Stefan Agamanolis Media Lab Europe
The core of his work is "When anything is possible, what really matters?"
Intro to Media Lab Europe. Sister to MIT Media Lab, shared IP, separate finance.
Researching human connectedness. Relationships mediated by technology. How we will relate to each other. How to enable presence, new forms of cultural exchange.
Two core beliefs: humans have a fundamental need for contact with other humans. Technology helps enable this.
Stories illustratin the first from psychology. In C13, Frederick II wsa king of Italy. Wanted to learn if children had an inborn language if you didn't teach them. Raised a group of infants who were never to hear speech. Foster parents not allowed to speak or handle babies. Nurses did this. Result was all the infants died. Experiment has been repeated a number of times in history. WWII in 1940s, children in institutions. Germ theory stopped babies in orphanages being handled and held. Babies became sickly, withdrawn, lost weight. 40% who caught measles died, 0.5% in general population. Lack of human contact had fatal consequences.
Part of our physiology is open loop. Theory of limbic regulation. Facial expressions -- in an angry crown. Affects you physiology.
Adults need external regulation to be stable. Cannot be stable on their own. Social relationships, and the lack thereof, constitute a major risk factor for health.
Can technologies help sustain relationships?
Personal counterexaple is you car. Isolated, even when getting petrol or going to drive-thru ATM.
Good examples. Uses iChat AV to chat with parents at Thanksgiving dinner.
UK Mirror newspaper article -- "Mobiles 'linked to teen sex'". Mobile ownership, flirting, leads to earlier sex.
Trends to watch for. Media lab all open. No private offices. Allows for fluid exchange of ideas. Eureka moments, swear words. Open communications, feeling of togetherness. Team spirit. Want to use technology to create same thing. Have a 24 hour a day media portal (iCom) between MIT Europe and MIT Boston. Can have instant video conference. Will soon be for sale.
"Habitat" project. Two connected kitchen tables. When you put things on a table it senses it and displays image on other table. Remove an object and it grows, turns grey and fades away. Gives a history of the table. Communicates the rhythm of live at the other place. A sync of daily life.
Project "open window". In a hospital room, long stay, need to be isolated (e.g. bone marrow transplant). Very dehumanizaing experience. How to create a second window. Person can keep track of a place important to them 24 hours a day. Patient makes choice. Garden, room in house, hilltop view. Looking for results like paient asking for less pain medication.
Always on connectivity, ambient presence. Mobile devices still paying my the bit/minute. A roadblock to always-on. Need to work out how to charge for these services (if at all).
Pictures of keepsakes. Important in human relationships. Wedding rings, portraits, anklets. What are the keepsakes of the future. Portraits are static things. New portrait responds to people coming close. Smile, grimace. About 50 different things the portrait can do. Richer than a static portrait. "Portrait of Cati" project.
One2One flower pot project. Sits on desk. Girlfriend logs into PC and it blooms. Logs out and it deblooms. Trend of enhanced keepsakes.
Images of walkmen and iPods. Nice to isolate yourself. Other times this can be anti-social. Might want to meet new people, but not just talk to anyone. Want an extension of walkman experience, doesn't compete.
Video of project tunA. A music player you can use as normal, as well as tune into what people around you are playing. Don't need a boombox at the beach any more. Ad-hoc radio service. Can only listen to streamed media, can't download. Can bookmark a song or a person. Can walk into a music store and be notified it's available for purchase.
"Shared reflection" project. See a reflection of yourself as well as reflections of other people. Traditional video conference somewhat adversarial. _(Imagine everyone lined in a row, shoulders overlapping. People fade in and out as they talk. Speaker seems more prominent. Can watch TV with your friends, extended family. Changes the concept of a family room.
Palimpsest. Screen in lobby with layered video. Sees everyone who passes in the past day in a short video loop.
All example of technology mediating human comms for the better.
Mobile phone experience. Disadvantages of how distracting it is. How to turn device on its head. Video of two people in sensory isolation tanks making phone call. Project "iso-phone". Totally isloates you from any distraction while making call. Like old telephone body. Water is same as body temperature. Like a gourmet restaurant experience, everything controlled. Have new tanks where you are completely submersed. Scuba mask with microphone and earphones you can use underwater. Why to do a project like this? To me a great media lab project. A BT or Orange would never touch something this weird, but we learn a lot about why we design our devices in particular ways. Enable different types of interactions. Represents a shift from flexibility to singularity in design. Cell phone tries to be all things to all people.
Scenes of sports. Propensity to bond with team mates. Breakout for two is an experiment in sports over a distance. Video - a cross between soccer, tennis and "breakout" computer game. Exertion sport. Have to throw ball at blocks overlaid on video screen. Both can see same block pattern. Win by knocking blocks out.
Recently took to San Francisco. Kids live it - like video games but physical.
Other projects? Wanderful Alcove, magic wands. iBand like active name bands. Detects when you shake hands, exchanges information. Can even tell you what friends you have in common, helps to break the ice.
CNN News. Focuses on extreme events in Africa, don't get a view of what everyday life is like there. Tried to create a different kind of recording technology, a less mediated relationship than one with media orgs with editors and producers. Project "RAW" - digital still camera, one minte of audio before an after. Gives picture context. Photographer wears earphones that are also microphones (binaural). Tool for making historical recordings. Theme/trend of minimizing of mediation, strip away layers of middlemen.
http://www.medialabeurope.org/hc
Q: Any of these becoming commercial products?
A: iCom is getting there, only been around 3 years.
Q: Psychological question on screen size. Using large screens.
A: Large screen makes a different in Breakout For Two. Life-size video conference. Need to feel physical presence of that person. Similarly in iCom portal. Feeling of linkage of architectural spaces.
Q: Negroponte said we're moving from a world of moving atoms to bits. Some seeing bits creating face-to-face meetings. Comments?
A: Seeing full circle coming round. Wouldn't necessarily make same distinctions between atoms and bits that negroponte makes.
Dr Mark Parsons, Commercial Director, EPCC, University of Edinburgh
This one is probably of less interest to Telepocalypse readers, but included for completeness.
Some history on where the Internet came from. 1960s DoD ARPANET, but 1990s WWW took it mainstream.
Email of original proposal on WWW, asking permission to go off and do HTML. Computing Lab rustled up the money to build HTML 1.0. Took about 8 staff-years of effort. A tiny amount of resources. Need to give people ability to innovate. Time to do more than they're being paid for.
WWW originally for viewing CERN phone book!
Basic business benefits of BB?
Immediate benefit is faster downloads of data. Long-term opportunities much greater. Reduce wasted time, improve customer service, reduce costs, home working, etc.
Edinburgh largest supercomputing center. Self-funding. Business pays for it. Have seen that 5 years ago vast majority lacked Internet. 2 years ago majority have dial-uo. Now many have BB. Extremely rapid take-up.
Real examples. Focus on managing customers and production scheduling; customer awareness; business communications. Many other areas.
Have visited 150 Scottish manufacturing customers. Want to do two things. What can they make that week given existing parts and invenoty; and how to schedule it through. Not classic MRP, just small scale. BB opens up a whole loads of new things. Want to give customers more knowledge. Like Amazon, when in sock, when dispatched, when will recieve order. Can take info from scheduling system, display on a secure web page. Cost of only a few thousand pounds. But nobody will give you a fixed price quote. If they won't give you one, they don't know what they're doing. If it sounds high (fixed price) it's what you would pay anyway via the other route.
Sales guy rushing around, production guy either starved of work or overloaded. Smartphone lets a salesperson know how quickly he can deliver. Set realistic customer expectations, get more business.
CCA Lts as example. Centre for Customer Awareness. Just bought broadband in. Whole business process was around getting paper-based data from outside in and re-keyed. Interesting company, do mystery shopping projects. Pay people to go to hotel with complex questionnaires. Food, bedroom, registration. Data all done by hand today. We automated. 15 page form not unusual. Not just a tick and rating. Also looking for textual info.
Paper forms at mercy of postal system. If a comment is unclear or wrong need to send back by post. Slow, people forget what they experienced.
Technology - Java. Free open source (Tomcat and MySQL).
BB enables better business communications. Video conferencing built into Windows Messenger. IM. VoIP. Sit in meeting with laptop open. Can IM with other participants. Can talk to lawyer in contract negotiations. Direct conversations in real-time.
Explanation of VoIP.
Hotel here doesn't allow you to use your VPN!
Small companies using BB for customer service. Some very professional websites make you look like a bigger company. Woman with holiday homes and croft in Highlands, web site helps keep the place full year-round. Doubled her income.
Should you host your own website or buy hosting space? At EPCC we buy hosting space, despite owning big pipes and computers. Just less hassle to have someone else manage it all for you.
A warning. Internet is a good thing. Business information is valuable. Need firewall, virus check, security packages. Get system setup checked.
A disconnect between big vendors and grass roots business. Vendors harping on about web services. Finance sector has 25 year old apps that are hard to transition to web services. An opportunity for new SME entrants.
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