Marco Combetto

Experiencing the Affective Diary

A diary is generally considered to be a book in which one keeps a regular record of events and experiences that have some personal significance. As such, it provides a useful means to privately express inner thoughts or to reflect on daily experiences, helping in either case to put them in perspective. Taking conventional diary keeping as our starting point, we have designed and built a digital diary, named Affective Diary, with which users can scribble their notes, but that also allows for bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors and mobile media to be collected from users’ mobile phones. A premise that underlies the presented work is one that views our bodily experiences as integral to how we come to interpret and thus make sense of the world. We present our investigations into this design space in three related lines of inquiry: (1) a theoretical grounding for affect and bodily experiences; (2) a user-centred design process, arriving at the Affective Diary system; and (3) an exploratory end-user study of the Affective Diary with 4 users during several weeks of use. Through these three inquiries, our overall aim has been to explore the potential of a system that interleaves the physical and cultural features of our embodied experiences and to further examine what media-specific qualities such a design might incorporate. Concerning the media-specific qualities, the key appears to be to find a suitable balance where a system does not dictate what should be interpreted and, at the same time, lends itself to enabling the user to participate in the interpretive act. In the exploratory end-user study users, for the most part, were able to identify with the body memorabilia and together with the mobile data, it enabled them to remember and reflect on their past. Two of our subjects went even further and found patterns in their own bodily reactions that caused them to learn something about themselves and even attempt to alter their own behaviours.

Believable environments: generating interactive storytelling in vast location-based pervasive games

Generating content into vast areas is a relevant challenge in the field of location-based pervasive games. In this paper, we present a game prototype that enables children travelling in the back seat of a car to enjoy a narrated experience where gameplay combines with the experience of traveling through the road network. The prototype is designed to provide what we refer to as a believable environment. We propose four design characteristics to persuasively include a journey within a pervasive game. First, the story should refer to geographical objects with their everyday meanings. Second, the games scale needs to cover vast areas. Third, the application should provide sequential storytelling to make it fit with the journey experience, and finally it should provide interaction support where players can engage in gameplay and interact with the computer in various ways at the same time as they are looking out of the car window. We describe how these requirements have been implemented in the prototype and present an initial performance test.

Backseat playgrounds: pervasive storytelling in vast location based games

We have implemented a conceptual software framework and a story-based game that facilitates generation of rich and vivid narratives in vast geographical areas. An important design challenge in the emergent research area of pervasive gaming is to provide believable environments where game content is matched to the landscape in an evocative and persuasive way. More specificly, our game is designed to generate such an environment tailored to a journey as experienced from the backseat of a car. Therefore, it continuously references common geographical objects, such as houses, forests and churches, in the vicinity within the story; it provides a sequential narrative that fit with the drive; it works over vast areas, and it is possible to interact with the game while looking out of the windows.

Increasing Decoupling in the Robotics4.NET Framework

The advent of social robots increases significantly the number and the kind of robotics systems to be controlled. Since CSRS software depends on the particular hardware architecture of a robot, software reuse becomes a significant issue. Reuse is usually achieved by packaging software in modules, by abstracting a well defined set of functionalities.

Towards a general purpose user interface for service-oriented context-aware applications

Today context-aware applications are isolated systems designed for a special scenario. There is no way to combine different applications, which is common practice with desktop applications since years. For example, the airline knows when your plane leaves, your PDA knows your GPS position, VirtualEarth knows how long you need to the airport, and another service can order a taxi to your current position. When you manage to combine these services, you will get informed when you must go to the airport and a taxi is ordered to your current position. Thus, in the future we need to federate context-data retrieved from different sources and services on the internet. This imposes several challenges: (1) We need an architecture that allows us to federate these services and to communicate with the users. (2) We need tools that allow programmers to quickly implement and deploy services on the network to generate a grass-roots movement. (3) We need a general purpose user-interface for such applications that allows users to deal with context-data and interact with context-aware services. In this paper we sketch our architecture for service-oriented context-aware applications. Based on this architecture we develop a general purpose user interface which is a collage of instant messenger, roadmap, and web browser. In this paper, we describe the formatting requirements for the CHI Conference and offer a number of suggestions on writing style for the worldwide CHI readership.