After I published the post, I received a comment from someone from PARC with links to additional technical presentations about innovations in networking.
Van Jacobson Explains It All
If you are interested in ubiquitous & pervasive computing - and creating seamless user experiences across locations and devices, it is well worth the 90-minute watch.
In the video below, Van Jacobson talks about ubiquitous computing, wireless, networking, research, and the challenges of making everything synced and seamlessly inter-operative in the future. In this video, Van Jacobson provides a good overview of the history of the communications/networking industry, and much, much more. Although the presentation was given in 2006, it is well worth the time.
A NEW WAY TO LOOK AT NETWORKING
Here's info about Van Johnson and abstract of the talk from the Google Tech Talks website:
"Google Tech Talks August 30, 2006 Van Jacobson is a Research Fellow at PARC. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist and co-founder of Packet Design. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist at Cisco. Prior to that he was head of the Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He's been studying networking since 1969. He still hopes that someday something will start to make sense."
ABSTRACT
"Today's research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows. Security, mobility, ubiquitous computing, wireless, autonomous sensors, content distribution, digital divide, third world infrastructure, etc., are all poorly served by what's available from either the research community or the marketplace. I'll use various strained analogies and contrived examples to argue that network research is moribund because the only thing it knows how to do is fill in the details of a conversation between two applications. Today as in the 60s problems go unsolved due to our tunnel vision and not because of their intrinsic difficulty. And now, like then, simply changing our point of view may make many hard things easy."
A similar post can be found on The World Is My Interactive Interface blog.
In the video below, Jim Thornton, a researcher at PARC, is interviewed by Dean Takahashi, from VentureBeat. Jim discusses his work in the area of content-centric networking, also known as CCN or Named-Data-Networking (NDN). CCN is a way to work around the problem of internet "bottlenecking", something that happens when lots of people want to view rich multimedia content at the very same time.
As it stands, content-delivery companies handle this problem by storing content in video caches, identified by IP addresses. If you search for content via the CCN protocol, your search will lead to a memory node that is identified by the name of the content (or other information that identifies the content), rather than an IP address, and select the content that is closest to your location.
One of the objectives of CCN is to reduce internet bandwidth expenses.
PARC is working with nine universities on this project, which provides open-source software that can be found on theProject CCNxwebsite.
About CCNx: "Project CCNx exists to develop, promote, and evaluate a new approach to communication architecture we call content-centric networking. We seek to carry out this mission by creating and publishing openprotocol specificationsand an open source software reference implementationof those protocols. We provide support for acommunityof people interested in experimentation, research, and building applications with this technology, all contributing to its evolution."
If you are curious, the open-source Content Centric Networking code can be found on the github website. If you visit the website, make sure you take a look at the "ReadMe" section. Also heed this warning, found on the Project CCNx website: "CCNx technology is still at averyearly stage of development, with pure infrastructure and no applications, best suited to researchers and adventurous network engineers or software developers. If you're looking for cool applications ready to download and use, you are a little too early."
RELATED PARC Awarded National Science Foundation Funding to Expand Fundamental Research in Content-Centered Networking: Part of NSF's new "Future Internet Architecture" program, the Named-Data-Networking (NDN) grant includes PARC and nine universities: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign University of Arizona Washington University Yale University Colorado State University University of California, San Diego University of Memphis University of California, Irvine University of California, Los Angeles
Networking Named Content (pdf) Jacobson, V.; Smetters, D. K.; Thornton, J. D.; Plass, M. F.; Briggs, N.; Braynard, R. Networking named content. Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT 2009); 2009 December 1-4; Rome, Italy. NY: ACM; 2009; 1-12.
"Network use has evolved to be dominated by content distribution and retrieval, while networking technology still can only speak of connections between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network's where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which takes content as a primitive – decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived heavily from IP, we can simultaneously achieve scalability, security and performance. We have implemented the basic features of our architecture and demonstrate resilience and performance with secure file downloads and VoIP calls."
SocialTV: designing for distributed, social television viewing (pdf) Ducheneaut, N. ; Moore, R. J. ; Oehlberg, L.; Thornton, J. D. ; Nickell, E. SocialTV: designing for distributed, social television viewing. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 2008 February; 24 (2): 136-154.
"Media research has shown that people enjoy watching television as a part of socializing in groups. However, many constraints in daily life limit the opportunities for doing so. The Social TV project builds on the increasing integration of television and computer technology to support sociable, computer-mediated group viewing experiences. In this paper, we describe the initial results from a series of studies illustrating how people interact in front of a television set. Based on these results, we propose guidelines as well as specific features to inform the design of future "social television" prototypes."
Dan Saffer is one of my "important influences". When I was taking HCI and Ubiquitous Computing courses, I bought the first edition of his book, Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices.In today's world of technical convergence, it is an important read, as Saffer's content crosses a number of disciplines.
Thoughts: It doesn't surprise me to learn that the #1 book on Saffer's Essential Interaction Design Books list is list is Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. According to Saffer, "there's no getting around it: this isthebook. Affordances, mental models, and other bits that have all become part of the general lexicon all started with The Don's book. A must read." Don Norman's book was required reading in the Human-Computer Interaction class I took a few years ago. As I read through the book, I sensed a familiar tone. I later learned that Don Norman was the co-author of a required textbook for one of the psychology courses I took when I was a university student the first time around.
Don Norman's thinking has influenced me for decades - he continues to be an influence, because he writes articles for one of my favorite publications, Interactions Magazine:
It brightens up my day when I open up my mailbox- the one at the end of my real-life driveway- and find my Interactions magazine, in all of its well-designed, well-written, semi-glossy-paged glory, waiting for me to open up and read. The September/October, 2010 issue includes articles on topics related to authenticity in new media, the complexity of "advancement", design and usability, and the politics of development.
Here is an excerpt from the article, which highlights some of the problems of rushing to get products with natural-user interfaces out to market:
"Why are we having trouble? Several reasons:
The lack of established guidelines for gestural control
The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.
The developer community's apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research, which results in their feeling empowered to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public"
(Interactions Magazine is a publication of ACM CHI -Association of Computing Machinery, Computer-Human Interaction interest group).
Here are a list of books/articles, suggested by Dan Saffer's readers:
Designing for Interaction – Saffer, D. (2nd Edition; 2009) Thoughts on Interaction Design – Kolko, J. (2009) The Humane Interface – Raskin, J. Digital Ground – McCullough, M. Inmates are running the Asylum – Cooper, A Designing Interactions – Moggridge, B (ed.) Everyware – Greenfeild, A. Designing Social Interfaces – Malone & Crumlisch Emotional Design – Norman, D. Invisible Computer – Norman, D. Persuasion Technology – Fogg, BJ Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology by Jonas Lowgren and Erik Stolterman (Paperback – Mar 30, 2007) Designing Visual Interfaces by Mullet/San Steve Krug – Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability Design Research: Methods and Perspectives edited by Brenda Laurel Information Architecture ("The Polar Bear Book") by Peter Morville.
Bill Gerba blogs about DOOH, which stands for "Digital-Out-of-Home", focusing on displays and kiosks in public spaces that offer dynamic and/or interactive content, usually for the purpose of advertising and marketing. If this is an area that interests you, take a look at Bill Gerba's most recent post, "Does TV Content Work on DOOH? Maybe, Maybe Not" - WireSpring: Digital Signage Insider (9/24/10)
Gerba refers to a "Marketing Funnel" graphic to illustrate some of his points. Six of the seven concepts represented in the graphic, shared below, might be useful to think about for people working in the field of public displays for purposes other than advertising or marketing:
Most of us have noticed that there are many more large-screen displays around. Some displays intrusively attempt to grab your attention through loud and garish informercial-like content. Some are designed to be interactive and pleasant, but go un-noticed by passers-by at all!
Don’t worry, I’ve not forgotten what Sunday means, the day to relax and lay back. I might not be posting as often as I was before because I’m back in school, but don’t worry, I still have plenty of games that I’m willing to share. The nice thing about gaming is that it can always [...]
I love the concept of interactive, networked public displays! The PD-NET project has a fairly new website and a Facebook page. If this interests you, take the time to learn about the PD-NET project, a collaborative effort between researchers from several different universities in Europe.
To create enabling technologies for large-scale pervasive display networks through the design, development, and evaluation of a robust, scalable, distributed and open platform for interconnecting displays and their sensors.
To establish Europe as the international centre for work on pervasive display networks.
To address key scientific challenges that may inhibit the widespread adoption of pervasive display network technology: Tensions between privacy and personalization, situated displays, business and legislative requirements, User Interaction.
Here is a list of participating universities and researchers, taken from the PD-NET website:
J. Müller, F. Alt, D. Michelis, and A. Schmidt, "Requirements and Design Space for Interactive Public Displays," in Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (Multimedia 2010), to appear, 2010.
COMMENT
If you are familiar with this blog, you know that I am passionate about interactive displays, especially in public spaces. I've devoted numerous posts to this topic on this blog, and also on The World Is My Interactive Interface, a blog I started a few years ago when I was working on projects for large interactive displays.
I am interested in how interactive displays, of any size, can be accessible and universally designed, especially those that can inter-operate with mobile devices, including devices that support communication for people with special needs.
I discovered Unity 3D a few years ago and was impressed by the company's great game development products. I especially liked the company's Unity Web Player- it makes web-based 3D interaction come to life.I shared my impressions of the company on a post, Chill in an on-line 3-d tropical paradise from Unity 3D. At the time, Unity 3D was a very new company.
A lot has changed since then!
I learned today that "the companies are announcing that EA has signed a multi-year enterprise deal with Unity: EA will be using Unity's platform across multiple franchises, and all of EA's developers will have access to the "entire range of Unity products from web and mobile to consoles and beyond". The timing is also good: Unity is launching its 3.0 upgrade next week." -Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch
What I like about Unity 3D is that it was created to support cross-platform development.
I recently purchased a printer to go with my new computer, an Epson Stylus NX125, which while nowhere near top of the line, prints quickly, with good quality colour photo and black and white text. I’ve not used it too often but it makes a nice addiction to what I’ve already got in terms of [...]
