestures. You can sense gestures on a hard surface like a table top using Microsoft Surface.

Games are a very good test of the research because they require accurate classification and fast classification. Their group created a test application called Air Guitar Hero that uses hand gestures to pretend playing the guitar. A third research theme is mouth gesture interactions for example using tongues that can be used with paralyzed people who cannot use their hands or arms. Desneyäs group created a device to be placed on the tongue with electrodes in order to sense the tongue with a micro+controller. The idea is that some children wear retainers when they are young but a reluctant to use them because they are not nice to have and make them look ugly. But if they were cool by using sensors to make them technologically advanced to use, would help adoption of them. An example is using your tongue to control a Tetris game. All the technology is now embedded in the tongue retainer. So what are some applications of tongue gesture interaction? According to Desney, we can use tongue gestures to control mobile devices like for example building a music player within your mouth. Another application is in medical sensing for salivary analysis and food analysis.

The last project is Bionic Contact Lenses where technology is embedded in the contact lens. An application could be to project information into the eye, for example, remembering who a particular person is by looking at that person. Another application is medical sensing such as glucose sensing with bionic contacts.

In closing, Desney is talking about the next evolution of HCI that will help bring computing into the real world.



At the end, there was some questions addressed to Desney and Jonathan.



All in all, a great start to what looks to be a great lecture series on HCI in Beijing, something that I miss from my alma mater at University of Toronto.

My talk and photos from the Social Networking Conference in London, UK on Sept. 24 and 25, 2009

I was an invited speaker at the Social Networking Conference in London, UK from September 24 to 25, 2009. I spoke about Advances in Mobile Social Networking, of which my slides are available here for download and also on SlideShare below.

Advances In Mobile And Social Networking Alvin Chin

View more presentations from ubiquitousdude.

It was a business conference with many attendees and speakers from industry, I was the only one from research.  However, it was nice to see how other companies are using social networking especially how Facebook is being prevalently used, as quoted by Clara Shih who promoted her book, The Facebook Era, of which I bought and I am reading.  Clara mentions how Facebook and social networking sites are the new CRM, that is where your customers are and so you should utilize them to its full potential.  

IBM gave a great talk on enterprise social networking and how it forms a core in their organization, where employees can use DogEar for bookmarking URLs which automatically propagate to a social media portal that is similar to Facebook for aggregating social media content from all your colleagues and friends within the company.  IBM has been a huge proponent and model for other companies to follow, about how a social media strategy can vastly transform a company to become more responsive and have a better reputation with customers.

Photos from the conference are up here on Nokia Ovi.

It was great meeting with all of you at the conference, please keep in touch with me as gadgetman4u on Twitter and FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Facebook.