What makes a great Android app? One that melds the virtual world with the real world in a fun or informative way. One app that does that in an impressive fashion is called JOYity and it comes from Zelfi, a German mobile gaming startup. JOYity uses the GPS in the Android phone to let you play games and go on adventures based on your location in the real world.

Technorati Tags: adventures, Android app, app, JOYity, virtual world

If you are an extensive user of Post-It, you may find this interesting. Sequoia Studio has a conceptual project called E-Note, which is kind of a futuristic version of today’s Post-It. E-Note will use a flexible electronic paper technology which will be powered by a solar captor. It can be stuck and unstuck anywhere using a special ‘Gecko’ glue. And if you are thinking is that all? Wait till I tell you that E-Note will even have a visual alarm/reminder function which it can achieve by changing it’s color (any of the 8 colors) ! Now that’s what I call “ultra-cool!”.

Technorati Tags: enote, epaper, future, sequoia-studio.com, yankodesign.com

“I just started playing Fable 2 and I’ve heard from several reviews and posts that its possible to have pre-marital sex. And judging by the stats for STD’s and the fact that you can buy condoms, I assume this is correct. I, however, have only seen the option for marriage so far when people fall in love with the character. How do you just get them to sleep with your character? ”

Update: Oct. 23rd 1:36pm EST

I woke up at 3 am on Wednesday morning and I checked out Google Trends. I noticed the search term “How to Have Sex in Fable 2″ …So I blogged about it (I was one of the first to do so). At About 3:06am the post went live. Here are screenshots of my hit stats since then:

This blog has only been live for 19 days and this post accounts for more than half of all my page views. My adsense revenue is at $0.02. This is a lesson in something. I am not sure what it is yet.

Technorati Tags: fable 2, fable 2 walkthrough, how do you have sex in fable 2, how to have sex in fable 2, sex in fable 2

The first video eyewear specifically designed to let you step inside virtual worlds, MMOs and 3D games. No more staring at flat screens. The iWear VR920 allows you to enter virtual worlds and communicate with others as if you are really there.

Experience cyberspace like never before
Step inside with the Vuzix iWear VR920, the world’s first Internet communications and gaming solution that incorporates immersive big-screen 3D, head tracking, microphone and audio. You can move, look around, listen, and communicate with others – almost like being in the ‘real’ world. The iWear VR920 opens amazing new doors to the World Wide Web.

The AV310 Widescreen is a lightweight (4 oz) wearable display that transforms your small video screen into a large 16:9 widescreen home theater with a virtual 52-inch display as seen from nine feet. Worn like regular glasses, the AV310 Widescreen is compatible with all audio/video devices with composite video-out and includes independent focus adjustments for each eye and removable high-quality stereo earphones. A single removable AA battery affords up to 11 hours of viewing enjoyment.

Enjoy video games on your private widescreen display or watch 2D or 3D movies anytime, anywhere in 4:3 or 16:9 format. Never before have wearable displays come this close to the real widescreen movie experience.

Learn More

Price: $399.95 (USD)

Technorati Tags: Glasses, VR, Vuzix, Vuzix iWear Video Glasses

This is a must see. 3 Rear Projection transparent large touch displays. The resolution looks great for being how bright it is in that room. Wondering if it can do multi-touch.

Technorati Tags: Cave, Microsoft Surface, Rear Projection, Surface, Touch Walls, Touchscreen

Acid3 Test with a score of 88/100 – which is impressive for a mobile browser!

Technorati Tags: Fennec, Firefox Mobile, Images, Interface, Screenshots

Learning the success rate of new user navigation conventions for the web that work well is difficult. There is a free PHP powered tool that can help with this analysis from LabMedia, called ClickHeat. Being able to peer into navigation trends helps IA and UX research tremendously.

Adding an audio component would be a great addition to this tool. Being able to add this type of user feedback within an online tool like Protoshare would be a great step forward as well.

Download It

- on the browser’s client: Javascript (tested on Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Konqueror…)
- on the server: either Linux or Windows (since ClickHeat 1.3 release), Apache or Lighttpd (other may work fine), PHP, the graphic library GD2 (PNG support needed).

View the demo
http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.php
(login/password: demo/demo)

Technorati Tags: Click Maps, Clickmaps, Heat Maps, Heatmaps, Study, Usability Studies, User Testing

Download Here:

axure_stencils_1_acleandesigndotcomrp

Includes stencils for:
Form widgets
Calendar
Rate this and more…

Very nice selection. Hope to see more.

Technorati Tags: Axure, Design, Interaction Patterns, Patterns

Here we go…

It took me awhile to learn how to click and drag my avatar through the space. I kept on clicking on the floor to move which resulted in my avatar skipping abruptly to the spot I clicked on. I felt jerked into place instead gliding into place. Once I learned how to move my little virtual self, I felt more connected with it. Speaking of my little avatar, it was not the one I picked. My avatar was a girl and not the guy I chose. I chose the guy with the blue hair, not the girl with the red hair.

I must also say that the audio could be jazzed up. The continuous looping of environmental sounds is annoying. There is no sense of connection to the sounds. The audio is very flat with no special dimension. I would expect some spatial sensitivity in a 3D environment.

Some avatar sounds just simply scared the living shit out of me.

I do not feel apart of a community at all. There is no immediate sense of connection to the other inhabitants. I do not see, feel or am I aware of any incentive to learn about my fellow ‘googlers’.

I want to upload Sketchup models to my custom world. Please let me do this.

Overall, I think Google has some big plans with Livlely as in everything they do. But at this point it just seems they are looking to enter a new market with the framework and engine to support something.

http://www.lively.com/

Express your thoughts. I think Google needs to hear it.

Technorati Tags: Avatar, Google, Lively, Second Life

Much of our research went onto help inspire the Whirl Wind application that NASA uses today.

We also helped innovate the sharing and the distribution of custom annotated 3D worlds via a world wide network of collaborators. The application is no longer available to use but it is worth learning about as it relates to the user experience.

Learn More Here:
Eventscope

From the site:

A multidisciplinary team of experts in visual design, educational curriculum design, cognitive psychology, software engineering, and geology/ planetary science use interactivity, real data, education-reform and cognitive psychology concepts to extend the walls of the classroom to far away places.

Technorati Tags: Life on Mars, NASA, Robotics, Virtual Reality Tool

Inamo – an innovative restaurant in London has installed touch sensitive tables which customers can use to place an order and even call a cab:

“At the core of Inamo is our interactive ordering system. Diners place orders from an illustrated food and drinks menu projected on to their table surface. You’ll set the mood, discover the local neighborhood, and even order a taxi home.”

We will see more of these types of interactive systems as projectors and the software that runs them hit a price point that is favorable.

I wonder if I do not like the Miso, can I hit undo?

Technorati Tags: Food, Inamo, Interactive Table, London, Ordering System, Surface, Touch Tables

But let us be honest, the blackberry is meant for business emailers. Blackberry users are not fundamentally in need to be wow’d or do they need or want to play virtual pool with multiple fingers while waiting for their Lexus to get detailed.

I think most Blackbery users want simplicity. They want their email and more recently want their maps and GPS. Build a rock solid experience around that goal. Don’t muddy up the experience by providing too much. Don’t get saturated by technology that is not in your game. Push the envelope in other places like:

IM/IRC chat interfaces
Super easy teleconference tools
PDF viewers and ways to EDIT pdf documents
Stock management tools
Make people yern for a ‘real’ Blackberry keyboard (don’t virtualize it. Update: too late)

“The virtual keyboard produces a clicking sound and sensation when pressed, which makes it feel very similar to typing on an actual keyboard.”

Will give them kudos for trying if it works out.

Cater to your business market and innovate there. Don’t go the iPhone and Android path. Who cares about the music platform for a Blackberry. Focus on the business.

Technorati Tags: Blackberry, Blackberry Storm, Innovate, iphone, Mobile, multi-touch interfaces, Sucks

Verizon Wireless today also started selling the new Samsung Sway, a slim slider with a silver finish. The Samsung Sway offers a 2.2″ screen, a 2-megapixel camera with NightShot and video capture, Rhapsody service, Bluetooth, and a microSD slot supporting up to 8GB cards.

Key features:
a media center, offering downloadable games, ringtones, wallpapers, location-based services. Feels nice in the hand.

Samsung claims a talk time of up 4.5 hours. to Measuring 4.15 by 1.96 by 0.47 inches and weighing in at 3.56 ounces, the Samsung Sway costs $120 with a two-year contract.

Technorati Tags: Flux, Mobile, Rhapsody, Samsung Sway, Verizon

In today’s economic climate, there is a fast growing trend to go “off the grid”. With more and more states offering rebates and tax incentives to go green, more and more consumers are trying to find the right solution. Buying solar, wind and hydro energy for personal household generation is becoming more mainstream. So, what does this have to do with the user experience? Well, creating smart ways to manage this energy must be accessible and easy to use. There is a huge challenge in engineering creative interfaces to monitor and control these new personal energy systems.

There are a few pretty cool solutions out there.

View, in real-time how much energy you consume with the MLEnergyManagement plugin:
The TabletKiosk UMPC combines the capabilities of a PDA, MP3/Personal Media Player, Tablet PC and storage device in one sleek and stylish mobile device.

Even control your home from the iPhone. Now that’s nice.

Technorati Tags: home control, home remote, Interfaces, iPhone home control, iPhone remote control, Off the Grid

It may not what you see above, but it is the first baby steps getting there:

KDDI’s Real Space X-ray includes mobile phone software that combines a six-axis sensor, GPS, and microphone in order to display data from the user’s immediate environment. Point the phone in the direction of the street you are walking by, for example, and the phone will show you various businesses that lie ahead in a 3D fashion. The software also has a sense of your surroundings so it’s smart enough to know you’re on a train based on the station sounds and it can sense the speed you’re traveling and automatically adjust to an appropriate mode.

CEATEC JAPAN 2008 Tech-pert Panel Category Award Winner – in software

Technorati Tags: augmented interfaces, augmented reality, CEATEC JAPAN 2008, flexible LCD screens, Future Interfaces, GPS, KDDI's Real Space X-ray, mobile devices, six-axis sensor, software

Here is the benchmark portable 3D UI. We will see this type of rich interaction become commonplace as the iPhone competition increases. UX designers need to keep a balance on what is practical and what may be a needless journey through the UI experience.

Technorati Tags: 3D Mobile UI, Future Mobile, Nvidia, Tegra

Technorati Tags: app store, iphone, review

Article written for TEQ Magazine April 2008

Coordination, if done with accuracy, can be key to a successful outcome on many levels. It is most difficult to facilitate coordination from disparate processes when each player has his own methods and time lines. Finding tools to help with this are rare. As interactive design problems become more complex, the teams that drive the solutions must evolve to meet those needs.  Compounding this is the reality that is now common to be working with teams in other time zones and with people who speak different languages. Managing a coordinated effort is vital to the success of a project. For interactive solutions to be solved timely and precisely, they need to fit within multi-layered metaphors and support elegance and sophistication both visually and programmatically. Most importantly, the solutions need to support the goals of the sponsor, stakeholder, or business need.  For all of this to work well, there is a need for a central system to bridge relationships between each independent group. If used strategically, I find a tool like Axure can play that vital role.

In my experience, Axure can work to satisfy the communication efforts between multi-faceted groups in a seamless way. Before I started working with Axure back in 2005 on the Hollywood.com redesign, I was using traditional tools like Visio, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver to capture my use cases and web simulations for user testing with Nielson Norman. The three rounds of intensive testing were mostly successful and my simulations worked well, but the process was laborious and time consuming. It had taken 5 months from start to finish (yes, you can mostly blame NNG for this) but naturally I wanted to expedite the process. So, I went searching for a tool to help in the user testing phase of a project. I found Axure by chance and after my first few hours with it, I knew I had a tool to not only help in rapid user testing, but one that would enable me to help bridge many of the efforts I was using other tools for. Not only could I quickly build wireframe simulations, but the ability to capture functional specifications at the object level and then produce a complete word document with all of this intact, automatically, sent me to IA nirvana.

Soon after my discovery, I showed my Director of IT a fully working simulation of one of his .NET modules.  He had coded this module in the morning, and by the end of the day I had a fully working, interactive simulation based on his code, ready for first level user testing. He purchased the tool ten minutes after my presentation. We both were hooked and became very efficient collaborating together from that point forward, increasing our lifecycles by at least 30%. After a few years of daily usage with this tool, some best practices have emerged which I’d like to share.

What It Is Not

I will begin with what Axure does not do. It is not a tool that can export working production ready HTML. Although it may seem like it can, it cannot. It is not the best flowcharting tool. It has stencils to create flowcharts and use case scenarios in a crunch, but you soon revert back to standard tools like Visio, as it is, of course, more powerful. Axure does not have the ability to version control well (however, this may be addressed in future releases). If you have teams of IAs working together on simulations or wireframes it would be ideal to have check-in, check-out capabilities specific to users, much like Visual Source Safe, Subversion, or Harvest. It does not work on Mac OSX, since it is a .NET application and it appears they are not interested in pursuing the Macintosh option. I would suggest the developers of this application to port to Linux using Mono if at all possible. Axure will not change existing methods and protocols overnight within your organization, but it can be successfully introduced into an existing production process at any point, no matter how big or small your project may be.

Best Practice

After using Axure successfully with very aggressive deadlines, as well as in slower paced research environments, I have discovered many benefits this tool brings to the people involved. I enjoy IA as a career path because of the satisfaction I get from seeing people work together to build something. At first glance, this complexity seems impossible to build. The challenge in this is what drives me as an IA. Fine tuning efficiency is critical to making a project a success when it feels large and unmanageable. I find that the IA is not only there to build relationships between systems, but to build efficiencies between individual skill sets in order to reduce risk.

Where Axure shines is in the Agile/SCRUM development process, especially for remote team collaboration. From my experience, the Agile method morphs from team to team, but is the same in essence. It is in the iterative approach to software and web development that Axure works really well. When I start a project, I start at the 1.0 iteration. This is primarily a very low-level abstraction of the structure and navigation – I call this the XO document. As the fidelity increases and the Axure project grows into a more mature document, the iterative tracking of each instance of the project becomes very useful. I can go back to 1.4 or 2.4 of my document with ease. With HTML publishing built into Axure, I can publish to a live project blog where the client can track the history of the development (every client falls in love with this, by the way). In parallel to the publishing of the HTML prototype iteration, Axure can generate a Microsoft Word Document of the same interval which I save as a PDF for client download. This PDF is the main source of all client feedback, since they can add comments directly within the document. The client can explore the simulation, track, and comment on the functional specifications within the PDF. This is a great process for remote team coordination and Multilanguage constraints. There are times within a teleconference where I may choose to update the project blog in real-time and have the client refresh their browser to see live changes we just reviewed (clients love that too).

Summary

Axure is not a complete replacement to your standard design, documentation and development toolkit, but it is a fantastic way to aggregate these documents and share them quickly and effortlessly. For fast paced production environments where research and usability tends to be a gift and not a mandate, the more quickly you can get your product into a state for user reaction and engagement, the better. Axure can do this for you.

Technorati Tags: Axure, Axure Software, iRise, Protoshare, Prototyping, Simulation