Sunday 30 September 2007

Mobile Camp London: CuteCircuit wearables

bluetooth t-shirt with touch sensors & heat+vibration actuators
hug yourself & send action to application on phone, then send that hug to other people
can also send hugs to friends if you don't have a shirt -- use the HugMe software
can send to multiple people
when you connect after leaving it in your cupboard for a while, the phone prompts you: "there is a hug waiting. do you want to feel it now?"
children wanted to invent a touch language to communicate in class
power mesh rather than wires (silver coated mesh) with low power
bluetooth brain on back (only hard piece -- rest is soft)
can wash by removing battery & hug pads -- circuits are waterproof
unfortunately, demo shirts were left behind after they visited Wired NextFest -- a film company wants to use them in film (with Hiro from Heroes in it)
question: when will the shorts will be released...?
Mobile Phone Dress
When you swing the arm up to your ear it answers the call -- swinging your arm down, hangs up
Microphone and headphone in sleeve; aerial in hem of dress so doesn't give you high radiation
(side comment: jawbone -- world's best noise cancelling bluetooth headset: $100 but leagues ahead of anyone else)
SkateHoodie
problem: listening to music while you skate -- don't want to have iPod hanging around so it doesn't get bashed
instead have a hoodie that is a music player -- transfer music into it by plugging a USB stick into it
also enables sharing USB sticks with your friends (don't want to lend them your iPod, but a stick only costs a few quid)
headphones are embedded in fabric in the hood
controls are little indentations on the arm, have to learn which indentation is which

Mobile Camp London: The Astonishing Tribe

license rich graphical user interface middleware & tools for phone manufacturers
offices in sweden (hq), korea, san diego, tokyo, taipei

focus on user interface for mobiles

  • kastor: rendering engine -- images, rectangles, etc
  • cascades: UI design -- lists, etc
  • motion lab: UI authoring tool for cascades or kastor
proprietary tech, selling as a product
motion lab currently approaching release 2.0
cascades available as a library & headers for symbian, windows for mobile, etc.
can integrate into a third party app

UI driven architecture to enable a seamless UI combining lots of different services (MVC architecture)
background services such as MMS service, main menu service, media player service
UI layer controlled with XML config, separated from background services
generic callbacks to service code

can try out interface without back-end on real device
allows you to test performance of UI

also have a win32 viewer that allows you to preview on windows

define a control element and tie to a visual layout and a model using ids
can specify model using model element in XML, or using a dataService element that gets data from C
dataservice defines a class and the C code registers such a class
callbacks are basic tree access methods: get root data element, get child at index, get name, get property, etc.
whenever you change something in the data structure, you can tell cascades about add, remove or change and it will update the appropriate controls and visuals for you

can define a frame that maintains a history of pages
also allows you to define transitions between pages
pages can have commands that invoke handlers
handlers can be to services and also to functions within cascades itself (e.g. navigation between pages of a frame)

action elements define animations by acting on attributes of visual nodes

also have a testing framework for the UI
have expected frames and compare by pixel
also hopper test with random clicks

next release of motion lab will move further away from page design and towards flow design