Exertion Interfaces

Labels: msra, theory

Tracked down sources for equipment
Identified hard- and software requirements
Talked to James Landay about how to evaluate if design themes are useful: agreed on meeting with HCI experts and designers where they discuss how themes played out in design.
Identified development team that works on Natal to work with them.
Refined thesis-on-1-page

Labels: msra

Gave talk at Nokia Beijing on Exertion Interactions, with a particular focus on "Jogging over a Distance".
Organized visitors from RMIT to see Microsoft and give talk.
Inquired vendors about purchasing of EMS systems, might need to modify own due to costs.
Met with Advanced Technology Center at Microsoft to help with design.
Met with Richard Harper, Andrew Blake, Desney Tan, Jonathan Grudin.

Labels: msra

This week included attending the distinguished speakers in HCI seminar, organising a talk with Nokia and the Natal team in Redmond, and talking to other researchers about their demos from ACM Multimedia.
Tried out EMS for a game idea that involves 'in your body' activities. Seems suitable for synchronizing distributed (individual) muscle activities.

Labels: msra

This week, I learned more about the technology researched here, and talked to some very smart people about their work in relation to Exertion Interactions.

I've given a talk about Exertion, on the same day as Desney Tan's talk, which made me think that our work has a lot in common: we are both very interested in a close link between technology and the body, which tries to enhance the bodily action, rather than enabling a reflection on it afterwards, which is more James Landay's work. (I think they can be nicely combined). I call it 'in your face computing', it is on an extreme end of the 'hidden in objects' approach of Weisner's ubiquitous computing.

Also tried to structure design themes: maybe themes are framed based on a lens on Exertion Games depending whether you see them as "exertion play", "socially mediated play" and "rule-based play", similar to what Salen and Zimmerman do to understand games, they also see them from different angles to understand them as a whole (, without infererring that these aspects can be investigated independantly).

Currently still juggling 2 game ideas, need to refine one or combine both.

Labels: in your face computing, msra

First week at Microsoft Research Asia resulted in several conversations with some very smart people here. Also thought about what I have learned from previous studies, and 3 themes stand out: uncertainty, pain as investment and physical risk. I am trying to address them in future designs. Was also working on longer Jogging over a Distance write-up, and identified the notion of shared pain as being both bodily and social, possibly being the parallel-play equivalent to social body feedback in non-parallel games.

Worked on four project ideas so far, will narrow them down based on what technologically possible next week.

Will also give talk to local and US HCI people next week.

Labels: msra

Here I will blog my work while being at Microsoft Research Asia for the next 3 months.
(Also, I just found that Jane McGonigal did this wonderful blog of writing her favorite sentence for every day of thesis writing, I might do the same :-) http://bestsentence.blogspot.com/

Labels: msra, writing