Responses for Sept. 15th

Response to Interactive Public Ambient Displays:

While going through this reading, I had a few ideas on how to expand on the functionality of these displays.

1: Would it be feasible to interlace the wide viewable displays with screen guarding technology? This technology, used sometimes with laptops, PDAs and cellphones, restricts the viewablity of the display only to those directly in front of the display. If these displays could be built with this technology laced in the screen, personal information could be displayed on the screen guarded rows and it could allow the display to present more private information without having to rely solely on body occlusion.

2: It would be have these displays interface with a person’s headset for possible voice commands and audio listening services. The downside to this could be displays not respecting the privacy of the user and harassing them with sound.

Response to Proximity Toolkit

It seems that this toolkit will be a great asset to producing more complex and creative software without having to deal with the low level Vicon system. It seems to include all the interactions I would expect to use in programming a proxemic interaction program. I am surprised that no one had written a toolkit for this system before.

Response to Toolkits and Interface Productivity

This reading really helped emphasize the importance of toolkits in development, something I was previously not very aware of. I am interested in how the Collabrary toolkit can be used to create mutli-user musical interfaces. I am reminded of MICE, the Mobile Interactive Computer Ensemble, who created web applications to be accessed by hundreds of people (with laptops) in the same space. These apps could control a musical composition or even use these laptops to output the composition ( https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~mburtner/MICE.html and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyeBCYRBmx8 I apologize, none of the content is well produced). These interfaces could allow anything from interactive composition editors to a program that delegates instruments to different users.