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I had lunch with a couple of friends this week who both were raving about the newly released Guitar Hero II game for the Xbox 360. This really had my attention because these guys are pretty seasoned first-person shooter gamers and they almost apologetically explained why they loved this alternative gaming style. If you're not familiar with Guitar Hero, it's similar to Dance Dance Revolution -- you've seen those kids at the mall dancing around on the colored mat to match to the cascade of instructions on the TV screen. In Guitar Hero, you also have a constant flow of instructions on the TV screen, but in this case you are holding a plastic guitar with colored buttons on the stalk. But don't let that make it sound simple. It's difficult to master so they start off with the simpler songs. When you're hitting all the right notes, the crowd cheers and music really starts flowing, but when you mess up it kills the buzz everyone falls silent. Click to read on...
Have you heard about the Pew Internet study? I haven't read the full report but the overview published by the newswires is interesting and it definitely has me thinking about how to create technology that meets the needs for various types of Internet users (or non-users). The Pew Internet and American Life Project has observed from their phone interviews with 4,000 Americans that adults can be divided into three groups.
I'm sure many of us will read these categories as
but that wouldn't be fair or accurate, would it? Now here's where the study's results get really interesting. They further divide each of these groups into sub-categories. For example: from Forbes.com (via the AP):
Notice what the common thread among all of the Elites is: social communication. I would be willing to bet that the reason the "Lackluster veterans" continue to frequently use technology is because of the need to stay in touch with people. Social connection will always drive innovation in technology. It's probably safe to assume that if you're reading this blog you're a "high-tech elite". So does one of these sub-categories represent you? Which one and why? What are you needs as an Elite - what's missing? Drop me a comment. I'm sure it's no mystery which slot I drop into - "Omnivore". Munch munch munch :).
Hi I'm still here. Just wrapping up a week of furious coding. So not much else got done including blog posts. I've been writing a client for Windows Mobile phones for our project called Conversa and I was trying to finish it in time for the HP TechCon conference. I would describe Conversa for you but it really deserves its own post so I'll save that for later. Basically it's an online discussion forum in which users interact solely with video, either from the web or from the mobile phone. I think it's pretty cool. Something funny happened while I had my nose in the keyboard this week. I'm careful to balance my youthful demeanor (aka video gaming , fast cars, wearing shorts when everyone else in the room isn't) with sufficient adult-like professionalism. But that sort of went to heck the other day when one of HP's CTO/VP's stopped by. He saw me standing in my office which is near the Halo lab where he was leading a tour of VIP visitors. He called out "Hey, I didn’t know you sat here" and walked in. I sheepishly surveyed the stacks of Mountain Dew cans, candy wrappers, and an open box of pizza, looked at him, and laughed. I love writing software. It's probably the best part of my job. Time evaporates and when I look at the clock I often realize I missed lunch. By three hours. Building an idea into reality, for me, is the reward for the pain and suffering of writing conference papers and patents. Well that and actually traveling to the conferences (especially the ones with water slides!).
Last night I attended the HP Gaming Summit, a press event in San Francisco for HP's new gaming business unit . I was there helping my friend and coworker show the Mscapes research project. I love these things. They're exciting and fun. The venues are very classy and hip, the catered food is tasty, and the technology is cool. It's nice break from coding in my cell office at work. An interesting situation came up. I'm an avid reader of the Engadget blog and I knew that Ryan Block was supposed to be there, but I had no idea what he looked like. So I sent a text message to a friend and had him send me back a photo of him. Good thing too because Ryan was the first person to walk up to us. Rahul Sood, the founder of Voodoo PC gave the keynote at the event kickoff. You can read about the content of his talk in the various articles written about the event. What I like about Rahul is his style. How did Dean Takahashi say it in his article? "Sood hasn't really been indoctrinated in the HP Way yet". I remember the first time he came to Labs after the acquisition. He casually spoke to a room of suspicious researchers without a hint of intimidation. No notes, slides, management jargon, formality or BS. He told good stories and used the word "bad-ass" a lot (something you know if you read his blog). It's good to see someone who hasn't sacrificed his youth on alter of management. One final comment. My favorite HP Labs demo at the event was Pluribus. It's difficult to fathom the size and brightness of this thing even when you stand in front of it. You almost have to go buy the biggest TV on the market and place it next to this display to see just how much bigger and brighter it is. It's like lighting up the entire wall, floor to ceiling, left to right, of your house with an HD TV. I was actually playing Call of Duty on this screen after hours one night when one of our coworkers had to get up to walk around in the middle of the game because he was getting motion sick. It's that awesome. Here's a video I threw together from the event. Nothing fancy, but enough for you to get a feel for what it was like. Dean Takahashi is a much better writer than me, so you can read his descriptions of the projects below.
From San Jose Mercury by Dean Takahashi:
Last Monday I made the very short trip to Stanford University to sit in on the final presentations for CS247, a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course taught by Scott Klemmer. Each team gave a three minute presentation, some did silly skits, to introduce their project and then we browsed the project posters in the corridor and discussed the work with the students. The projects were also being judged and voted on by representative from Google, Yahoo, and Ideo. I was just there out of curiosity. Some of the projects were pretty impressive considering they had only three weeks to build them, plus other coursework, I imagine. I spent the most time talking with the creators of a project called Breakin' News. The idea is to connect company break rooms in two different locations together so people at work can socially interact from a distance. For the demo they had a plasma display with an attached webcam. They handed me a bluetooth-enabled mobile phone which was wirelessly connected. I could press directional buttons on the phone to navigate the interface on the display. It's a nice and clean app, written in Flash by Dean Eckles, a grad student. With a button push, I could record a short video which was posted to the board and viewable by other users of the system. It's a straight-forward idea with nice integration of the mobile phone with Bluetooth. The video quality was low, but they explained it was so they didn't overload the processing capabilities of Flash. I do like the idea of using a public display to link remote locations. I think they were right to choose asynchronous messaging. HP tried similar experiment a few years back by connecting two large displays in the common areas
