Tag: andymaskin

Many of us fondly remember the physical computing project Botanicalls, which rose to fame in 2007. Created by Rob Faludi, Kati London, Kate Hartman and Rebecca Bray while at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and now sold as a kit via Sparkfun, it is essentially a moisture sensor that tweets. You assemble it, customize it (with the Arduino framework), and connect it to power and ethernet, and then place it in your plant. When the soil gets dry, it sends out a twitter message along the lines of “Please Water Me!”

We here at the Lab are following the trend of Quantified Self, wherein consumers are measuring more and more aspects of their lives and sharing them online. As we discussed people logging their runs, their weight and even their sleep, I decided it was high time we assembled a Botanicalls unit and put it to work for us, as a way to further demonstrate this theme. So we bought a little palm plant, assembled the kit, and here it is!

After we put the kit together, and customized it so it tweets about three times a day with its current moisture, we also updated it so it takes much more frequent measurements and stores them in a database. Moreover, we decided to create an embeddable iFrame so that you can monitor our palm plant for yourself. Simply add the following code to your HTML document, blog post etc.:

<iframe src="https://www-stage.ipglab.com/plant/iframe.php" frameborder="0" height="500" width="276"></iframe>

Also, you can follow the plant and our other gadgets that tweet at our dedicated QS twitter account: @Quantified_Self

This week we’ve been playing with Clik at the lab. To use it, you simply pull up http://clikthis.com in a web browser. If you don’t already have the mobile app, scanning the QR code takes you to the mobile app in your device’s applicable app store. If you scan the code with the Clik app, you take control of the screen and can play YouTube videos on it. Your screen becomes a TV and your device becomes a remote.

One thing I really like about it is that you don’t need to sign in with a username or password to use it. The interaction is pretty instant. That may pose limitations in terms of desired social functionality down the road, but for now I think it works rather well.

Also, unlike other software such as AirPlay that requires devices to be on the same wireless network, this uses your device’s data connection. So this means you can use this in Out of Home contexts where few people would go to the trouble of joining a wifi network just to control a screen.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdirdmxpLOY]

En route to Austin for SXSW, I settled in with the January issue of Wired and the soundtrack to Drive, which I highly recommend for dusk flights if you have a window seat. I came across an interesting article about Ian Bogost and his Facebook game project “Cow Clicker”.

I won’t get into every detail of the game here, but I definitely encourage you to read the article at wired.com if you are so inclined.

To sum up, Bogost created the game as a satire of Farmville and it ironically went viral. It came from the point of view that games like Farmville and Mafia Wars create game mechanics designed to suck people into repetitive pointless tasks and then hopefully charge them for the privilege of an enhanced experience performing pointless tasks.

In Cow Clicker, the satire, users had cows in a virtual pasture, and they got points for clicking on them. And there was a leaderboard. Eventually it gained 50,000 users, and held onto many of them until Bogost’s self-imposed “cowpocalypse” when all the cows were raptured effectively ending the game.

The thing that struck me about the story was how the satire backfired in some ways. It was meant to simply make a point – for people to try it for 15 minutes and thus get the point Bogost was trying to make about game design. But because the satire was based on the same sort of game mechanics he despised, it actually wound up taking off in spite of itself. There were thousands of people who played it for real. Even as Bogost kept upping the satirical ante, this deliberately pointless game gained ardent fans.

To me this represents the raw power of what happens when you hit on a fundamental insight about human behavior, and what gets them hooked on a game, activity or even a brand. No matter how much you wish it wasn’t true, and you want to snap people out of a set of behaviors you view as pointless, some things speak to us at a deep level. The entire field of psychology is predicated on the idea that humans are not each a completely randomized set of emotions and behaviors. There are things you can learn about how we as a species are wired that even the best satire can’t wash away.

Cubify is here at CES showing off their $1299 3D printer. It has a sleek design and can build plastic objects based on photographs. You can make a tiny plastic bust of yourself. Winston Churchill would be jealous.

3D printing is obviously quite a ways off from being common in consumer households, but when prices drop far enough, and they are easy enough to use, and kids start wanting custom toys, perhaps we’ll see some traction.