Monthly Archives: April 2008

What to do with a Wii?

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Andreas Bulling from Zürich sent me a link to some amazingly creative Wii projects: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ – it is really interesting how many people play with this device and get interesting ideas going!

At the TEI’08 conference in Bonn Susanne Boll an her team presented interesting work on gesture recognition using Wiimote’s acceleration sensor [1]. People from Georgia Tech presented another idea using this controller: WiiArt [2]. We currently think of using it in teaching to make some exercises (e.g. measuring Fits’ law ;-) more exciting…

[1] Schlömer, T., Poppinga, B., Henze, N., and Boll, S. 2008. Gesture recognition with a Wii controller. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Bonn, Germany, February 18 – 20, 2008). TEI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 11-14. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1347390.1347395

[2] Lee, H., Kim, H., Gupta, G., and Mazalek, A. 2008. WiiArts: creating collaborative art experience with WiiRemote interaction. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Bonn, Germany, February 18 – 20, 2008). TEI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 33-36. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1347390.1347400

>What to do with a Wii?

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>Andreas Bulling from Zürich sent me a link to some amazingly creative Wii projects: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ – it is really interesting how many people play with this device and get interesting ideas going!

At the TEI’08 conference in Bonn Susanne Boll an her team presented interesting work on gesture recognition using Wiimote’s acceleration sensor [1]. People from Georgia Tech presented another idea using this controller: WiiArt [2]. We currently think of using it in teaching to make some exercises (e.g. measuring Fits’ law ;-) more exciting…

[1] Schlömer, T., Poppinga, B., Henze, N., and Boll, S. 2008. Gesture recognition with a Wii controller. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Bonn, Germany, February 18 – 20, 2008). TEI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 11-14. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1347390.1347395

[2] Lee, H., Kim, H., Gupta, G., and Mazalek, A. 2008. WiiArts: creating collaborative art experience with WiiRemote interaction. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Bonn, Germany, February 18 – 20, 2008). TEI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 33-36. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1347390.1347400

Teacher Training: mobile phone programming in JAVA

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Yesterday evening we organized a teacher training session on JAVA programming for mobile phone. We introduced them to the basics of Java ME and gave a tutorial on using Netbeans with mobility pack for creating applications. One idea for using the phone as an application platform is to increase motivation.

In some of the discussions we came across the issue of “how to teach programming” in school. I personally thing that explaining and learning the basic concepts of statement, variable, if-then, and loop is best done with not much around… I showed some of the activities on the OLPC for programming: Pippy (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pippy) and Turtle Art (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Turtle_Art) and we talked about processing (http://www.processing.org/) as a further option.

>Teacher Training: mobile phone programming in JAVA

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>

Yesterday evening we organized a teacher training session on JAVA programming for mobile phone. We introduced them to the basics of Java ME and gave a tutorial on using Netbeans with mobility pack for creating applications. One idea for using the phone as an application platform is to increase motivation.

In some of the discussions we came across the issue of “how to teach programming” in school. I personally thing that explaining and learning the basic concepts of statement, variable, if-then, and loop is best done with not much around… I showed some of the activities on the OLPC for programming: Pippy (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pippy) and Turtle Art (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Turtle_Art) and we talked about processing (http://www.processing.org/) as a further option.

Mensch und Computer program committee meeting in Lübeck

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Yesterday night I flew to Hamburg and traveled on to Lübeck – a quite nice town in the north of Germany – for the program committee meeting of Mensch und Computer 2008. This morning I got up a little earlier to walk around the city – as it was my first time visiting. The building I could see when walking into town however was oddly familiar, after some moments I recalled that it is the Holstentor which was pictured on the 50DM note (DM = German Mark – the money used in Germany till 2001 before we exchanged it for the Euro ;-) .

In the meeting we discussed a large number of submission made to Mensch und Computer 2008. It seems there are quite an interesting number of papers in the program which make the conference worth while. We will also run the second edition of our workshop on Automotive User Interface and Interactive Applications. The automotive workshop we ran 2007 in Weimar was with about 30 participants very successful.

>Mensch und Computer program committee meeting in Lübeck

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>Yesterday night I flew to Hamburg and traveled on to Lübeck – a quite nice town in the north of Germany – for the program committee meeting of Mensch und Computer 2008. This morning I got up a little earlier to walk around the city – as it was my first time visiting. The building I could see when walking into town however was oddly familiar, after some moments I recalled that it is the Holstentor which was pictured on the 50DM note (DM = German Mark – the money used in Germany till 2001 before we exchanged it for the Euro ;-) .

In the meeting we discussed a large number of submission made to Mensch und Computer 2008. It seems there are quite an interesting number of papers in the program which make the conference worth while. We will also run the second edition of our workshop on Automotive User Interface and Interactive Applications. The automotive workshop we ran 2007 in Weimar was with about 30 participants very successful.

Meeting on Human Centered in Vienna

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Ina Wagner, Volker Wulf and Kjeld Schmidt organized a meeting to get together people from all over Europe that work on human centred computing. We had interesting discussions what is specific and distinct European human centred computing and how well it is represented in organizations such as the ACM.

Some years ago there has been significant support in this area of research on a European level – namely I3 and the disappearing computer initiative. Currently many of us feel that the value of user centred research is not supported enough and hence innovation happens somewhere else which can lead to massive disadvantages for European industries. One central issue is that we need more to communicate value of user interface research.

The need for user interface research is undoubtedly accepted. One example is the ISTAG report of 2001 that tried to look into 2010 – a future that is now not too far anymore. Looking at the challenges stated in this report it becomes clear that most of the technical issues are solved but this does has not lead to a breakthrough with regard to the visionary scenarios. But towards the challenge “natural interfaces” we have still a long way to go. If we really want to get closer to those scenarios of ambient intelligence that are human friendly we really have to push on interaction and user interfaces – hopefully decision makers on a European level will get it ;-)

>Meeting on Human Centered in Vienna

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>Ina Wagner, Volker Wulf and Kjeld Schmidt organized a meeting to get together people from all over Europe that work on human centred computing. We had interesting discussions what is specific and distinct European human centred computing and how well it is represented in organizations such as the ACM.

Some years ago there has been significant support in this area of research on a European level – namely I3 and the disappearing computer initiative. Currently many of us feel that the value of user centred research is not supported enough and hence innovation happens somewhere else which can lead to massive disadvantages for European industries. One central issue is that we need more to communicate value of user interface research.

The need for user interface research is undoubtedly accepted. One example is the ISTAG report of 2001 that tried to look into 2010 – a future that is now not too far anymore. Looking at the challenges stated in this report it becomes clear that most of the technical issues are solved but this does has not lead to a breakthrough with regard to the visionary scenarios. But towards the challenge “natural interfaces” we have still a long way to go. If we really want to get closer to those scenarios of ambient intelligence that are human friendly we really have to push on interaction and user interfaces – hopefully decision makers on a European level will get it ;-)