Mike Edwards

Here is the latest in my continuing series on analyzing Twitter conference backchannels by their hashtags and replies/retweets. This one, though, is a bit different and special... because I was actually at the conference! Below is my breakdown of Games + Learning + Society 2009 via the #gls and #gls09 hashtags.

The positions of the glowballs, and other information coming from SCREM, can be relayed to a little Nokia N800 palmtop over the WiFi connection.

Tracking is still a little rough, and, as I mention in the video, I think the IR cams are grabbing the N800 a little bit, so we'll need to keep it outside of the area--at least until the tracker is a bit more solid. Still, it should be a handy way to bring in another interface--and other participants--inside SMALLab. In fact, I gave the N800 to James in the office, and he could watch the movements of the balls through the wall.

I'm sure that's useful somehow.

Here is a quick video explanation of the HitArea and DragArea render engines.

The engines can track when a pointer enters and leaves them, and the DragArea engine also reports back the pointer's relative position--handy for sliders, etc.

Here's more work on faking three dimensions on a flat plane.

Disco 3D: Behold the three dimensions!

Again, this only works from the perspective of the ball, so one person needs to hold it fairly near their point of view to get the effect. And, from the brief demo we did at the workshop, sometimes people need a few minutes to adjust to the effect before they feel like they're navigating space.

At this point, it seems like more of a fun demo or a parlor trick. One really good suggestion we got recently, though, was that we could give participants a button, say on a Wiimore, that would allow them to assume the first person perspective if more than one person is navigating the space. That might help share the experience a bit better.

We were experimenting with different ideas for how to represent the third dimension you have access to with the SMALLab installation. This is a trial using a camera viewpoint that tracks the position of the ball as you move through a space with it. It fools you into thinking that a 3d world is changing at your feet.

It's not a perfect solution. It only works for one person, and there are limits to how high you can pretend the Z-axis goes. Still, it's an interesting way of looking at the problem, and it might open more doors later on.

Hey, no sense keeping this hidden on my hard drive. And until we get a full and working archive of all the thesis documents back at the department, this seems like the most logical place for it to go. Plus it will allow me to link it into CiteseerX, which I'm currently doing research with and loving. While I'm thinking about it, I"m also loving JabRef, the open-source citation manager. Just wish I'd discovered these last year.

Today's observations in pictures:

Battle of the Bands: Nurses in Kamuzu Central Hospital's Children's Ward C, which is dedicated to therapeutic nutrition, compare the UNICEF-style MUAC band with the prototype we've created.

Paper Records: One of the driving forces behind implementing Baobab's patient-manage system in hospitals is to help reduce the problems associated with keeping paper records. Here we see the destination of many records that are only a few years old.

Rashid Demonstrates the X-Ray Process: One of the best-loved features of the Baobab system is its use with tracking and reporting on x-rays.

Just a very brief video message from me here in Malawi.