As you move differently in bed during the different phases of sleep, Sleep Cycle uses the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement to determine which sleep phase you are in. Come morning and it plots out a graph of your nocturnal activity. Here’s mine from the last couple of nights:
Sleep statistics for 30 – 31 Jan
Went to bed / woke up: 01:18 / 08:27 | Total time: 7h 08m
Sleep statistics for 31 – 01 Feb
Went to bed / woke up: 23:21 / 06:30 | Total time: 7h 08m
Can you guess when I woke to tend to our son? Now I *know* when I woke at night…
Those of you who are used to analysing sentiment will know it’s no easy task—even though some of our dashboards automate certain processes for us.
Programs are not good at understanding natural language and we have to configure them to recognise specific words that indicate different types of emotion and sentiment.
Through some recent poking around I have discovered that W3C have been working to develop Emotion Markup Language via the W3C Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group.
Their take on it is:
Emotion-oriented (or “affective”) computing is gaining importance as interactive technological systems become more sophisticated. Representing the emotional states of a user or the emotional states to be simulated by a user interface requires a suitable representation format. Although several non-standard markup languages containing elements of emotion annotation have been proposed, none of these languages have undergone thorough scrutiny by emotion researchers, nor have they been designed for generality of use in a broad range of application areas.
The Emotion Incubator Group will discuss and propose scientifically valid representations of those aspects of emotional states that appear to be relevant for a number of use cases. The group will condense these considerations into a formal draft specification.
The formation of EML ties nicely into the work W3C are doing with semantics. It will be quite a while before these standards are fully developed and adopted, but this layer of additional data will—at some point—make our jobs easier.
Leah Buechley from MIT has been working on a project to create interactive wallpaper that uses low-tech materials to create an amazing display.
What I like about this project is how it utilises technologies such as bluetooth: a technology that I still think is underrated and under used. What if your mobile phone could automatically send a signal to the wallpaper, instructing it to change colour in accordance with your mood?
Throughout the day many people update their Facebook or Twitter statuses with either positive or negative posts discussing how they feel. Automated sentiment analysis already exists, all we would need is a mobile app that calculated your mood by analysing your day’s social network updates.
I’m on the hunt for interactive devices that use Twitter and Facebook in more useful ways. Last year those cats at Poke put together Baker Tweet using Arduino, it would be great to see more work like this next year.
I like making things. Call me an empiricist, but I think the best to way learn something is to get stuck in and get your hands dirty.
Today I stumbled across the super cool Make Magazine; their blog showcases some cool digital stuff, and also shows you how to make some pretty cool s*@!. Its like a techier and geekier version of Scrapheap Challenge that sits online.
There are some real sweet finds on there and my recent favourites are:
The drawing machine powered by old CD drives
The Vodafone mobile phone orchestra [A TV Ad for Vodafone NZ]
Interactive art on roofs [Soo one of the best ideas of 2009]
I was called into a brainstorming session last week for a prospective client that wanted to embrace web3. Que!? I hear you say. As a digital bod I was asked for my thoughts on the components that exemplified web3.
What instantly came to mind was “asynchronist, always on, cloud stuff and utilities”.
I shared my thoughts with the team and we jointly considered technologies, applications and things that were applicable to brief and the brand. The brainstorming session and the initial question subsequently made me think: these types of questions are going to be common quite soon. How is the web evolving? Which technologies should we be keeping an eye on?
I’ve done a bit of digging around and I’m not going to try and some up “web3″ because nobody should, but here are some important things that are shaping the web:
All of the videos above might, well do, seem a bit geekish, but they all demonstrate how the web is continually evolving into a more networked and realtime environment.
Raw data will have more context around it and this will translate into more useful information; applications will move from the desktop to the cloud; search will become more social, aggregated and instantaneous; people will be social in more than one place, and this will mean lifestreams will have a greater significance.
Effects on media?
Hard to predict of course, but the first thing that springs to mind is that user destinations will change. We will be buying more media across social networks and web applications. Specialist rivals to Google, like Wolfram Alpha and Delicious, will make small scratches on their monopoly.
Improvements in our digital infrastructures will mean that we will be spending more time online and consuming more content. Entertainment will continue to be, a greater mishmash, delivered by iPlayers, Vodcasts, YouTube and Sky+.
I’m going to stop here because I don’t like prophesying and predicting, but you get the gist.
There’s been a lots of recent hype surrounding augmented reality. It seems to be the next thing media/advertising folk talk about after social media.
It’s been at the back of my mind I guess. It really is very cool. Some brands, mobile phone manufacturers and creative shops are getting in on the act by producing innovative work. Layar for Android looks good and Mobilizy’s WikiTude cleverly overlays tourist information from Wikipedia.
The recent buzz got me thinking about ways in which brands could effectively use AR for utilities. What if there were applications that combined and expert systems and artificial intelligence with AR? Consider the some of the potential uses:
- Applications for plumbers and DIY junkies that could identify pipes and fittings;
- An application that utilises Haynes manual information: each time a user points their lens at an engine part the app could tell them what the part was, how you could safely remove it and what tools were required.
There’s been a lots of recent hype surrounding augmented reality. It seems to be the next thing media/advertising folk talk about after social media.
It’s been at the back of my mind I guess. It really is very cool. Some brands, mobile phone manufacturers and creative shops are getting in on the act by producing innovative work. Layar for Android looks good and Mobilizy’s WikiTude cleverly overlays tourist information from Wikipedia.
The recent buzz got me thinking about ways in which brands could effectively use AR for utilities. What if there were applications that combined expert systems and artificial intelligence with AR? Consider the some of the potential uses:
- Applications for plumbers and DIY junkies that could identify pipes and fittings;
- An application that utilises Haynes manual information: each time a user points their lens at an engine part the app could tell them what the part was, how you could safely remove it and what tools were required.
Now I *know* when I woke at night…
