I am very pleased to annonuce that the “Classroom of the Future” book has been published by Sense Publishers.
This book is the outcome of the homonym workshop that took place in 2007 and where i was invited for a talk.
What i liked the most was of course the topic, but even more the people: inspired, smart, willing to share knowledge and experiences.
The majority of the speakers became the co-authors of this book that is divided into five different sections, covering building design, technology, and community-related aspects of the classroom.
I wrote the chapter about technology-enhanced classrooms entitled “Making the Classroom a play-ground for Knowledge”, summing up my experiences and visions of the upcoming learning space that is not just “packed” with technological tools, but enhanced by a whole new and pervasive interactive language.
You can find a preview of the book here, i would really love to receive feedback (if you want a preliminary version of the chapter ask me).
Congratulations to Kati Mäkitalo-Siegl, Jan Zottmann, Frederic Kaplan and Frank Fischer for their work in turning a succesful workshop into a “tangible” book.

November 19-21 2009, 21 excellent speakers in front of a thousand people highligthed passages of their lives, trying to convey the essence of their research towards excellence.
The event, called 21 minutes, is an open project that will continue and develop during the years.

I have been asked to produce an interactive sketching experience using multitouch technology, that would help the speakers and the chairman Patrizio Paoletti to draw knowledge structures during the seminar. We brought an EDiT unit there, right side of the stage, and Pierpaolo Vittoria (a trained mind mapper) used my sketching application.

We had no precise plot, most of the speakers improvised or changed their mind just before the presentations, we had video output sent to the main screen.. a real live experience.
I am very satisfied with the whole event, since the contents were so high and inspiring, the audience became involved very soon with questions and a lot of social interaction during the breaks.

A lot of people came to see the technology, the “multitouch” was not much mentioned or noticed, instead the “creative, brainstorming, dynamic, shareable” modality was considered something new and unseen, and generated many ideas and connections.
Also Gilead Sher, an important Israeli negotiator and one of the first guests, appreciated the philosophy behind the application and played a lot with it.

Will playful and natural technology/design help people towards a better communication in order to understand each other?
I do hope so, and the research continues.

EDiT, the interactive table i’ve been engineering for InformaSistemi, has been highlighted as one of the innovations of Smau 2009.
Can we still talk about innovations when all the HCI world is turning its eyes towards the “touch”.

In my opinion: yes. Touch technologies will become mainstream in 2010/2011, and there are a lot of them, while operating systems are updating their widgets accordingly. However this does not mean that all applications we use today will be magically improved by enabling multiple touches.
My forecast is, instead, an initial frenzy in creating new apps (see the iPhone experience) where the quantity/quality ratio will also become a factor of criticism towards the real need for the multitouch applications.

Multi-touch is cool ok, but multi-user is the real change.

EDiT has been designed from the ground up with this idea in mind, so it still deserves the “innovative” adjective (IMHO of course).

We are working closely with Teddy italian fashion company in the context of the recent Terranova brand restyling.
For Terranova, the designers decided to create a new retail experience based on digital projection and interactive surfaces. The focus is always on the product, so all the “cosmetic” elements should have an orientating goal towards the merchandise, this is the rule in the retail space.
We realized for them a project using multiple digital projections with custom image warping on volumes, using two Façade systems both at the entrance (keywords: stunning, catchy, inviting) and at the very end of the shop (keywords: element of continuity, ambiance).
The interactive projection is using a TouchMyBrand system where the movements of the sales person behind the counter have a “fragmenting” effect on the digital projection behind her. So, users experience interactivity not on themselves, but on some other human being (let’s call it the “zoo” effect?).
The whole experience is well balanced, and the goal of the place is maintained.
As always the motto is: “follow the rules of nature”.  [video]

I am proud to announce that TANGerINE, the tangible interaction platform i designed and developed during my PhD together with my wonderful research team, will be demonstrated at Frontiers of Interaction V.
We sketched a conceptual application about sonorization of future cities, leveraging the sound design skills of Nicola and nifty Flash development from Lea.
Thanks also to Omar, Piero and the people at Micrel for working hard in stabilyzing the hardware architecture.

Uh! It has been a while, i’m not writing here it’s a long time.
Tomorrow i will have my Doctoral defense in Florence, and i hope it will be fun!

Right after that i am going to donate blood for the thousands of wounded people in Abruzzo, Italy.
To them goes my thinking and prayer.

On tuesday i was invited by Frederic Kaplan at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) for a talk on Interactive Surfaces.
It has been a really interesting experience: the audience had precise questions about applications and technology. Besides the talk i had the chance to try WizKid live!
WizKid is a robot with social skills that features a novel interaction paradigm, combining robotics with a mid-air gesture interface called “halo”. Me and Frederic exchanged a lot of ideas about the project, the metaphors and the tech issues related to the “halo interface”, that in my opinion has the possibility to become widespread also in a number of other devices.
WizKid was exhibited at MoMa for three months, and it is now returning back to its swiss home (not on his own legs, at least for the moment ) to be upgraded and refined.
Thanks again to Frederic for the chance, and it was also very nice to meet again Nicolas Nova and talking about his experience as a veteran LIFT organizer.

While i was attending CHI 2008 there was also a Microsoft booth, as premium sponsors of the conference.
No, the table was not there, but there was crew from the Surface team. Some talks, lot of listening and rumors around the corner, i had new insights on where is Surface heading.

A slimmer Surface
First, the form factor. Everyone wants a slimmer touch-enabled surface, it can be done with capacitive sensing (didn’t you know that it already exists from the french Stantum?) but renouncing some computer vision-related features, like the domino-tag recognition for object detection, that is now a core feature in the first AT&T installation.
Microsoft is really looking at retail, and retail is about things first, so they will not be going the capacivite way (even if they claim a capacitive Surface was already in development), and will stick with a vision-based setup trying to make it thinner.
How? Multi camera setups are the answer, but what about the display, will they switch to LCD or OLED? It will be an engineering challenge for sure, but they really want to move away from the crowd of fridge-shaped multitouch tables out there.

SDK and APIs
We asked for APIs and SDK availability, as researchers, and they were very interested: “yes, we really do want you scientists to play with the thing”.
Unfortunately for now the key concept is “business first”. A first wave of commercial partners, then hopefully the research labs.
They said Surface needs the contribute of the scientific community, as well as skilled user interface developers, so the question is not if they will release the SDK, but when.

IP and patents
Regarding IP and patents, they turned it down, “you cannot patent touching a table” even if someone else is trying to do that.
They said that there will be research papers about Surface internals, and they are deciding what to share and what to keep. So, and i always thought this way, the multi-touch world is more about who “does it right” with some clever algorithms/engineering rather than patenting the whole thing. That said, i think, there will be a lot of patents on underlying hw-related technology.

XBox into Surface!?
And here is the really interesting thing: XBox.
Yes, a possible future for Surface is being an extended XBox, in which you can plug both a normal lcd/plasma display (or projector) with usual gaming gear and also use the surface as as an additional control panel. Think about command and conquer games. This will happen when Surface will shift from commercial-oriented partners to end-user market, and is not behind the corner, but it’s a really feasible microsoft-style scenario, they love the gamers community and know they have the bucks and the potential to create the wave.

Hello world. This one to tell i am still alive, despite the lack of blog updates. I’m here at CHI 2008 in Florence, just started attending, have a poster to present for the MICC, an Engineering SIG to facilitate and, hopefully, some interesting things to get excited about in the world of Human Computer Interaction. If this is the case (whichi i am sure of), i will keep this post updated.

Give your sketches a kinetic feel
K-Sketch is a work presented by Colwell and Landay, it’s about creating a sketching user interface that speeds up the animation process. There is a lot on sketching, and these guys tell it’s for “novice” animators. My feel of it is that it is an awesome technique that could be in a pro tool too. Maybe multitouch?

Computational Textiles
For the soft and tangible interface lovers. Lilypad Arduino is about embedding technology in dresses, but not only that. Technology doesn’t look like that, dress does look like something more. And girls become passionate in programming and start computer science courses!

Get something more serious than a Wiimote
Had an interesting talk with Stephen Hughes, who was presenting his work with the U. of Glasgow on tactile input. He is actually the engineer founding SAHM-Engineering, that provides an integrated architecture of wireless sensors packed into a small box. That is very similar to what U. of Bologna does as the hardware platform fo TANGerINE, and a good sign that these micro-architectures are growing in market demand. Side our booth there was also Pamela Jennings with her project “Constructed Narratives”.
She is using tangibles with smart sensors too, to construct blocky “things” that map to conceptual structures, using WordNet as API and other text mining. Very different use of this technology!

Media Spaces: a panel lacking the future The panel featured Buxton and other famous researchers. Very good intro about the history of media-spaces (which you could name also telepresence), and some insight about the present, but.. the future? No real answer, and a shared feeling that the market of mobile devices is driving it all. Buxton said: “more is less! (more technology, in the right place, becomes less complexity).

A taste of digital Pen & Paper
I missed some workshop in the past and still wasn’t able to use the digital pen&paper technology. Hopefully ETH Zurich booth with Beat Signer showed their iPaper suite for digital annotation (and much more), and also a poster from Jurgen Steimle about, i would say, the future of Post-It. Both use Anoto technology, and both say that Anoto (who is the only widely available provider of APIs and tech) is “holding back” too much in terms of licensing agreements, and that is one of the reasons why digital pen&paper isn’t still widely used.

I took my time to let the Microsoft Surface storm quieten. Delicious entries and blog re-posts seems to have calmed down, so we can now relax and think.
Microsoft is smart, very smart, as ever. With the multi-touch bubble inflating every week, and no serious player but Jeff Han who claims he’s not going to mass market, Microsoft arrives and annonces its technology.
Not only, Microsoft chooses the best seat and says: "guys, you like multi-touch, well, we are the platform!".
The technology is convincing, the concept has enough hype, the interaction metaphors are there.. to be catched… and MS is the best system and idea integrator on this planet.
I wonder if Bill Buxton, MS research evangelist, did know about this secret project and team before the announcement… or if the team was assembled in the last 6 months cut & pasting previous research by Wilson and friends.
In the meanwhile, Leopard comes out of his shelter, and we see Jobs’ WWDC Keynote… nothing so special. It’s a carbon copy of one year ago, Jobs seems tired, not enthusiastic and somewhat disappointed to my eyes.
About what?
Without trying to foresee the man’s inner world, i imagine him illustrating the 10 key features of Leopard, cool toys (and in fact "pretty cool" is the sentence he uses most..), indeed, but at the end of the day.. that’s just another OS improvement.
Microsoft, instead, has a new computing paradigm.
I understand how you feel Jobs, and wonder that feature number 11 was some multi-touch related technology, and maybe a platform sitting somewhere that couldn’t ship in time… and MS did stole the scene, as ever.
But the ones of us who are not so interested on the giant’s fights (sorry to be so metaphoric today) can start thinking that a new world in computing is around the corner, new ideas can be expressed through this medium, and this is going to happen very soon.

My collaboration with Natural Interaction and iO is over.
I would like to thank Alessandro, Daniele and all the crew, It has been an intense year of work and breakthrougs.

I will continue my research on tabletop interfaces following the spark of the beginning: knowledge visualization.

Keep up the good work!

These last months have been very busy for me, working on the tabulaTouch device and all the software that surrounds it and that will make the development of a new kind of applications easy and fast. In the meantime, the whole net world turned its face towards multi-touch, following on Jeff Han’s new startup, DIY experiments and rumors of Apple releasing a new line of touch-enabled products (iPhone being a clever announcement to gather and redirect multi-touch hype on them.. very Jobs). It’s fun now to see myself saying “yes! yes! i knew it!”.
I am particularly proud of the tabulaGraph sample, a simple concept mapping template that shows some of the potential in constructing knowledge collaboratively, presented at the Alpine Workshop in late january. Exciting moment, indeed.

Just back from Villars, Switzerland, where i participated to the workshop “Classroom of the Future: Orchestrating Collaborative Learning Spaces” during the CSCL Alpine Rendez-Vous.

This workshop has been simply great: caring organization by Kati and Frédéric and cool interactions with everyone, but mainly with Giulia, Nicolas, Lily, Jim, Martin, Paul, Do Lenh. We also had a lot of fun creating our future classroom prototype along with Joanna, Tash, Andreas and Khaled.

Out of the many ideas, one aspect regarding technology enhanced classrooms has popped in my head.
The problem is not technology, indeed, neither are the students: the missing link between usual teaching and the future of education are the teachers.
This makes a lot of sense, as they are the main orchestrators of the education process. How can they teach with technology they don’t know well? So the problem goes back to teacher’s training.
The talk from Jeffrey Huang, about connected classrooms and augmented environments also made somewhat clear to me that in such a new space, where social interaction is entwined with new technology, the role of the facilitator is more and more important.
Just a tech person? No, someone following the group dynamics and presenting them with the right interactive experience, then letting them play freely with it.

Looking forward for some kind of follow-up, in the meantime we’ll try to keep in touch.

It seems that music from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra is stimulating my brain cells as it was not happening in some time… (Brian Eno is still unsurpassed).
I just found a citation from Jeffes, the orchestra founder:

"I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out ‘I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random’ and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a
nice orderly life, you kill off what’s most important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe your unconscious can just be. It’s acceptable there, and that’s how everybody is. There is an acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear in ourselves."

Very, very true.

The more i play with technology, the more i see the importance of paper.
When working on bidimensional visualization surfaces (that is 99% of the time), we use objects and spaces that are very similar to paper sheets. That is why providing the affordance of paper, especially in tabletop interfaces, guarantees a more natural interaction with objects.
But paper has also another, very important, feature: it is disposable.
Creativity needs freedom, and experimentation is made of many trials. Paper is a friend of prototypation and sketching, it is transportable and always-on. In general, every intermediate step in the production of an idea perfectly fits the temporary persistence of paper, while the digital domain is the right place for the final outcome.
Bridging the two domains is the challenge: digital pen and paper (like Anoto) is trying to give an answer, i expected many more products based on this cunning technology, but we are still at the beginning.
In my view interactive tables in general are one of the "pillars" for this bridge, an my research is heading also in this direction.