Richard Ling from the Inc group was asked by the New York Times to contribute to an article about the impact of mobile phones on airplanes.
Would you like to know more about GPS, Bluetooth, QRCodes and mobile cameras? and would you like to influence the developments of future tourist information systems?
ITU is involved in a national research project (DANVIFO.dk) in which we are investigating the use of IT in the experience economy. In particular we are investigating and have developed prototypes using mobile technology such as GPS, Bluetooth, QRCodes and the cameras to provide tourist with for example location-based information both indoor and outdoor. In addition to this we are also investigating newer interaction principle such as multitouch screens, eye tracking and Nintendo Wii controllers for enhanced interaction in public places such as museums, kiosks etc.
The project uses Bornholm as a particular case and we are collaborating with several partners in Bornholm who are eager to continue the collaboration with researchers and students from ITU.
Doesn’t this sound interesting?
We are proposing several master thesis projects but are you motivated to challenges within (but not limited to) the following areas:
• Design and analysis of interfaces and homepages on mobile devices
• Development of location-based systems and games
• Employing GPS, Bluetooth, QRCode and cameras in novel solutions aimed at the experience economy.
• New interaction principles using multi touch, eye tracking or Wii controllers
- then don’t hesitate to contact Dan W. Hansen (witzner@itu.dk) office 3D08 at any time.
Both Danish and English speaking students naturally are welcome
As a researcher in the INC group, I have closely been following the Danish Election Parliament election campaign, which culminates tomorrow, Tuesday November 13th, election day. With the aid of an hardworking assistant and in co-operation with the Danish blogportal Overskrift.dk, this friday we discovered that at this election campaign, it looks like 250 out of 808 candidates running for parliament have started (or continued) blogging – and there have also been quite a lot of activity on places like YouTube, Facebook and Myspace. So it looks like “social software” functionalities have really been taken into use this year which also marks a breakthrough in terms of the amount of money the political parties have spent on online campaigning. These facts have in themselves generated quite a lot of media attention which means that as researcher I have myself tried new forms of communicating to the public, through appearance on web-tv, more precisely DR Update for which I was interviewed about my
impressions of the campaign together with the blog editor of Politiken, Kim Elmose. Also for this first time I participated in a podcast, as part of the site Beocast’s weekly podcasts.
Regarding the innovative part of the politicians’ and political parties communication online, my survey of the content so far indicates that politicians still tend to be somewhat monologic in the way they think about their online communication; and users have not been that eager to enter into dialogue with the politicians either, perhaps because they experience that the politicians are “absent present” most places. Read a more thorough analysis of the experience of the online election campaign up to now at my Danish blog called Walgblog.
In relation to all this, last thursday, I was informed that Nordforsk have granted a group of Nordic researchers and me funding to start a network and project on Political Culture Online in the Nordic Culture – it is not just in Denmark that the use of online media in politics is changing radically this year. I look much forward to discussing the data from this election campaign with them when we meet up in January!
Andrew Feenberg, Finn Olesen, Even Selinger and Peter-Paul Verbeek are speaking at Roskilde University next thursday, the first of march.
More info here
I finally got a new phone, so I’ve started using Imity, an application that uses bluetooth to connect you with people that are near that you either know or do not know. And it works! Yesterday I was eating tapas at Atame with a friend of mine, suddenly the persons sitting next to us asks ”Søren Mørk?” and it turns out to be Christian Dalager and Trine Rahbek whom I’ve never met before. I’ve been reading Dalagers blog for some time and strangely enough I just added him as a contact on flickr yesterday morning, and then we end up at the same tapas bar that evening and because of imity, we ended up talking and having fun for a couple of hours together.
This is a wonderful example of a technology that mixes what goes on in your online life with your offline presence; it truly takes the social networking online offline. Most online activities have relations to offline things and the other way around, which is why we should not distinguish so much between on and offline.
