Positive Technology Journal

Re-blogged from Infoaesthetics

a wirelessly controlled tactile display, consisting of a 4 × 4 array of vibrating motors that is mounted on a waist band or on the forearm. this tactile display can be used as a navigation aid outdoors, as experiments have proved that 8 different vibrotactile patterns can be interpreted as directional (e.g. stop, look left, run, proceed faster or proceed slower) or instructional cues (e.g. "raise arm horizontally", "raise arm vertically", "hop") with almost perfect accuracy.

[link: newscientisttech.com & ieee.org (pdf) springerlink.com|via boingboing.net]

Via Mobile Community Design

The UMPC site has an interesting little future scenario video about how UMPCs might be used

From Networked Performance (via Pasta and Vinegar)

MoPres: Sense and contribute to the ghosty presences around you by Jane Oh, Alex Bisceglie:

MoPres brings out the residual 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

User Scenario: People wear the vest with embedded sensor package [heart rate and body temperature sensors], and the data is logged through the cell phone with geo tagging [gps and/or cell-tower id]. Once the mobile application reads the pattern of the data in relation to locations, it triggers the output devices embedded in the vest [heater and the pulse motor] with relevant residual patterns so that people can experience others' past experiences at the given spot.

Via Medgadget

A future concept designed for the AA, this flexible rubber device uses motion combined with reaction time to determine whether or not you are suffering from driver fatigue. The device comunicates with an RFID tag positioned in your car and only starts to detect whether you are tired when you are in your car. The device can be bent to fit your wrist, and has memory to stay in position, to ensure it will not fall off.

Designer: Daniel Ruffle

From Pasta and Vinegar

VibeFones: Socially Aware Mobile Phones by Anmol Madan and Alex Pentland will be presented next friday in Montreux, Switzerland for the International Seminar of Wearable Computing.

In this paper, we describe mobile social software that uses tone of voice, location and proximity information to create a sophisticated understanding of people's social lives, by automatically mining their face-to-face and phone interactions. We describe several applications of our system - automatic characterization of social and workplace interactions, a courtesy reminder for phone conversations, and a personal trainer for dating encounters.

Via Mobile Community Design

The MBW-100 watch lets you answer or reject calls, displays caller ID info, and even lets you play, pause and skip music tracks. The device connects to selected Sony Ericsson handsets (including K790 and K610 models) via Bluetooth 2.0. The stainless-steel, 6.6-ounce watch boasts analog dials and an OLED screen, and it lets you control a variety of phone functions, such as call handling (you can answer, reject or mute calls) and music playback (play, pause, and skip tracks)

Via Textually.org

The Australian company SMS Development has announced the world's first truly mobile GSM watch phone.

The watchphone has SMS capabilities with an internal antenna, is tri-band and comes with bluetooth functionality; talk time is 80 minutes.