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Coolest of CHI 2014
Every year around this time my research community has the CHI conference, both standing for Computer-Human Interaction and a pun on the greek χ, representing empirical data. Here are the projects I saw at the conference that were the coolest. I’ll update this as I read papers I didn’t get to see in person. Haptic…
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“That’s very compelling, but are you the only one who can use it?”
I was asked this question when demoing a research interface at a presentation recently. It’s a good question, and I think one we in the research HCI field tip-toe around a lot. The answer I gave was that concept interfaces are meant to explore a new idea. A successful concept presents an idea what is…
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I Need a Better Distributed Notes Service
I sync many, many plain text notes between my phone and various computers I use during the day. Some of these are little reminders, like what I need to buy for dinner, some of these are freeform narrative ideas about a story, and some of these are links of stuff to read. I’m looking for…
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Learning from Feedback
As the head chef of a new 5-Star restaurant, you are anxiously preparing for the opening in three months. Your menu is mostly set, and you’ve talked about your ideas with your food industry friends and they’re excited. You want to try out some of your dishes on people who aren’t in the industry, so…
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Players are Jerks to NPCs in Real Life, Too
A non-player character (NPC) is anyone you encounter in a game who is not a player themselves. They are controlled by the game, whether a human game/dungeon master or a computer simulation. Player characters (PCs), the in-game characters controlled by the players, are notoriously abusive to NPCs. Since the universe exists and moves forward for…
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Explaining Hipsterism
I was at my cottage this weekend hanging out with a few younger male relatives and their friends. At one point, one of them jokingly said that I, with my beard and square-framed black glasses and plaid shirt, “kind of looked like a hipster”. They didn’t know that I lived right next to Queen Street…
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First Dungeonmastering Experience
After wanting to do it for many years, and meticulously re-reading DM of the Rings, I DMed a tabletop RPG session for the first time last week, in a setting of my own invention. I had all kinds of concerns going into it (Will it be fun? Is the custom setting over-ambitious? Do I know…
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Digital Immortality Now!
My friend[1] just sent me this article from the Montreal Gazette, announcing a program called “Live On”, developed by an ad ageny that lets users to tweet after their death. The service doesn’t claim to merely let you schedule tweets to appear a certain time after you die, but will attempt to replicate your writing…
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Moons of Sallys
Click the image to play Moons of Sallys, inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad. (More of a toy than a game really – you can just fly rockets around). I’ve nearly finished reading Stanislaw Lems’ The Cyberiad for a second time. I’m an old-school sci-fi aficionado, and it’s possibly one of my favourite books in…