REBECCA E SPITZER

In researching various things for my thesis, I ran across this tidbit. I think it’s from Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, but I’ve been through so many books the last few days I can’t put my finger on it.
Anyways. This comes from the middle of a discussion about ubiquitous computing and the idea of phicons.
“The Media Lab [...]

Well, our presentation went out without much of a hitch last week; we weren’t completely pleased with how much we were able to explain, because the implementation of the project can get confusing and we got caught up in the details without giving a lot of the big picture. We did play the video first, [...]

Well, after many hours of deliberations and redesigns, the final version of our Dynamic Rehearsal interface will be presented this afternoon! I’m quite pleased with the interface, and I think the elements are looking a hundred times better than the last implementation. There are still a lot of bugs to be worked out of [...]

After the interface of our original working implementation was proven terrible last week, I worked up some new elements for the next phase of implementation in Microsoft Blend, which is an XAML godsend when you want to spend 30 minutes doing a three hour project. It generates some additional markup to deal with in the [...]

Over the last two weeks, our project group has been working to implement a preliminary version of our Dynamic Rehearsal project, spending days and nights programming in C# on the Microsoft Surface Simulator. Our goals were to implement high fidelity look to the project and a medium-low fidelity interaction model, and we made it part [...]

For our Tangible User Interfaces seminar this week (in between building code for the Dynamic Rehearsals project), I read some of the most well-known texts on Ubiquitous Computing: The Computer for the 21st Century (Mark Weiser) and Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, bits, and Atoms (Ishii and Ullmer).
Weiser’s paper, published in 1991, describes [...]

At one of our last meetings for the Dynamic Rehearsals project, it became clear that we had different conceptions of how a user would interact within the main rehearsal screen. Moving through a video timeline is a difficult interaction to reinterpret for the surface.
In the end, we decided to simplify the interaction by synchronizing the [...]

For the next phase of our tangible user interface project, I drew up the following use scenario:
Ousystem is created for the general use of a theatrical production team: director, cast, and crew. A typical user has extensive experience in theatre, but not with computers. With the assistance of our system, they will be able to [...]

For our tangible user interface project, my group has decided to tackle problems associated with the theatrical rehearsal process. In a single rehearsal, actors may run through a show and receive brief feedback from a director. Without taking copious notes, however, it is difficult to analyze or review the rehearsal or progress made over time. [...]

Andreas Lutz’s new portfolio website uses what he calls “audio-visual navigation” and requires only a webcam, microphone, and browser to use. With a combination of voice commands for selection and hand movements for navigation, the website transforms your laptop into a different kind of user interface, one that doesn’t rely on a mouse and keyboard [...]