Borrowed Ladder

/ Security

Today’s NYT article Social Security: Migrants Offer Numbers for Fee seriously reminds me of the “borrowed ladder” concept from the movie GATTACA:

Mr. Luviano, 39, obtained legal residence in the United States almost 20 years ago. But these days, back in Mexico, teaching beekeeping at the local high school in this hot, dusty town in the southwestern part of the country, Mr. Luviano is not using his Social Security number. So he is looking for an illegal immigrant in the United States to use it for him — providing a little cash along the way.

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UbiComp Gaming Workshop

/ Media Technology

This year’s UbiComp 2005 conference will include a one-day workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and Games:

The theme of this workshop is ubiquitous computing entertainment, playful social networking, and games. Our goals are to provide a productive forum in which international researchers, members of the entertainment industry, game players, game designers, and game publishers can discuss key issues in ubiquitous gaming, present and future uses of ubiquitous computing that create compelling, playful and socially beneficial gaming experiences, and to facilitate an exchange of ideas that will allow ubiquitous games to break out of their current “niche” and into the mainstream.

The workshop will be September 11th, 2005 in Tokyo.

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Trapped Christmas Presents

/ Hacks

For over a decade my friend Jay and I have exchange trapped presents at Christmas. When I say trapped I mean it in the classic Circle of Death game style — if you open the present carelessly a buzzer will sound or explosive cap will trigger. It all started when we were designing traps for live-action role-playing games, but quickly became a challenge to one-up each other each year. These days we open all the other presents first and then settle down with our flashlights, dentist tools and wire clippers to work on opening each other’s presents while the rest of the family eats pie and enjoy themselves making unhelpful comments.

Jay and I each have our own style of trap-making. Jay has become a master of secreting traps in places that you’d think he couldn’t access. His high-point is probably the time he gave me a deck of gaming cards that he had somehow unsealed, hollowed out, rigged with a cap-popper trap, then resealed and reshrinkwrapped such that it looked like new again. (That’s rivaled by two years ago, when he managed to plant an explosive inside a cut-then-resealed chocolate egg.) I’m always trying a new angle on things — my favorite is still the time I gave him a “special” version of Looking Glass’ PC game System Shock, which included a specially-included candy red button in the second room of the game that when pressed would berate him for not checking closely for traps as it dropped powerful monsters on his head. (It always helps to know the programmers…)

This past Christmas I wanted to try a trap where the mechanism was plain to see but a puzzle to disarm. The result is the magnet trap shown bottom left. The metal plates at the bottom are sold in joke shops as Exploding Toilet Seat gags. They’re spring-loaded to lift up and set off a cap, but in this case the magnets attached to the top of the popper are being pressed down by the magnets attached to the top of the lid. On one side is a north-polarity magnet being pushed down by another north-polarity magnet, on the other side is a south-polarity magnet pushed down by another south-polarity magnet. The whole system is quite stable — until you try to turn the lid to open the jar. Then the north and south magnets on the lid switch positions and pull the poppers up, setting off the caps. You can see the whole thing in action by clicking on the picture below. Jay tried using magnets underneath the jar to counteract the ones on the lid, but that wasn’t enough force to fight both the magnets and the mechanical spring. I’ll leave the right way to disarm the trap (and the way I originally set it) as an exercise to the reader (and will probably eventually put it in an update).

Jay had two traps this year — the first was a buzzer trap held down by a Borg Teddy Bear that he had gotten at the Star Trek Experience in Los Vegas. It was rigged so if I moved the bear or pulled the wrong wire first it would go off. Remembering my MacGyver lore, I pulled the red one (or was it black?) and disarmed it. The main trap, however, was the bear itself — he had taken it to a teddy-bear factory and had them sew in a voicebox that played his own message. I didn’t set it off (I learned long ago never to press something from jay that says “press me” on it), but am still impressed. You can see it in action from the other movie linked below.

Magnet trap explained
(Quicktime, 3.1M)		 Borg Teddy-bear trap
(Quicktime, 750K)

Update (7/24/05): explanation of how to disarm below the fold.

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Sign of the times

/ Big Brother

I took this photo last week at the entrance to MARTA, Atlanta’s subway system.

It wasn’t so long ago that I would have taken a picture like this one in a foreign country as a reminder of how different life would be without our Bill of Rights. It’s amazing how quickly we’re letting it slip away from us…

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A little bit of friction

/ Media Technology

The PostSecret blog is a “community art project where people mail-in their secrets on one side of a homemade postcard.” Some are thoughtful, some disturbing, some kinda silly, but almost all are high quality. I think Sarah Boxer’s NYT Arts Review nails why that’s the case:

The Web site gives people simple instructions. Mail your secret anonymously on one side of a 4-by-6-inch postcard that you make yourself. That one constraint is a great sieve. It strains out lazy, impulsive confessors.

For PostSecret, you write, type or paste your secret on a postcard, and then, if you want, decorate the card with drawings or photographs. Next the stamp and then the mailbox. Yes, it’s work to confess. And it should be, if only for the sake of the person who might be listening.

That’s a lesson we need to remember as we design for more and more frictionless communication — sometimes a little friction is exactly what you want. (A special thanks to my dad for the link.)

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Cone of silence

/ Media Technology

Coming next month to a store near you (via the New York Times):

The cone of silence, called Babble, is actually a device composed of a sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range. About the size of a clock radio, the first model is designed for a person using a phone, but other models will work in open office space.

I’m imagining all sorts of cute hacks you could do with this. I especially want to set one up to cancel out my speech and simultaneously play music or pre-recorded/synthesized speech over it — turn your whole conversation into a badly dubbed movie!

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Wearables have hit the mainstream

/ Wearable Computing

I’d like to officially declare that wearable computers have hit the mainstream.

When I started wearing a hat-mounted display connected to a 50 MHz shoulder-strap Linux box back in 1996, I defined a wearable computer as having five features: portable while operational, supporting of hands-free use, equipped with sensors into the environment, ability to be proactive in supplying information or aid to the wearer, and always on, always running. When sponsors or journalists would look at my contraption and ask how such a beast could ever become mainstream I’d just point to their cellphones, which strictly by my definition were already wearable computers and which were becoming more wearable-like all the time.

Motorola HS810
Wireless Headset

The thing that made cellphones only borderline wearables was that they’d usually be in a pocket or bag rather than worn — that meant their access-time was greater than that critical one or two seconds that make wearables so compelling. With bluetooth phones and the most recent round of wireless headsets I think there’s finally been a shift in how non-researcher, non-techies are using cellphones, and it looks a lot like what we self-described cyborgs were doing a decade ago.

I first started noticing about six months ago that people around my lab were wearing these bluetooth headsets even when not talking on the phone. These weren’t just researchers, these were the venture capitalists and financial planners that occupy the rest of our building. Then a few days ago I landed in the Atlanta airport and noticed not one but three people turn on their bluetooth-enabled cellphones, put on an ear clip and then not talk on the phone. These were early adopters but not techies, and yet they looked just as fashionable and comfortable wearing their headsets as they did in their expensive suits. I talked to two of them about their new fashion accessory, and both gave the same explanation: it’s now so comfortable and so simple that they prefer to wear the headset just in case a call comes in. The woman I talked to said it was just more convenient to wear the device than find a place to carry it, and now she never had to go hunting for her cellphone when she got a call. It was so light and comfortable, she said, that she soon just forgot it was there altogether. The man talked about what a pain it used to be to be carrying suitcases on the escalator when the phone rang, and how now he just pushes the button on his ear and starts to talk. He also showed off the hands-free dialing feature: just tap your ear and say “office” and the phone’s speech recognition system automatically connects you.

This sort of technology has been creeping up on us for years, so it’s easy to miss the progress. It’s nice to take a step back and see how seamlessly these people integrate with their technology compared to when I was “packing iron” on a daily basis. In many ways, they’re far more cyborg than I ever was.

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