Tom Hume

On tape icons: "I’m fascinated by the history of our standard media icons, as I bet a few of you are too. They add a significant story to the history of the button. Icons and buttons go together like peanut butter and jelly."

SeisMac: "SeisMac is a Mac OS X Cocoa application that makes your MacBook or MacBook Pro into a seismograph. It access your laptop's Sudden Motion Sensor in order to display real-time, three-axis acceleration graphs."

Selling New Mobile Phone Features: "Purchasers of the D600 handset are invited to participate into, what looks like, quite a compelling interactive game and successfully complete 5 tasks. Each task in cunningly designed to also demonstrate how to use different features of the phones."

Interesting - and very similar in principle to a project which we undertook for Mr Jones' group at Nokia earlier this year, exploring what play can mean for them - and specifically how it can be used to encourage people to do more with their phones. I've been meaning to write about this for *ages* now (particularly after I presented it publicly for the first time at dScape 2005); apologies if the text below sounds a bit "press"y, I've lifted it from the case study (which should go onto our site rsn).

We all like to play; whether we're trainspotters, online gamers, old or young, we all take pleasure from playfulness. It can be solo activity, a social exercise, investigative, educational or just plain fun. In a mobile context, play is usually associated with simple downloadable arcade games - but this needn't be the whole story.

So we built a mobile toy for Nokia, called Twitchr.

The idea behind Twitchr is simple: digital birds visit your mobile phone. An application that resides on your handset gives you a window onto a "virtual garden", into which these birds will fly from time to time. To tempt them, you use an almost childishly simple one-click interface to drop pieces of seed on the ground; minutes or hours later, your handset flashes and tweets as a bird arrives, and you have a short window of opportunity to click again and snap a photo. Bird photographs are saved into a personal scrapbook, where they can be reviewed later.

So far, so good: at its most basic Twitchr is an engaging and (we think) delightful digital toy with which you interact throughout the day. But it goes a lot further - players can deepen and extend their interaction with the game in several ways, each of which involves learning more about the capabilities of their handsets.

For instance, if you configure Bluetooth and "pair" your device with that of a Twitchr-playing friend, then birds can fly between your phones. If you don't snap a visitor time, your friend has a chance to (if they are within range). This adds a new physical dimension to the game: don't want your friend to catch that rare crow that just took all your seed? Run away quick until they're out of range! Annoyed that you weren't fast enough to snap that owl? Give your pal the nod and she'll get a chance to...

And if you configure your internet settings, the game opens up further as you become part worldwide community of players: upload your photos to the Twitchr web site, browse or search for other players and their photos, trade or swap seed and photos, watch the migration patterns of birds as they hop from player to player, even write your own software to interface with the TwitchrSphere!

Once you're online, your phone becomes part of a massive digital environment: numbers of the various species rise and fall over time, new species can be introduced, and old ones become extinct. This gives rise to all kinds of emergent behaviour: don't want a breed to become extinct? Disconnect your handset from the world and you can become a rare bird breeder, catching otherwise-extinct varieties and releasing them back into the wild via Bluetooth!

Played on its own, with friends, or with the world, it's an open-ended community game which has no beginning, no end, no winners and no losers. We built the on-handset application, the web site behind it, the algorithms which determine the rise and fall of bird breeds, and the technology powering it all; art direction by the horribly talented Denise Wilton, whilst at FP Mr Ribot can take much of the credit for the implementation (supported by Ms Lozdan, Mr Burt and myself).

If you'd like to have a quick Twitch, we're running a closed beta right now: email twitchr@futureplatforms.com to get onto it.

Social play, bluetooth, a one-click interface... this presses *so* many buttons for me. We're now looking for directions to take Twitchr in next - drop me an email or leave a comment if you'd like to have a chat about it.

Interesting interview with Kei-ichi Enoki, executive VP at NTT DoCoMo: "Videoconferencing--this is part of your job. There is no preference to it; you have to do it whether you like it or not. We think that there is a market there, but that market itself will be small. If it goes to the consumers, I think that means a greater expansion of the market for us. But one issue is that you don't always want to use a TV phone. It is not an issue about technology; this is maybe more of a psychological issue."

Lists of links, with perhaps a pithy piece of sarcasm or a quote appended, are all I have time for this week:

• "They Stopped Calling It Rendezvous" - or, Using iTunes Playlists For Communication.
• Infospace forms a mobile game unit
• A Force More Powerful: "a nonviolent strategic simulation game", which reminded me of this story.
• Two wonderful things from We Make Money Not Art: AudioCubes, and the MIDI sock puppet.
• Interview with Brent and Sheila of Ranchero
• More on casual gaming from MobileGirl.
• For Mr Walsh and Dr Dan, "Methods of Defense Against Brute Force", from an 1840s manual. Hmm... familiar?
• Lovely mobile car ad campaign. Kicking myself that we haven't been suggesting this...
• Massively Multiplayer Online Dating Games: "A game specifically targeted to dating and socialising: as a dating service. Not as a game. Not as part of a game (SWG's character matching, etc). Not as a chat room, not as a Metaverse, not There.com but as a direct and simple service. Using a game environment in a serious - yet playful, very necessary for dating - way. "
• Rag Doll Kung Fu

Hmm, 4 of the above directly relate to Stuff We Have On...

Wow - according to this interview with a guy at Nokia who's probably spent waaay more time thinking about TV content than I have, what people really want on their mobiles are not designed-for-mobile bits of video, but full broadcast stuff - what they see on their TV day-to-day.

That goes completely against what I've been anticipating, and whilst I'm suspicious that his view may be focus group-driven (asking people what they want, not watching them to find out)... he's seen the research and I haven't. Related Forum Nokia info lives here.

Stealth haptics in Powerbooks: "Apple added a feature called Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) to the PowerBook line i early 2005. The sensor attempts to prevent data loss by parking the heads of an activ disk drive after detecting a "sudden motion", which could be due to strong vibrations o a fall"

This is a fantastic story: "Rather than using a standard punch card or signing in electronically, the clock presents a QR code that the users snaps a photo of -- designating the times at which they check in or check out."

Not so much for the idea of using QR codes as a punch-in clock; like the article says, that's pretty pointless. But it had never occurred to me to change barcodes from being static items to dynamic things that change over time or in response to the environment...

More links I don't have time to write about properly:

• New cell phones will reach out and slap someone, a story about haptics from the New Scientist;
• WAP adverts are back; we did what I was told at the time was the first mobile+web+PDA ad campaign, with 24/7 Europe, just after FP launched back in 2000 I think. Not that shoehorning banner ads onto phones is anything to be massively proud of (there are much better ways to tie up mobile and advertising), but just to say that this stuff isn't new. Another good post on mobile ads here.
• Is Nokia coming to I-mode?
• DoCoMo open up DoJa development; again, we looked at this back in 2001 when we first started doing mobile Java projects, and did a few bits and pieces (all on emulators, of course - given that we're in Brighton, not Tokyo). It was good preparation for the J2ME work we're inundated with today: worthwhile technically but not commercially.
• "Jef viewed good design as a moral duty, holding interface designers to the same ethical standards as surgeons." - what an obituary.
• On Nintendo: "Can Nintendo really expect to move DS units by appealing to people that don’t consider themselves to be video game players?". My vote: shit yes, the number of people who aren't hardcore gamers dwarfs those who are, and Nintendo are a machine for converting electrons into fun.

Ah great - it looks like someone has done it: produced a QuickSilver-like product for mobile phones. Qix "ugments the phone interface by automatically presenting candidates to the user based on the data he or she inputs. The information used to generate candidates is sourced from a suite of different data stores on the phone".

Where can I get a copy of this? The basic way in which I've interacted with a mobile phone - press a menu key, get options, or type in a number - hasn't changed since my first mobile back in 1998/1999 (I was a late developer in mobile terms, and held off getting one for as long as possible). Just as QuickSilver completely changed the way I use my Mac, I'm looking forward to being able to hunt through the increasing amounts of Stuff on my phone in more efficient ways.

I see LifeBlog as a prototype for this kind of thing: it does an excellent job of bringing together lots of sources of data and presenting them in a unified fashion, but it's about *reading*. Qix looks like it might go further than this, and let you not just read Stuff on your phone, but Do Things.