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 of our HP Labs Palo Alto and our Bristol, England sites. It didn't take long to realize a problem. Time zones. When they were at work, we were sleeping.

I left the event before the judges announced the winners. If anyone knows, drop me a note.

Flickr photos of the projects