Urblove is both a service for the production and staging of location based mobile games and an online community where these games are distirbuted. Urblove provides for users to create their own games and to share their experience in playing them. The project hopes to encourage a sense of urban exploration in the service of creating a more integrated tolerant urban environment.

The project is being developed in collaboration with researchers Pers-Anders Hillgren and Per Linde (Interaction Design) and Karin Brook (Cultural Geography). The project is also developed in cooperation with wireless provider WIP and two community youth organisations RGRA and Tosabidarna. RGRA is a group interested in engaging youth in issues of national and global importance while Tosabidarna is a group supporting female Skaters.

While the project is in the early stages of development it is particularly interesting for its mix of start-up, community support, corporate cooperation, and institutional support.

The project is multilayered game employing the ‘This is not a game ‘ gambit to evoke a rich immersive game space that allowed the national broadcaster to develop a new intimate relationship with its viewers -’reaching audiences that have left the Sofa for the Keyboard’. The Truth About Marika was based on a traditional TV Drama. Before the premier of the television show a women made the public claim that SVT has stolen the story of her missing friend for the Drama Series and was part of a cover up. Her blog became the online section of the game space as viewers/participants looked for collected and shared clues to the missing girls story which were planted in the Drama Series and in Virtual and Actual worlds – the third plane of the game space. Talk Shows were staged including the shows producers, their accuser, and other protagonists.  Printed QR codes were posted in locations for discovery via mobiles. Geospatial information was gleaned via google mappings of clues.

The project might be seen as model for creating television media, broadcast media, and perhaps narrative media more  generally that is event driven and therefore makes good use of the relative difference that broadcast media displays in relation to network based content delivery platforms.

This might be related to the more simple and serendipitous rise of twitter as a backchannel for television. The real-time qualities of twitter and broadcast media appear particularly well aligned -each adding another dimension to the other.

He is currently working with the Game Studio @ SICS and is the principal developer of the commercialised pervasive gaming platform ‘The Creator’. He was also involved with the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming.The ‘game creator’ project developed as part of that project is the original  implementation of ‘the Creator’.

As the user goes about their day, the bio sensors capture real-time information on their physical states, including pulse, movement, skin temperature and galvanic skin response. At the end of the day, when the user syncs the collection devices to the tablet, the software interprets the bio data and represents the user’s emotional and physical states as colourful body shapes in positions ranging from fully reclined to upright. The colour of the shapes represent emotional states, with blue for the calm/rested end of the scale, red for the other aroused/agitated extreme, and gradations of purple for the states in between. Whether the shapes are more horizontal or vertical indicates that the user is moving around a lot or a little, respectively. Text messages that the user has received throughout the day, and photos they have taken are also uploaded to the diary from their mobile phone. All this bio and social data is then overlaid on a timeline of the user’s day.

The user can then navigate their diary by scrolling through this timeline and looking at sections of their day and the data associated with it. Photos they have taken are displayed in stacks according to their timestamp, and circular symbols that represent text messages received can be clicked on to reveal their contents. The user also has the ability to write or draw on these sections – perhaps notes on where they were, who they were talking to – adding another layer of narrative.

High-res screen captures can be viewed here and there is a video with more information on how to use the system here.

Affective Diary was developed in the Interaction Lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in cooperation with Microsoft Research. Participants in the project are: Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Anna Ståhl, Petra Sundström and Jarmo Laaksolathi, SICS, Marco Combetto, Alex Taylor and Richard Harper.

The Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID) is a leading innovator within the realm of experience design. In developing new platforms for human interaction via communication technologies and new media, ACID is committed to helping people participate in an increasingly digital world. The centre houses a multi-disciplinary team of ethnographers, designers, computer scientists and software developers who utilize their expertise to provide solutions for clients who wish to use technology to get closer to their users or customers.

The strength of the centre’s research derives from its extensive investigation into new ways to facilitate collaboration and develop social capital in various communities via technological intervention. In creating versatile digital media content, ACID aims to develop methods and tools that emphasise automation, generation and adaptation, thus enhancing creative potential for individual users.

ACID’s unique propriety research methodology follows a process that begins with careful determination and understanding of case-specific human interaction needs, followed by the formulation of initial designs for an appropriate digital interface. Each project’s prototype subsequently undergoes extensive testing and evaluation before a solution is obtained, carried out with the aid of genuine subjects in living laboratories.

Since 2007 ACID has provided technology-based resolutions to human problems in a number of real-world contexts. The broad spectrum of the centre’s research encompasses services to education, tourism, local government, electronic entertainment, indigenous communities, artistic practitioners and telecommunication networks.

The first, and perhaps most known, concept I worked with, we named social navigation. Bascially, social navigation makes other’s social trails through information spaces visible. This helps users find their way in large information spaces as we typically rely on the judgement of others. After working with the concept of social navigation for a while, some of the colleagues I was working with at the time, figured that we could move this concept out into mobile contexts. Thus, we built a range of social mobile services . This in turn, made us discover the problematic nature of seamlessness, a concept often promoted by the telecom-industry. Instead of seamlessness, we have therefore been working with seamfulness. A seamful design is one where the seams in the network coverage, positioning system, or between different media in a space are not hidden but instead used as a resource in the design, shown to the users so that they can make sense of them, appropriate them and have fun with them.

After working with social navigation for many years, I became really interested in affective computing after listening to Rosalind Picard in 1998. But my take on affective computing is somewhat different from Roz’ direction of research. Together with the affective presence group I have been exploring an alternative view on how affect can be integrated into interaction with end users. Our take is that of affective interaction. In particular, with my research group we have been exploring the idea of involving users both physically and cognitively in what we name an affective loop.

All these “interaction concepts” that I have been working with throughout my research career all belong to the same theoretical foundation: that of embodied interaction (as discussed by Paul Dourish). But instead of being grand theories of life, universe and everything, our aim is to make these concepts carry the grand theory into usable design concepts that anyone can pick up and make use of in their design practice.”