Yesterday’s keynote by Janet Abrams of the Design Institute was a smack in the face to many UBICOMP attendees when she started asking questions like: “How do you translate UBICOMP into real life? If this work is supposed to be ubiquitous, why don’t go out into the real world enough? Who are these users? Why are they so flavorless?” Nice wake up call to the researchers here but did they get it? Not sure… She went on to describe the “Big Urban Game” event that took place in Minneapolis where online players voted to move huge game pieces around the city (pic above). Nice concept but the whole game seemed more like a publicity stunt / marketing gimmick (TARGET was a big funder) so it still wasn’t clear what the point of this game was in the long run. Afterwards, the “1 Minute Madness” session let posters, videos, and demo authors state their point in one minute! An interesting project was the “Z-Agon” a six-sided display device that uses densely packed LEDs. Pretty nifty looking, but kind of overkill. Atau Tanaka also showed me his “Malleable Mobile Music” application which allows people to login to a central server with their PDAs and they are assigned to a track of music (such as the drum track). When they areiption>
