Technology that knows how we feel

Clive Thompson on Gadgets That Know How We Feel:

Beverly Woolf is a computer scientist who studies “intelligent tutoring” — artificial-intelligence teaching software that automatically adapts its lesson to how quickly a student is learning.

She outfitted computers with expression detectors that followed where the students were looking. She installed sensors in the chairs to detect posture and gave the kids wristbands that measured galvanic skin response. If the tutoring software identified that the pupils were checking out, it would offer encouragement or shift to a different or easier problem, just as a human teacher might do.

It worked. The software was 80 percent accurate in sensing the students’ moods—and toward the end of a 15-minute lesson, users were three times more engaged and focused than kids who had been working on regular, unmodified computers.

Smart idea. And why stop there? I think that all of our software and hardware would work better if it understood our moods. We need an emo revolution in high tech.

… Our computers have been robots too long; it’s time they softened up.

Thompson discusses several current research projects that involve computers sensing emotion in order to limit interruptions and improve productivity and safety.

Humans tend to interact with a fluidity and mastery of contextual clues that computers lack. Much of this is due not to intelligence but to emotional awareness. I would argue that learning the art of emotion would best happen in creating responsive, playful technologies. There are few human experiences so dynamic and rich with emotional clues as two or more people playing together. In fact, this blog takes its name from a key play marker that differentiates what might be mistaken for aggression from rough and tumble play. Get play right and an emotionally sensitive spreadsheet is a breeze.

ADDENDUM: On the flip side, consider play technologies generating, evoking, or triggering emotions: How Wii and Kinect Hack Into Your Emotions.

Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect

Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect [video]:

A quick installation prototype Emily and I hooked up with the libfreenect Kinect drivers and ofxKinect. The system is doing skeleton tracking on the arm and determining where the shoulder, elbow, and wrist is, using it to control the movement and posture of the giant funky bird!

(via Engadget)

Nike Turns London Into a Game Board to Get People Running

With the help of an advertising firm, Nike transformed the city of London into a game board for a two-week competition called the GRID. London was divided into zones. Runners competed by starting at a phone box, dialing a number, entering a unique ID, and then following the instructions to run to other phone boxes. The organizers used data from the calls (the iPod Nike+ system was not a part of the game) to create and track different kinds of competitions (e.g. men vs. women), posting the results online.

It was Nike’s desire to promote more running — in part to drive sales. What’s remarkable is that an advertising agency chose a form of play over an actual advertising campaign to achieve Nike’s goal.

Nike Turns London Into a Game Board to Get People Running:

Douglas goes on to say, “We decided the best strategic option to deliver this would be to augment the running experience; creating a layer of experience on top of the run that aimed to alter how the activity would be interacted with.” Hence the game. The current competition started last Friday and runs (no pun intended) for 15 days. Players, who can compete individually or in teams, get points, badges, and prizes for speed, routes, and “various unlockables,” Douglas writes, “that become apparent as the game unfolds.” As of this writing, the game had 2,834 players and 323 teams.

“GRID is part of a growing category of ideas that sits within, as Tom Coates of Yahoo! describes, the ‘real world web,’” Douglas writes, “connected things that blur the physical and virtual spaces — things that thrive primarily because they excite us as humans, rather than being a vehicle for demonstrating technical capability.”

I agree with Douglas. There are few things that excite us as much and as uniquely as does play. How many advertising campaigns are as enthralling as two weeks of the GRID? Further, I predict we’ll see a growing trend of cities reinvented as playgrounds for adults — with technology intimately linked to those transformations (more & more).

(via Matt Anderson)

Giants, Beanstalks, and Technology

I recently read an article by author and technology culture geek Cory Doctorow. In it he talks about parenting, children, and “screens.”

The way Cory describes how he and his daughter involve a computer and the Internet in their play could have been a case study for what I’ve written about the idea of context aware toys — minus the actual toy part.

Jack and the interstalk: why the computer is not a scary monster:

But the fun comes when we incorporate all this into our storytelling play. It started with Jack and the Beanstalk. I told her the story one morning while we were on summer vacation. She loved the booming FEE FI FOE FUM! but she was puzzled by unfamiliar ideas like beanstalks, castles, harps and golden eggs. So I pulled up some images of them (using Flickr image search). Later, I found two or three different animated versions of Jack’s story on YouTube, including the absolutely smashing Max Fleischer 1933 version. These really interested Poesy (especially the differences between all the adaptations), so one evening we made a Lego beanstalk and had an amazing time running around the house, play-acting Jack and the Beanstalk with various stuffed animals and such as characters. We made a golden egg out of wadded up aluminium foil, and a harp out of a coat-hanger, tape and string, and chased up and down the stairs bellowing giant-noises at one another.

But the laptop play we’ve stumbled on feels right. It’s not passive, mesmerised, isolated TV watching. Instead, it’s a shared experience that involves lots of imagination, physically running around the house (screeching with laughter, no less!), and mixing up story-worlds, the real world, and play…

Room full of wonder

An xkcd classic

Damn straight.

Admit it. You totally want to do this. Turns out — you actually can: calculate it & then stock up.