Here is a list of “idea labs” around the country/world. It is a list of places where they carry out work very similar to what is done at MIT Media Lab – lots of engineering, design and rapid prototyping/fabrication for projects that push the envelope of technology and its application to our lives.

USA – ACADEMIC

D-Lab/Media-X/CDR, Stanford, http://mediax.stanford.edu/

Infolab, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, http://infolab.northwestern.edu/

Information Sciences Institute/Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, http://ict.usc.edu/

Georgia Tech GVU, Atlanta, GA, http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/

Human-Computer Interaction Institute, CMU, Pittsburgh, http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/

CMU Entertainment Technology Center, CMU, Pittsburgh, http://www.etc.cmu.edu/

NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYC, http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/flash/Home

Berkeley Institute of Design, Berkeley, CA,  http://bid.berkeley.edu/

Four Eyes Lab, UCSB, CA,  http://ilab.cs.ucsb.edu/

USA – COMMERCIAL



MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, http://www.media.mit.edu/

MERL – Mistubishi Electric Research Laboratories – http://www.merl.com/

Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, http://www.parc.com/

Eyebeam, NYC,  www.eyebeam.org.

Applied Minds in L.A., http://www.appliedminds.com/

Yahoo! Design Innovation Team, design.yahoo.com

Idea Lab, http://www.idealab.com/

Willow Garage, Menlo Park, CA, http://www.willowgarage.com/

Squid Labs, Berkely, CA, http://www.squid-labs.com/

Institute for Human- and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, FL, http://www.ihmc.us/

Accenture Technology Labs, http://www.accenture.com/Global/Services/Accenture_Technology_Labs/default.htm

IBM Research, http://www.almaden.ibm.com/software/disciplines/user/

Docomo Communications Labs, http://www.docomolabs-usa.com/

EUROPE / ASIA



Innovation Lab, Denmark,  http://innovationlab.dk

medialab prado madrid, spain, http://medialab-prado.es/

v2 rotterdam, holland, http://www.v2.nl/

interactive institutes, sweden, http://www.tii.se/

ars electroncia futurelab, linz, austria, http://www.aec.at/en/futurelab/index.asp

fabrica, treviso, italy, http://www.fabrica.it/

c3, budapest, hungary, http://www.c3.hu/

distance lab, scotland (former ML europe staff), http://www.distancelab.org/

art+com, berlin, germany, http://www.artcom.de/

meso, frankfurt, germany, http://www.meso.net/

Knowledge Media Institute, Milton Keynes, UK, http://kmi.open.ac.uk/

HumLab Blog, Sweden, http://blog.humlab.umu.se/

ITRI Creativity Lab, Taiwan, http://www.itri.org.tw/eng/

Sony Computer Science Lab, Paris and Tokyo, http://www.sonycsl.co.jp/

DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany, http://www.dfki.de/web

Creativity & Cognition Studios, University of Technology Sydney, Australia, http://www.creativityandcognition.com/

Mobile Life, Stockholm, Sweden, http://www.mobile-life.org/index.php

Studio Creatif, France Telecom, France, http://www.studio-creatif.com/

HITLabNZ, New Zealand,  http://www.hitlabnz.org/

Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Korea, http://www.sait.samsung.co.kr/eng/main.jsp

Don’t think, try!

Jonh Hunter

LIFT is on. Yesterday, I took part in this workshop that stimulated discussions around the reasons that brought different technologies to fail. As the topic was very interesting to many LIFT attendees the room was quite full and we had to break into groups. I coordinated and worked with people interested in reasons of failures of mobile applications. We came out with a list of nine points that summarize well our discussion:

1. Applications should be self-contained. No need to access data remotely as traffic is often charged separately and people do not want to pay extra money;
2. Lack of market model. E. g., Mobile blogging did not really address a real user need;
3. Lack of advertisement;
4. Lack of awareness / lack of certainty. For instance applications might show an inconsistence mechanism of use or either they did not offer appropriate feedback. People could feel uncertain that the application will accomplish their communication intentions;
5. Lack of culture. Either there is not a culture around a new service or the service might offer something which exist in other forms in other contexts;
6. Ergonomic barriers. Usability issues like extremely complicate installation procedures or interaction mechanisms;
7. Pricing/cost model. The user might feel uncomfortable if s/he is not sure of how much s/he is going to pay for using the system or the service;
8. Tradeoff between responding to needs and creating new needs. I actually think that we should design following the first principle but most of the time is the other way around and this lead developers to design for false needs;
9. Lack of standards. One of the biggest barrier for mobile development is the lack of standards. Devices offer inconsistent features and APIs and multi-device programming is extremely costly, and buggy…

During the general discussion we stated that most of the failures of “intelligent applications” lie on the fact that their definition of what is an intelligent behavior is flawed. Essentially, people are not rational and therefore unpredictable. Also for many of these products there is no effort to take the user’s point of view and adapt to changes.

I recently joined an open source effort to build a location-based social application that aim to provide location features to Google’s android compatible phones. It is called androidlocation. Initially, the application will allow to:

• List of friends with distance to our current location
• Detect GSM info and translate it to coordinates to know our current location
• Google Maps interfase to see objects in a specified radio of our current location with zoom and sattelite and traffic views
• Google Maps interfase to move around the map with zoom and sattelite and traffic views
• Search for Objects in Google Maps and show their location
• Show our current location with a transparent blue circle
• Show closest friends with their names

Raskar and colleagues at MIT Media Lab are building a wearable fabric to support millimeter accurate location and bio-parameter tracking at thousands of points on the body. Such a fabric can compute and predict 3D representation of human activity and use them for a closed-loop control to augment human performance. The goal is to support a detailed analysis and control of higher-level human activity. The basic technology uses a new optical motion capture method they have recently developed. The first phase of the project involves building next generation optical communication tools.

More here.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations

Free or free-ish:

Plot – http://plot.micw.eu/

Python Graph Library – http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/

DataGraph – http://www.visualdatatools.com/DataGraph/index.html

ParaView (3D visualization) – http://www.paraview.org/

GraphSketcher – http://www.graphsketcher.com/

R (statistical) – http://www.r-project.org/

Not so free:

Numbers – http://www.apple.com/iWork

Aabel – http://www.gigawiz.com/aabel.html

Citrin – http://www.gigawiz.com/citrin.html

Smile – http://www.satimage.fr/software/en/index.html

Profit – http://www.quansoft.com/

We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.

(Whorf, 1956, p.214)

The European Commission has come up with something for the eco-warrior on the go: a cell phone application that tracks one’s own carbon footprint. After downloading the free program (at mobgas.jrc.it), consumers can use their mobiles as an eco-diary, recording, say, time spent driving and watching TV. The program calculates how much greenhouse gas their activities are creating. If they upload the data to the site, users can see their footprints ranked against national and global averages. The mobGAS software was launched to coincide with the round of U.N.-led climate talks that just concluded in Bali. It’s available in 21 languages and is accessible to anyone with cell-phone Internet access.

Location awareness is the knowledge of the position of one’s interaction partners both in physical environments and in virtual worlds. This information is extremely important for the coordination of communication and collaborative problem solving especially when participants are not nearby. Nova, in his PhD work conducted a series of timely experiments to demonstrate the impact of location awareness on collaborative work at a distance [Nova, 2007]. He designed an ubiquitous treasure-hunt game, called CatchBob! where three participants had to walk around a campus area to chase a virtual object. They had at their disposal a tablet PC running the interface represented in figure 1. Using this system, they could communicate with their partners annotating the campus map with the stylus of the tablet and have information on their proximity to the virtual object to be found. He compared experimental conditions where partners could see the position of their partners with a control condition where participants could see only their position. After the game, he interviewed the participant. In particular, he asked the participant to draw the recalled path of his/her partners, comparing this information with the real traces from the system logs.

figure 1. CatchBob! interface as seen by one player

Using this experimental design, he demonstrated that the availability of what he called Mutual-Location Awareness tool (MLA) had an impact on collaboration. In particular, for the players knowing where the others were located both with automatic refresh of the information, or with manual refresh, had inhibiting effects on communication within groups and on the recall of partners’ past positions. It also made the group more passive than those who did not have this interface. Nova and colleagues also analyzed the messages exchanged during the game. He used the coding scheme reported in figure 2, where messages were classed by content and by pragmatic use. Consistently with the process measures described above, he found that players in the control condition exchanged more messages about position, direction and strategy that those with the synchronous MLA. They found also a negative correlation between the frequency of messages about strategy and the number of errors made by the individual when drawing their partner’s path [Nova et al., 2005].

figure 2. Example of messages exchanged by the CatchBob! players. Nova coded these messages using two intertwined coding scheme: message content and message pragmatics

These studies brought forward the various roles of mutual location-awareness ranging from a resource for division of labor to the facilitation of situation understanding or the use of past positions to draw hypotheses about the partners’ future behavior. Nova finally discussed how automating location-awareness can be detrimental to group collaboration in certain situations [Nova, 2007].

[1] Nova, N. The influence of location awareness on computer-supported collaboration. n. 3769, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, March 2007. [pdf]

[2] Nova, N., Girardin, F., and Dillenbourg, P. ’location is not enough! ’: an empirical study of location-awareness in mobile collaboration. In Proceeding of the third IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Educations (Tokushima, Japan, November 28-30 2005), IEEE Press, pp. 21–28. [pdf]