Mobile gaming: Nokia launches the n-gage platform

The n-gage platform, launched this week by nokia, promises to be a cornerstone in the growth of the mobile gaming industry.


An introduction to the n-gage platform

Thanks to an alliance with major mobile operators and games producers (Capcom, Electronic Arts, Vivendi Gamer Mobile, Thq wireless, Glu Mobile, i-play, Gameloft, Indiagames, Digital Chocolate) the platform will foster the development and distribution of games specifically designed for mobile devices. The Dirk Spanner title, a detective adventure, will for instance use typical features of mobile phones such as maps and cameras to examinate objects.


The Dirk Spanner trailer

The n-gage portal will also act as a community to bring mobile gamers together.

Mixed reality and interactive storytelling: MXR wIzQubes

The MXR Corporation, based in Singapore, is marketing wIzQubes: a toy which exploits mixed reality technology to allow kids to have 3D interactive storytelling experience. It looks like a RPG game in physical reality.


A wIzQubes demo found on youtube

wIzQubes enables users to enjoy virtual stories from a special 3-D angle. The Magic Cubes leverage off Mixed or Augmented Reality technology to bring stories to life. Users access 3D virtual reality and interact with story characters to dive into the world of mixed reality.

By allowing children to actively participate in the storytelling and directly engaging with their most favorite story characters, children can learn and play at the same time. wIzQubes are designed to capture children imaginations, are easy to handle and fun to play with.

It does not take long to get started. Users take two plastic cubes with images on them. A web camera then capture s the images on the cube and a software calls up the animated story already stored in a software CD to let the users view and interact with the story.

The unique advantage of the product is that users not just view and visualize the animated story in an all rounded 3-D format, but also interact and play an active part in the story, through the interactive software component.

[Text pasted from MXR's website]

Social media and marketing

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A Literature Review on Social Media. A compilation of social media thoughts from the experts point of view. Produced by Alex Wong from Charles ... less Sturt Uni, Australia. Can be contacted via email wah17@yahoo.com


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iO: natural interaction made in Italy

The iO Agency, based in Milan, is about to release the tabulaTouch technology, developed by Stefano Baraldi, an Italian researcher in the fields of human-machine interaction, new media, knowledge management, software design and concept mapping.

The tabulaTouch technology will be branded as SensitiveTable, and will offer a line of templates and custom developments on it.


The SensitiveTable

The iO Agency also markets other natural interaction technologies such as the SensitiveWall and the SensitiveFloor.

The SensitiveWall was booked by fiat for the presentation of the new 500. At the FIAT 500 presentation, users could create their own 500 on a classic touch screen interface and then all creations were sent and displayed on a sensitive wall were people could see everybody's customisations. Some of the cars were sold on presentation day through this mechanism.


SensitiveWall - towers


SensitiveWall - bubbles


SensitiveWall - landscape

Digital libraries and technology-enhanced learning: Call 3 information days

17-18 December 2007, Luxembourg

The information days are events aimed at helping participants to better understand the work programme and criteria for the evaluation of proposals, to facilitate sharing of ideas and experiences, and to find partners for project consortia.

This infoday addresses researchers interested in submitting project proposals to the third ICT call under FP7, objective ICT -2007.4.3: Digital libraries and technology-enhanced learning.

The event will be held at:

European Commission
Jean Monnet building
Conference centre
Rue Alcide de Gasperi
Luxembourg (Kirchberg)

Participation to the event is free of charge

The information days will offer two half-day plenary sessions aiming at providing participants with information relevant for preparing proposals to the third ICT call. Main issues are the research challenges in the work programme and criteria for the evaluation of proposals.

The remaining time will allow for participants to present posters in order to find project partners, or to discuss their proposal ideas in bilateral meetings with Commission staff.

[text pasted from the event's web page]

Digital Theatre: interactive installation 'Euclide' in San Paolo, Brasil

In the context of the San Paolo workshop in Brasil, Studio Azzurro has introduced for the first time technologies developed by CALLAS. The new scenario was focused on the dialogue between video, physical environment and the spectator with particular attention being paid, in this instance, to the recognition of emotions in the audience and to everything that is emotionally involving in the context of the scenic space.

The interactive installation allows a virtual character named Euclide to talk with the audience. The action takes place in two or more separate locations: in one a concealed animator wears a cyber glove connected to a graphic computer; in another a monitor, connected by a cable to the computer, shows the virtual character to the audience. The animator’s hand movements activate the virtual character, controlling his mimics; digital effects alter animator’s voice.


BIT - An interactive digital character made by studio azzurro

People can talk to the character while a camera shows them to the concealed animator; he can therefore react and respond to them. The audience gets truly caught and surprised at seeing a virtual character reacting to them; the contrast between the cold appearance of computer imagery and the lively, fun virtual character entices even the most reluctant spectator.

Studio azzurro noticed that the reaction of the audience to technology is extremely different when virtual characters are involved. Even if the audience is aware of the existence of the concealed animator (the audience knows where he is hidden), people react to the virtual character as if it was an independent entity and not a puppet in the hands of the hidden animator.

The character can be realised with different styles from realistic to cartoon or assembling objects (similar to Arcimboldo's paintings) and different effects and accessories can be added to personify it. Euclide can have the role of a guide and an educational assistant.

[text pasted from CALLAS' website]

Tangible Acustic Interfaces: the TAI CHI project

With ordinary interface devices (e.g. keyboard, mouse, touch screen and ultrasonic pen), the interaction of humans with computers is restricted to a particular device at a certain location within a small movement area. A challenge in human computer interaction research is to create tangible interfaces that will make the interaction possible via augmented physical surfaces, graspable objects and ambient media (e.g. wall, tabletop and air), as well as making the interaction natural without the need for a hand held device.

In the EU funded project “Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer Human Interaction” (Tai-Chi), acoustics-based remote sensing technology is utilised since vibrations are the natural outcome of an interaction and propagate well in most solid materials. This means that the information pertaining to an interaction can be conveyed to a remote location (sensor) using the structure of the object itself as a transmission channel and therefore suppressing the need for an overlay or any other intrusive device over the area one wishes to make sensitive. The advantage of this new sensing paradigm over other methods of interaction such as computer vision or speech recognition suggests a strong potential for the computer industry. New applications can include wall-size touch panels, three-dimensional interfaces and robust interactive screens for harsh environments. The acoustics-based sensing used in Tai-Chi is the most promising way for human computer interaction, bringing another of the five human senses into the realm of computers: the sense of touch.



The ultimate goal of the Tai-Chi project is to develop acoustics-based remote sensing technology which can be adapted to virtually any physical object to create tangible interfaces, allowing the user to communicate freely with a computer, an interactive system or the cyber-world by means of an arbitrary object from the environment. The methods for contact point localisation developed in Tai-Chi utilise the location-signature embedded in the acoustic wave patterns caused by contact, as well as triangulation and acoustic holography.

The Tai-Chi project has involved the fundamental study of acoustic physical properties, advanced theoretical development of localisation algorithms, hardware structure design and demonstrations at public events. New results have been achieved for localising impacts (finger tapping, nail clicking and knocking) and tracking continuous movement (scratching) on large surfaces. Various localisation approaches have been thoroughly investigated, mainly, Time Delay of Arrival, Location Pattern Matching and Acoustic Holography with high precision attained using enhanced filtering techniques. In-air localisation has also been studied and tested using Time-Delay and Doppler-Shift to track a moving acoustic source in the air. Experiments were successfully conducted with different objects such as wood boards, window glass, plastic blocks and metallic sheets. In the final stages of the project, work is being carried out to produce a Tai-Chi Developer’s Tool Kit (TDK) comprising sensors, signal conditioning circuitry, a DSP unit, a PC interface together with a library of algorithms. Several papers on this work have been presented at conferences and published in journals.

Among the application demonstrators developed by Tai-Chi partners are: a Virtual Piano (a piano keyboard projected on white board that produces the relevant note when touched), a Memory Game (cards projected on plastic sheet), a giant tablet (that enables curve drawing by continuous movement of finger on a large wood board), a music chair and an interactive map interfaced to Google Earth.

[text pasted from TAI CHI's website]

The Reactable: from research to mainstream

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

With her first tour concert at the Coachella Festival in California, the Icelandic singer Björk introduced the reactable for the first time to a mainstream audience.


Bjork performs Declare Independence at Coachella, 2007, Reactable featured

[text pasted from reactable's website]

50 years of EU in the world

A review of the past 50 years reveals an unprecedented success story: what began as the EEC on 25 March 1957 has grown into a union of 27 member states which, after so many painful years of war, expulsion and suffering, now unites the continent in peace and ensures a level of prosperity and stability previously unknown in the history of this continent.



[text pasted from http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=95CuBI-BL4E]

PHAROS - Lighting the way for European audiovisual search

Worldwide, the volume of stored information grows exponentially with an increasing share of audiovisual content. This content drives the demand for new services, making audiovisual search one of the major challenges for organisations and businesses today. Digital data is the greatest value that many organisations possess, and the ability to use it, rather than just store it, will be one of the most important strategic aspects in the coming decade.

PHAROS (Platform for searcH of Audiovisual Resources across Online Spaces) is an Integrated Project co-financed by the European Union under the Information Society Technologies Programme (6th Framework Programme) – Strategic Objective ‘Search Engines for Audiovisual Content’ (2.6.3)

The PHAROS mission is to advance audiovisual search from a point-solution search engine paradigm to an integrated search platform paradigm. This platform will be built on an innovative, open, and distributed architecture that enables consumers, businesses and organisations to unlock the values found in audiovisual content.

The PHAROS search platform will create a new infrastructure for managing and enabling access to information sources of all types, supporting advanced audiovisual processing, content handling, and management that will enhance control, creation, and sharing of multimedia for all users in the value chain. The impact for the specific audiovisual industry will be to strengthen and extend product and service offerings, integrating oustanding technologies and achieving a competitive advantage by integrating solutions addressing the full content management processing chain.

[text pasted from PHAROS' website]

CALLAS - Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-Edge Living Adaptive Systems

The CALLAS Integrated Project aims to design and to develop a multimodal architecture which will include emotional aspects in order to support applications in the new media business scenario with an “ambient intelligence” paradigm.

The vision underlining the CALLAS Project is that new media can enhance user participation in content, media, and social interaction. In many ways, if old media is something static in the user experience, new media is a dynamic process that stimulates interaction and communication with users and technology. This dynamic approach entails a strong attention to all interface and interaction aspects. CALLAS would like to analyse, understand, and advance this participation including all the emotional aspects relevant to human communication processes.

Contemporarily, the CALLAS Consortium believes that one of the most interesting factors in human emotional interaction is the space where it takes place. For this reason, the scenarios chosen for CALLAS are all relevant different typologies of space: theatres, home, squares, festivals, etc. The CALLAS goal is to bridge the gap between the emerging capacity of conveying emotional aspects within multi-modal interaction and the growing expectations of people for a more natural and pervasive interaction with digital media applications in intelligent adaptive spaces.

[text pasted from CALLAS' website]

BRICKS - Building Resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services

The BRICKS Project researches and implements advanced open source software solutions for the sharing and the exploitation of digital cultural resources.

The BRICKS Community is a worldwide federation of cultural heritage institutions, research organisations, technological providers, and other players in the field of digital libraries services.

The Community orientates and validates the project results, and co-operates towards the creation of the BRICKS Cultural Heritage Network that will provide access to and foster the European digital memory.

[text pasted from BRICKS' website]