today was the day of my presentation at the conference. if you'd like to hear it, here it is as a 7.5 MB download.
please note that as of this tenth episode of ventriloquy, i will no longer be using MP3 encoding, but AAC instead. this is because of better audio quality vis-a-vis file sizes, as well as the ability to apply chapters, and embedded pictures and URLs. all of this adds up to better value for you.
here are my thoughts and observations from today's conference sessions:
Judy Chen, presenting on behalf of her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, talked about 'privacy in collaboration'. this study looked at seven users of Instant Messaging, and is supposed to inform the design of a larger survey. one good takeaway was to be reminded of the (often implicit) conflict that anyone online would soon face - that of privacy versus public awareness.
Linda Macaulay, of the University of Manchester, talked about 'intensely focused groups within online communities'. her study was a three-year collaboration between her university and a small sports firm, which was interested in two goals - building the business, and building community. once again, this session highlighted to me that, sometimes (if not often), the motivations and aspirations of why people go online can come in conflict.
Junko Ichino, of TIS Inc, talked about trialing a 'color-coded document catcher as an interface for reading online documents using the psychological effects of color'. this brought back memories of the course i did on color at the MIT Media Lab. in a nutshell, she used hue, saturation and value to correlate to relevance, importance and concreteness respectively.
the Hellenic Institute of Transport gave a presentation on 'the need for interactive training tools', with a special focus on driver training. i learned that research now suggests that, for satellite navigation in cars, vector interfaces are preferred over map-based systems.
Jen Schoepke, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gave a really cool presentation on 'a question of fit between today's graduate students and tomorrow's tech-savvy professor: the lessons learned from the Teaching with Technology course'. her three main points on her work with teachers-in-training were to inculcate a sense of 'teaching as research', 'learning community', and 'learning through diversity'.
Gerhard Fischer, of the University of Colorado, talked about 'social creativity: making all voices heard'. he started off by showing us a picture of Rodin's 'the Thinker', and asked us what was wrong with the picture. then he described that distances need not neccessarily be spatial, but can be temporal (design processes benefit from evolution over time - standing on the shoulders of giants, and how Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger helps us become more reflexive learners), conceptual (voices from collaborators, such as those in homogenous Communities of Practice as well as, more importantly, heterogenous Communities of Interest - 'symmetery of ignorance'), and technological (voices from virtual stakeholders, that media will always influence the message, especially in the age of ubiquitous / pervasive computing). Fischer shared a quotation from Kipling to illustrate his point: "the strength of the wolf is in the pack, and the strength of the pack is in the wolf". this tension describes the ambiguous relationship between individual and social creativity. i feel that some of the questions he raised when talking about individual perspectives can inform our understanding about podcasting. these include "am i interested enough and am i willing to make the additional effort and time so my voice is heard?", "do i have something relevant to say?", "am i able to express what i want to say?", and "am i willing and able to express myself in such a way that others are able to understand me?"
Chen Ling and Wonil Hwang from Purdue University gave an interesting talk about 'user satisfaction with five new cell phone features". they concluded that the availability of a colour screen and internet browsing are significant for user satisfaction, and that the brands preferred for these factors are Samsung and Nokia respectively.
Vanessa Evers, soon to be a faculty member at Stanford, talked about 'cross-cultural issues in evaluating culturally diverse users'. just like Azim Ant Ozok the day before, she made reference to Hofstede's (1980) seminal work on values. according to Hofstede, who carried out his study at IBM, Singapore has large power distance, small uncertainty avoidance, is collectivist, female, and has a long-term orientation.
now that i have had one day to reflect, i'm going to venture at connecting the dots represented by the various sessions i attended yesterday. it has occurred to me that what we're actually beginning to see are the nascent strands which will eventually evolve into two related developments.
first, Michitaka-san's work on real world avatars, Ehnes's vision of augmented realities with ubiquitous and intelligent projection systems, Hideaki-san's and Koichi-san's work on tangible and perceptual interfaces, and Berger's research into the perception of self-rotation all point towards what might very well become the Star Trek Holodeck (!)
mind-blowing as that is in itself, what's even more exciting is Roibas's observation that end-users prefer to produce and consume DIY content, as opposed to canned, broadcast content.
now...
if you combine that observation, with the development of the holodeck, what would you get?
we get nothing less than the future of podcasting.
yes, the future of podcasting will incorporate video, but not in the way that most, if not all, observers currently imagine it.
the future of podcasting will not involve the production of home-made videos (at least, it might, for a limited market, in the medium term, but not in the long run).
but video will still be there, together with olfactory, vestibular and haptic feedback.
you see, the missing link is Ryoko-san's work on the virtual time machine. the virtual time machine involves the pervasive and multi-sensory recording of a slice of time. this recording can then be 'played back', for the user to experience the 'relative present'.
one day, instead of DIY audio content, one will be able to share slices of one's life through subscription-based feeds.
the future of podcasting is nothing less than time-travel on demand.
