GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

We usually freak out at the idea that computer algorithms might tell us what to do. Yet we’re constantly asking them for instructions: how to contact person X, find document Y, or move from point A to point B. We just pretend that we’re in control. What if, instead, we made that submissive experience explicit, producing something unexpected — and fun?

You see, e-books may not yet have their avant-garde, but mapping apps just might. Self-described artist/architect/post-disciplinary researcher Mark Shepard built his alternative navigation iPhone app Serendipitor (currently in private beta) to inject Google Maps with the ethos of postmodern participatory art movements like Fluxus or Situationism. But when you mash-up movement with art, you get something very much like an alternate reality game.

Here’s Shepard’s description of how Serendipitor works:

Enter an origin and a destination, and the app maps a route between the two. You can increase or decrease the complexity of this route, depending how much time you have to play with. As you navigate your route, suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear within step-by-step directions designed to introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route. You can take photos along the way and, upon reaching your destination, send an email sharing with friends your route and the steps you took

As it happens, this dovetails with “Reality Has A Gaming Layer,” a terrific article published yesterday by game designer Kevin Slavin for O’Reilly Radar. Essentially, Slavin argues that mobile applications like Foursquare, virtual games like Second Life, simulated-reality objects like the Tamagotchi, and casual games like Farmville or Parking Wars are converging with the “big games” — essentially, games that require extensive play in the real world — that he and other designers have been working on for years.

What we’ve been creating, as we’ve taken these gadgets out of our office and living rooms and brought them with us into the world, are experiences that blend information, entertainment, and interaction. When you’re taking a photograph or looking up a map on your smartphone, you’re really waving around a video game controller. Serendipitor might be the perfect example of that.

(out of the) wayfinding with serendipitor [Serial Consign] via Nav Alang/@scrawledinwax

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Interactive Map of Afghanistan for iPad. Image By/Used Courtesy Of Development Seed

GPS maps for smartphones generally require a fairly high-speed wireless internet connection, consume significant processor resources, and are optimized for driving. But what if your 3G connection is unreliable or unavailable, and you still need to get from point A to point B — perhaps on foot?

Last week, I spoke with Eric Gunderson and Ian Cairns at Development Seed, one of the companies developing tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations, like this one. It’s not that farfetched: In a natural disaster and in the developing world, mobile phones may be useful navigational aids, but only if they can work without a reliable data connection and are optimized for different kinds of transportation than just zooming down the highway to the nearest Starbucks.

Development Seed caught our attention with a post that Cairns wrote for PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab on custom maps for cyclists and drunken, late-night pedestrians. For StumbleSafely, DC Bikes, and DC Nightvision, a typical street map was overlaid with crime data, bike lanes, bar and bike shop locations, and municipal infrastructure: “Not just buildings and roads, but even crosswalks, medians, and topography lines.” In short, all of the data that actually helps you get where you’re going when you’re not in a car.

These maps were built with TileMill, an open-source program the company created to help governments, NGOs, news organizations, and others easily create custom maps. The idea is to make map image tiles and Geographic Information System (GIS) data as easy to work with as RSS feeds or CSV databases are today.

“We want to put these tools in the hands of the subject-matter experts and see what they can do,” Gunderson told Wired.com. Development Seed won a Knight News Challenge award for the project.

Knight News Challenge: Tilemapping from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

One of the most-needed and currently most-poorly-served markets for mapping and data visualization support is in international development. As Gadget Lab reported this week, mobile devices are thriving in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the developing world, but data bandwidth and easy-to-find electricity aren’t.

“You can’t get an application like Google Earth working in Afghanistan,” Gunderson said. Maps On A Stick offers full-fledged, data-and-image-rich maps on a USB drive for no-bandwidth or poor-bandwidth use. The company and clients have plenty of experience with those scenarios, mapping uncharted road data in Africa, or helping relief workers provide housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina.

I think about those disaster scenarios often, just as I think about the people I love walking home alone in the city late at night.

When Apple launched the iPhone, it made a big deal about how its software team had written its own Maps client, using Google’s data only for the backend. It had to work for the touch interface, but it also had to make sense for how people would be likely to use Maps on a mobile device.

Now that easy mobile maps have become a natural part of our smartphone-carrying, 3G-surfing lives, it may be time for us to broaden our assumptions about the kinds of maps we’ll need and the conditions we’ll have when we need them.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Don’t type when you can talk, says Google. The search giant has strengthened its existing voice command feature on Android and introduced a new application called Chrome-to-Phone, for syncing with Chrome browsers.

Voice Search, despite its name, now lets you do more than just search: It will let users send texts, compose e-mails, call businesses, navigate, jot notes, and set the alarm on their phone by just speaking into the device.

The voice commands, called “voice actions,” are part of Google’s effort to improve the user interface on Android and let consumers go beyond the traditional keyboard and touchscreen interface on their phones.

The Voice Search application is currently available only for phones running version 2.2 of the Android OS — which means HTC Evo, Droid X and Droid 2 users can get it on their phones immediately.

Google also launched a mobile sync app to link its Chrome browser to Android 2.2 devices. The tool, called Chrome-to-Phone, lets users on Google’s Chrome browser click an icon to send a web page or a map to their phone. The page or map is then almost immediately available on the phone.

“This is a low-latency, super-fast app for pushing data to the phone,” says Dave Burke, engineering manager for Google.

Google debuted its voice search application in the U.S. about two years ago when it introduced Android. Now one out of every four queries, or 25 percent of queries, on devices running Android 2.0 OS and higher comes through the voice interface, says Google.

The earlier version of the voice command allowed users to do just three things: web search, call a specific contact and navigate to an address.

The new voice search app goes beyond that. For instance, you can speak the name of a song or a band into the phone and the app will go online, find the music and show a list of apps such as Pandora and last.fm that can play the music you want.

For more details, check out Google’s list of voice commands available through the app.

But when it comes to the Chrome-to-Phone app, the service is more limited. It is currently available to only Chrome users, though some Firefox users are also using it. The sync feature is also only available for Android devices, though Google says it will work to bring the feature to iPhone users as an app.

Image: Screenshots of Voice Search courtesy Google.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews