Using the Smart Shelf from my Networked Objects class, I plan on hooking an Xport and Arduino to connect the shelf to the reader. This tag will be on the book. When the child takes the book off the shelf, this action will act as the \”click.\” Pre-recorded readings will be stored in our dial plan. When the child takes the book off the shelf, he/she will receive a call from the Storybook Reader, who will tell the reader what page he will be reading from. When the child is ready to hang up, Asterisk will store the caller ID and information of the chapter the child left off for the next time he/she takes the book off the shelf again. Other non-linear narratives could be used for content, such as \”Choose your own adventure\” books for an older audience.

Location Based Narrative
Stories are inherently tied to places. Things happen to people in
specific places. Streetstories offers the chance for pedestrians and
online users to experience what\’s happening on the streets of New York
City. Who said what and where?

Our goal with this is to extend the narrative of a physical space. By
allowing people to record their own stories and listen to others, a
physical space can take on a new life. We can also observe and learn
things we might not have noticed before through the eyes and ears of
someone else.

This interaction not only exists in the virtual space (via a yahoo maps
interface) - it exists in physical space (via cell phone or podcast).
With street stories, you\’re hearing new dialogue and interacting with
your environment through the cell phone.

Aura attempts to represent and convey the emotional context of a location through the analysis of simple forms of user generated information. It follows the path of an emotionally significant experience of a particular space in Manhattan from a visual representation in photographs to a vocal, recorded story and makes the accumulation of location related information available to others through a simple phone call or a text message from their mobile phone wherever they are. Aura also attempts to assist users in finding locations matching a particular desired aura and allows users to automate a phone message to a friend in order to convey useful information about their current location. Aura is also intended to have a physical representation in a public space and a virtual representation online so that the most recent and archived communications within Aura can be publically accessible.

By calling the number, leaving a voice message, and scheduling a time for the message to be delivered, you can let the owner of the telebunny know that you were thinking about them, and hope that they find some comfort in hearing your special message. Maybe you have a young child at home while you\’re away on business? Or a special sweetheart who you know will be coming home from work tired and late? When the time comes for the message to be delivered, the telebunny lights up, letting its owner know that there is a message waiting for her. Giving it a gentle squeeze will connect the call and relay the message in your own voice.

MoPres brings out the risidual presence of the people who occupied your current location. It is a geotagging project with the humanized \’context\’ of the locations. The raw data is from bio-metric sensers rather than the conscious, forceful, and mostly inaccurate logging which will provide a more creative and sophisticated flexibility of interpretation on the experiences of people.

Games are fun to play and also fun to make. But most gaming systems don\’t really include a way for everyday users to make and share simple games. GT7K attempts to do this for people with J2ME-capable phones. You just download the GT7K engine onto your phone and you can play any GT7K game without any additional installs. And you can go to the site and make your own games to play and share. Fun!

OffLines has evolved from the question of what to do with your mobile phone when it is not being used for talking. One can text message, or send MMS/ email but these can only be sent when there is network availablity. There are also games of course, but some people simply do not enjoy playing games (gasp!) as much as others do. The phone can be used as an alarm clock, scheduler, even a small computer (with MS Office applications.) However, none of the present applications for the phone seem to fit the time when a person either does not have advanced applications or wants to just browse some information casually.

To fill this casual time, people often carry books with them, newspapers and magazines. However these can be bulky, use paper by the ton, and be full of articles we don\’t care about.
Why not use the dynamic screens that we all have on our cell phones instead?

OffLines is specifically geared toward this time and provides an application with customizable content that provides the option to access this content when there is no network connectivity.

The Human Rights Video Hub Pilot is a first step towards a larger endeavor that WITNESS is currently undertaking: the development of a Human Rights Video Hub. This Hub will be a place where anyone anywhere can upload human rights related footage video from handheld devices or laptops, to create communities and proposed calls to action around the abuses they witness.

The goals of the forthcoming Human Rights Video Hub are to:

* Provide the only global online destination for video content specifically related to human rights violations;

* Provide tools so people can educate and motivate others to act to end human rights violations and create community around their issues;

* Provide a unique online resource for human rights activists, citizens, journalists, and others to access information, resource footage for news stories, and get engaged;

* Help deter and reduce human rights violations through community-enabled advocacy using visual imagery as a catalytic force.

The Pilot is the first step in this process. The pilot is a curated forum that contains a subset of the functionality of the Video Hub which will be released in the summer of 2007. We hope that this pilot project will give witness a better sense of the quality and quantity of Human Rights videos already in existence, and the type and level of public interest in dialogue around them.

The current pilot is powered by freeformed.org.

Simply put, I wanted to use the phone as a gateway into something different, yet still very social, and enjoyable. Slot cars have existed in one form or another for many years now, and whilst simple, they invoke a great sense of play.

I want to see how the incorporation of the telephone as a controller alters this play. Will people try to collaborate or compete to crash the cars? (most likely) Will people try to chant to keep a steady pace? Will adults enjoy it as much or more than children?

Ultimately I hope people leave the project thinking differently about play and the telephone, as well as having a great smile on their face.

A Player\’s movement and interaction with the game will be mediated by hand-held controllers that are modified versions of the hardware they represent, thus adding a level of physical interaction and intimacy not commonly present in 3D fighting games. The title, Mooretal Kombat alludes to Moore\’s law, a simple heuristic discovered by Charles Moore that predicts the advancement of new technology and inevitable obsolescence of old technology. Moore\’s law posits that the amount of space that it takes to hold a transistor will halve every 16 months, and has held true since its inception in the early 60s. Many have interpreted Moore\’s law to be a kind of evolutionary theory of technology, where instead of the fittest surviving, it is the smallest and most functional that survive. In Mooretal Kombat players will witness first hand the historic struggle of obsolete, slow and featureless hardware, and most importantly, learn that the newest hardware simply kills.