General Context

In collaboration with Research in Motion, this project aims to develop a digital spyglass for children that is designed to function with and complement the parents’ BlackBerry during leisure travel. The spyglass is currently code-named Peer.

Users

• Improve security and peace-of-mind of parents by providing 2-way communication between Peer and
• BlackBerry
• ƒƒKeep children engaged and entertained using a variety of amusing augmented reality applications, especially during travel
• ƒƒExpose and enhance BlackBerry media playback, sharing and social networking features.
• ƒƒBe enjoyable to use and small enough so that children would carry it with them all the time.
• ƒƒEnable recording memories and experiences for future reference, aid in sharing travel experiences with extended family and friends
• ƒƒProvide children with fun, media recording technologyƒƒ
• Allow children to play and explore
• ƒƒProvide a stepping stone to children into the concept of augmented reality the BlackBerry ecosystem
• ƒƒEnforce brand loyalty of parents and expand BlackBerry value

Hardware

• Soft touch (rubberized) and durable construction
• Must be available in a variety of colours and colour combinations for personalization and identification
• Simple user input, e.g. spin and squeeze navigation
• Use spyglass metaphor for deeper physical interaction than current backlit display technology
• Different attachment methods: lanyard, bracelet, backpack
• Quick release and rubberized straps to minimize strangling hazard

Technology

• 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi for real-time media sharing and media synchronization
• Bluetooth for zero-configuration networking, device pairing and setup
• 3 or 4 band GSM for SMS service
• ƒ1.5” high resolution, 320-by-320-pixel OLED display with micro lens collimating filter
• 3-axis accelerometer for gesture-based input
• ƒDigital compass for augmented reality applications
• ƒMegapixel camera, microphone for audio and video capture
• Built-in rechargeable Li-ion battery
• Micro-USB for charging, synchronization and software update
• Dedicated graphics processor for real-time image processing

Peer Software

• Custom-built OS, with Over-the-air updates (Wi-Fi)
• User installable ‘applications’ for added 3rd party functionality

BlackBerry myPeer Software

• Manage devices, install new applications
• ƒ‘Poke’ and ‘Panic’ messaging to Peers
• Always on to receive notifications for real-time viewing of media

You can also download the formatted Experience Travel with Children – Phase 4 Project Brief PDF, submitted to my project supervisors.

We were organized into 3 groups:

1. Flexibility: Tamara and Minh
2. Strength: Felix and Teddy
3. Balance: Yasaman and Caleb

In the Strength group, we explored the kinds of activities that the participants normally did and for all of the activities, posture was always brought up.

• Participants noted that the exercises performed were often focused on specific muscle groups and that by knowing what muscles they were targeting, they could more effectively do their exercises, in other words, consciously knowing what muscles you’re trying to target helps target those muscles.
• Activities often had specific goals, especially with respect to posture.

Concepts

My co-design session with two of the participants produced four concepts, of which two formal concepts could be crystalized.

1. Back posture
2. Shoulder posture
3. Neck/muscle relaxation
4. Back relaxation

Both the back posture and relaxation could be combined into once concept; shoulder posture and neck/muscle relaxation could also be combined into another concept. Each of these would monitor the same thing but in a different area.

Concerns were primarily focused on how these devices could be attached to the body, and how they would be used. Participants were not very keen on purchasing this kind of equipment for their own use, although they would appreciate the availability of such devices at the centre.

The “shrug buster” is a concept for a posture corrective system that notifies the exerciser if he or she is not relaxing their shoulders. One way of measuring this is simply an earring like accessory that measure the proximity of the shoulders.

The point of exercising is to relax certain parts of the body while activating others.

Before any of the major sections, however, Kelly begins his book with one chapter titled, ‘My Question’. This question is obviously directly related to the title of the book, ‘what technology wants’. He begins with his personal history and why this question is important to him. By doing so he introduces the concept of the ‘technium’ and positions himself to answer the question, ‘what technology wants’ (although it is not syntactically a real question). The new term he introduces, the ‘technium’ is the whole of individual technologies working in concert in an entire system. He contrasts this to ‘technology’ which is one particular manifestation of an idea as a useful tool in our culture.

One of Kelly’s key theories is that the whole of technology acts and evolves very similarly to biology, as technology arose out of life, and this is one of the ways that he answers his question. He proposes that the technium should be regarded as the seventh kingdom of life evolving out of humans. Of course this idea is so radical that we might be quick to dismiss it because he clearly breaks some of our notions of biology to do this, but by using his new term, ‘technium’, he is able to pursue his argument.

Kelly mentions McLuhan’s idea that technology is the extended (or external) human, e.g. cooking, a form of technology, is the ‘external (or extended) stomach’. Yet, after mentioning McLuhan, I can’t help but think of his ‘the medium is the message’, however, with a whole new notion of ‘medium’. This medium is life itself—here on Earth it is carbon-based life—and the message, the manifestation of life’s potential is all the living organisms in their incredible diversity and also yet-as-incredible similarity (all life on Earth is based on the same building blocks).

By far, the most interesting section of his book, and the part that even though I find is perhaps the less controversial, is also the most ‘mystical’ or ‘metaphysical’, is the first section, ‘Origins’. For someone who firmly believes that Kurzweil’s Singularity is a myth, we get quite close in another mystical sense. Kelly is clearly a thinker whose mindset is deeply rooted in western, Christian and pro-scientific method ideology. ‘Origins’ is about a very abstract cosmological theory, so similar to Schrödinger’s ideas published in What is Life?, that I was surprised that his ideas were never mentioned in the notes or bibliography. Kelly’s style of writing is very clear, and this section reads smoothly and quickly. Reading through ‘Origins’, I felt as if I was soaring through time and getting a glimpse of the elegant simplicity of a very unified idea of biology and physics. Kelly explores one of the most abstract definitions of life by examing ‘exotropy’ (negative entropy). Kelly also creates a new term here although he really doesn’t need to; many physicists have referred to the same or similar concepts in the terms, ‘negative entropy’, ‘negentropy’, ‘syntropy’, and ‘extropy’. Again, this section makes very little reference to scientific ideas that have already been published on this matter and does nothing to clarify existing theories. Despite this, I really like Kelly’s cosmological view of technology

This chapter also introduces some interesting ideas on information as well. Entropy is the natural decrease in order from energy transfer. The momentum of entropy’s downward slope has created an eddy in our neighbourhood of the universe that has resulted in a manifestation of exotropy called life. Information ‘is signal of bits that makes a difference’. Kelly combines the two together elegantly by saying that ‘life is a self generated information system’ (organization of matter into highly organized structures that can process information).

Kelly makes bold and at the same time weak claims, such as the technium is the most powerful force in on the planet. How does one measure ‘power’? Is it the impact that it has on the rest of the ecosystem? Shouldn’t the technium be, by definition, less than the force of nature itself? The technium only exists because the tremendous resources that it consumes trickle down from the bounty of nature (a notion I’ve borrowed from Evan Eisenberg’s Ecology of Eden). Other times, he seems to contradict himself: one of his strong arguments for the theory of exotropy is the dematerialization of United States exports (a result of a shift to an information economy), however, further he goes on to say that dematerialization is an illusion, as we cannot build a light, high tech industry without a heavy industry as a base.

Kelly draws many graphs and attention to all the ‘arrows pointing up’, but there are a whole lot of exceptions to these rules, without a lot of consideration. He is very optimistic about good things that technology brings to our lifestyle: ‘faster, cheaper, better’, and firmly believes that the problems of tomorrow will be addressed with the tools of tomorrow. Kelly uses this sentence so surely, yet most of us would agree that most of the social, environmental, political and economic problems—problems that are for the most part a direct result of technological ‘progress’—will probably not be solved primarily through more technology.

His ideas are fascinating and his analysis much to clarify contemporary ideas on technology. Kelly again predicts the future in an elegant and logical flow. But whether or not time proves that he is a visionary, his ideas will definitely ‘stick’ in our culture.

If you’re in North America, the UK, or Spain you can already download the newly-announced BlackBerry Travel app from App World and give it a go for yourself (see our original BlackBerry Travel App post for full details and download info). If you’re not in those regions and want to see what you’re missing, or if you just want to see it in action before you download, then check out the video above. Live on location at Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona, Spain, we got a good look at the BlackBerry Travel app by the folks at WorldMate, who have put a ton of hard work into this app over the years.

Via Crackberry.com

I remember one of my professors asking the question, ‘What is Life?’ His abstract explanation was something along these lines. If you take two pop bottles, fill one of them with water and connect them head to head and turn them upside down, the water falls into the lower bottle irregularly and chaotically. However, if the conditions are just right—you swirl the bottles just so—you get a beautiful and orderly vortex of water. That is Life.

All of us are made of the same substance, ‘dust’, ‘earth’, (‘water?’), yet our brief existence is substantially different than all the other dead matter around us, even the other living organisms around us, and even yet, each of our existences are unique from the other humans around us. I also believe that the quintessence of humanity is creativity. Perhaps, I am slightly biased, as I am studying a ‘creative’ profession, yet I believe that all true human activity embodies the element of creativity and willpower. To celebrate life is to celebrate the will of creation of the universe, and to celebrate an individual’s life is to celebrate his or her will and creativity.

Finally, isn’t the ultimate form of human creativity, the power of creating another human life? What we create today, may be for ourselves and our happiness, but as we grow old we shall realize that ultimately, it is for our children, and for their happiness.

The instructor reminded people not to over exert themselves. “No pain” is the basically the rule that is followed. At any sense of discomfort, exercisers are to stop their activity and rest. She also discussed to what extent a positive way of speaking was important. There is always a positive way of communicating something.

The fitness class is very much a social activity. Merry tunes are played from a boombox near the window. Exercises walk on the treadmills and carry out conversations or hum to the tunes. The entire atmosphere of the class is very slow moving and generally cheerful, although I would attribute the cheerfulness mainly to the positive personality of the instructor. There is joking around, sharing of family news and general talk of all kinds of things, often personal and occasionally romantic. I would even go far enough to suggest that there is some degree of flirting.

“We exercise our tongues more than our muscles.”

Disabilities

Some various physical disabilities that were noted included:

• Visual impairment. There were two individuals who needed assistance moving around and setting up, entering and exiting the equipment. The instructor praised one individual for his level of independence, despite his condition.
• Body damage, accident recovery. This one is difficult to categorize, so it has been placed in its own category. One lady had suffered several broken and shattered bones from a car accident many years ago. Exercises kept her muscles strong.
• Language impairment. One individual had a lot of trouble talking although he was quite independent.
• Limited motor abilities. One individual clearly had limited motor control over his left arm.

Equipment

The exercises performed various activities using this equipment:

• Nu-steps (ellipticals)
• Bicycle
• Leg developer
• Stepper
• Treadmills
• Large integrated pulley press thingy by Apollo (I really don’t know these things very well!)
• Chairs. Man of the stretching exercises were performed on chairs: leaning forward, backwards, twisting, lifting arms,
• Small skateboards. Skateboards are used for various legwork, stretching, extending without having the exercisers need to lift their legs.

External Links

Exercise guidelines for older patients, published by American Academy of Family Physicians (via Wikipedia) http://www.aafp.org/afp/2006/0801/p437.html

During the exercise> we had to examine an object with fresh new eyes and a completely re-imagine a use in the far future. If today’s technology was experienced by people 50 years ago, they would certainly believe that there was something truly magical about today’s devices, doesn’t Apple claim that if a technology transcends that ability for a person to understand how it works, then it becomes magic? Our task was to create a magical product from the future. We had to identify 3 of its magical powers and in what kind of activity the device would be used in by drawing a scenario storyboard.

Our product was a handmade amulet we decided to call a proma.

The amulet has the ability to recognize products with its ‘eye’. The image, forms, textures and physical properties of anything can be captured simply by pointing at an object and performing some action.

Because products in this particular age have no labels, this amulet projects important technical information about the particular objects features.

If a particular object is desired for oneself’s personal consumption, the amulet is used once to capture the essence of the object desired and used again to recreate a personal clone of that object. The cloned object inherits characteristics from the amulets’ history, and the products that are generated are uniquely created for the individual. Over time, the captured memories, textures, materials, are preferences, and the objects created using the materializer inherit these preferences.

However, no one can create in a vacuum. The gem in the centre of the amulet indicates the amount of matter and energy left in your account. You cannot create and consume at whim!

Here, a simple coffee cup has been materialized and is ready to be enjoyed by the user!

What kind of products, systems and accessories for the BlackBerry ecosystem can be created to enhance the experience of travel for both children and adults alike? This product could be an exciting and playful product that provides a new facet to travelling and to the parents’ BlackBerry. One notion that will be explored is the ephemerality or permanence of the product in childhood. Is this a product that is only for travelling and will be associated with travelling, or will the child have this product with them more?

Download the updated project brief for Phase 2.