The Interaction Frontiers 2006

Posted on 01/03/2006 by admin

I spent lunchtime with Leandro Agrò and Flavio de Paoli in a nice Oktoberfest resembling steak house in Bicocca, the uber-modern quarter built in the ex-Pirelli factory area, chatting about new-born babies and the lacks of modern digital compact cameras.

The last minute meeting was set up in order to evaluate the Milano-Bicocca University conference room that’s planned to host this year edition of “The Interaction Frontiers” (you can find the 2005 site, with speakers – including Dirk Knemeyer – bio, abstracts and slides here), which will be the main UXnet Italy event for the current year.

The event is planned to be held on June 16 from 9am to 4pm and will be about

The traditional GUI windows [that] are now enriched by simul-human symbolic representations (avatars), have input devices and sensors capable of collecting emotion rich informations and finally come out from their screens and walk on their own wheels and robot legs.

This year conference room will have seats for 150/200 people, Wi-Fi + plugs will be provided for free to all the attendees and bloggers, so remember to bring your laptop!
Learning from the LIFT06 experience the first 4 seat rows will be reserved to people without computer as the famous laptop free zone.

We plan to have a world renown geek as keynote speaker and a bright minded researcher specialised in emotion capable machines (I’m sorry but cannot be more precise at this stage) plus a top class panel of User Experience/HCI experts and a bunch of great speakers. We have some 15mins speaking slots still available and will open a call for papers once the conference site will be ready (a couple of weeks or so).

I’m really excited to be involved in the organization of such a cuttin edge event which – by the way – will be provided FOR FREE to all. If curious you can find photo details of the conference spaces on Leandro’s Flickr set.

Farewell matteopenzo/blog welcome Yellow Line

Posted on 27/02/2006 by admin

After something more than 3 years on Blogger I’ve now finally made THE decision.

The switching to the english language expanded my user base on one side (BTW since this is going to be an English blog, I’ve imported just the posts written in English), and my blogging activity on the other side. I also needed something that could automatically track my asides such as Flickr and could easily handle tags; something with a great WYSIWYG editor and a great free template base: I’m not a designer anymore, I’m not a CSS guru, I don’t have time to fine tune the Xhtml. That’s why I moved to WordPress for the CMS/engine side and to Squibble for the template (something on the frontend side will probably change as the time goes by).

I’m still a WP virgin, I certainly need sometime to browse/play with themes and plugins, for the moment there’s some AJAX magic on the comments and search engine thanks to Squibble.

The blog name also changed: you’re now enjoing Yellow Line (you can find more info on the name here). If you already subscribed to the feed just sit down and relax, I already managed Feedburner to point ot the new feed; if you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now.

The content receipt won’t change too much: just a little of personal life, Eyetracking, Innovation and Mobup.

Enjoy.

P.S. Thankyou Simone for the WordPress installing and initial configuration and the FTP permission settings.

Monday morning at the IDII

Posted on 27/02/2006 by admin

As previously anticipated I spent a nice morning at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milan listening to a couple of thesis project (which are now approaching 50% of their completion). I was invited to listen to Vinay Venkatraman presentation: a bright minded Indian guy who came out with this nifty prototype of a new way to interact with web content for visually impairedusers.

The main idea is that actual screen readers (Flash Voice exluded, I dare to say are specifically linear (e.g. they scan the page top to bottom and have the transformed in interactable synthetized voice. full stop.) while we (and with we I mean someone who can see) usually interact with web content in non-linear ways. So Vinay came out with a solution which translates web page elements into different sounds: a TNICK for a form, a PLICK for a paragraph, a TRSTCH for a link and so on; everything is controlled via a motion-feedback enabled roller which is USB connected to the computer and manipulated by the user.

His prototype (which is made for nearly 70% of wood) targets developing countries thus trying to be EXTREMELY cheap to be built and based on open source software and ready-to-build hardware kits. Vinay is probably taking into account that the 100$ laptop is really becoming a smashing hit in the next few years (after the speech I suggested him to take into account the 20$ cellphone too). I tried to test the prototype but – thankyou Murphy – all the app crashed and didn’t re-started; I’m looking forward to retest it soon.

My visit ended with a quick chat with Fabio and a Pizza with JC /thankyou for spreading the word on Flash Voice!), Phil Tabor and Neil Churcher, with whom I had an enlighting discussion on the future of mobile television.