Reflections by Susie Wee

I came across an announcement for the following workshop: Workshop on Designing Cute Interactive Media in conjunction with the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

ACM is the premier professional research society for computer scientists. I think it is quite a statement that the broader research community is recognizing design, experience, and human emotion as bona fide research topics. Cuteness is being recognized as research by the research community!

In my mind, user adoption is the ultimate indicator of a technology’s success, and adoption is driven by having a great user experience. The research discussed in workshops like these will help us understand and eventually formalize the coupling of experience and technology. Understanding how to provoke human emotions like cuteness will help identify new research directions and drive technology adoption.

Congratulations to the researchers who were pushing these ideas in their work before it reached broader acceptance! For example, 2007 was the 25th anniversary of CHI. Clearly your efforts are paying off!

What do you think?  Is studying “cuteness” research?

Feel free to leave a URL with your comments.

I have an interesting experience to share. I had family and friends in town this past weekend, so I actually took four days off- Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday- where I didn’t respond to emails, I didn’t update my status on Facebook, and I didn’t post a new blog entry. I was having a grand old time in the physical world. BUT, a number of people at work became very concerned. One person sent me a message on Facebook that said “Are you okay?” Another wondered what was wrong and why wasn’t I replying to messages. Another was concerned that I was using up my vacation days and leaving HP. (No, I’m not.) It’s amazing what four days offline will do!

I did have an out-of-the-office message saying that I’d be back in the office on Tuesday, but that wasn’t enough. Do we need an “out-of-the-virtual-world message” as well?

For those who were concerned:  Sorry and thank you for your concern!  I’m absolutely fine… in fact, I’m doing great! 

What do you think?
Is this a sad statement about my life?
Do you have any similar experiences to share?
What happens when you spend four days offline?

I was comparing notes with Alex about blog post styles. I’ve been blogging for a few months now, so I’m probably still in the ”finding my voice” phase. One thing that I’ve been doing is changing things up by rotating styles between a serious post, a silly post, a technology post, a research post, a management post, a teamwork post, a sports post, and so on. My hope is that there will be a little something for different readers… so I don’t bore or lose a particular class of readers for too long. Does this defy conventional blog wisdom?

Another advantage of rotating styles is that I can follow more silly posts with more serious ones. I’m not sure why, but for some reason I feel the need to do this… perhaps so that people don’t think I’ve totally lost it. (Feel free to psychoanalyze me with that confession.) Well, the joke was on me. I posted “The man pays!” and “I’m a Guitar Hero!” with the full intention of following up with a serious post, but then our access system was upgraded into a form that was incompatible with our blog editing and commenting software. So, I haven’t been able to post a more serious follow-up until now!

This raises a few questions:

First, what do you think about rotating styles? Should I go with the more conventional approach of choosing an audience and sticking with one style? Or, is this approach of rotating styles okay? Does this defy conventional blog wisdom?

Second, this upgrade accident forced me to sit on a “silly post” for a couple weeks, which actually made me feel a little uncomfortable. What do you think of silly posts on a corporate blog? What do you think about me sitting on a silly post for a while?

Finally, on a personal note, please let me know if you have any feedback or advice for me on blog post styles. What styles/posts have you liked or disliked? What would you like to see more or less of?

Most importantly, I sincerely thank you for taking the time to visit and read my blog! I deeply apologize for losing any comments you might have submitted in the last week. Again, thank you for visiting!

HP Labs made it into Wikipedia!

We’ll add more details over time, but I wanted to share the news.

Thanks to Jaap Vermeulen (Jacoplane) for making the entry!

Tags: wikipedia, HP Labs, HP

Please feel free to include a URL with your comments.

I think the Misto table is just the beginning. But not just with a focus on gaming I think it is another view on human computer interaction that will one day be the norm.
It is my view that you can take the Misto idea and add in some other views like the Reactable http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/?media and the Massive Touch screens of today http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ and then mix up the environment of the user for new results.

Instead of just one or two monitors in a cube with a keyboard and a mouse imagine the work surface of you cube along with the walls being an integrated touch screen environment that interacts to the users touch as well as objects that are used everyday, I.E. mobile phones, iPods, PDAs, tablet PCs…

If we stop trying to make people conform to the computer and other mobile gadgets and instead make those objects conform to us I think we can revolutionize many different areas simultaneously. Of course who wouldn’t want to play a computer game on a 8 foot touch capable screen

But others are taking entirely new approaches to getting people to interact more naturally with devices. Look at Nintendo and the new Wii console. If we as engineers and researches keep pushing the envelope we can discover new gaming ideas and interactions. I can’t wait to see what we will actually make in the future; I think it will be even stranger than what we can imagine today.

We held the HP Gaming Summit last night at DogPatch studios in San Francisco. We held the summit to talk about our gaming business strategy and to show some HP Labs technologies now extended to the gaming domain. We’ve been working on a number of technologies for many years, but now that HP has VooDoo we have an extra-good reason to apply them to gaming. Yes, it’s all work!

Update: There has been a lot of press coverage and quite a few blog posts on the event.

The summit agenda was as follows:

• Shane Robison, EVP and Chief Strategy and Technology Officer

• Shane kicked off describing why gaming is important and strategic to HP.
• Interactive online gaming requires raw compute power and scale. HP plays in this market.
• Gamers are early adopters and will pay for leading edge technologies. HP can commercialize our innovative technologies for gamers, and then spread them to our other products as they scale and become more economical.
• VooDoo gives HP a strategic position in the gaming market to move on this strategy… and the DNA to do it.
• In addition to VooDoo, HP has a GameOn team in our Technology Solutions Group that develops infrastructure for online gaming.
• Rahul Sood, Chief Technologist, Global Gaming Business Unit, HP Personal Systems Group

• Rahul talked about where he sees the HP gaming business going in the future.
• The gaming experience will be more immersive, mobile, and physical.
• HP has the VooDoo products for extreme performance, the HP and Compaq products for configurable and baseline computing. Later this year HP will fill the gap with an interesting gaming product offering… look out!
• Rahul led a panel discussion on the future of gaming. The panelists were:

• Dr. Lars Butler, Trion World Network, Founder & CEO
• Roy Taylor, NVIDIA, Vice President Content Relations
• Rich Wickham, Microsoft, Director of Games for Windows, Entertainment, and Devices Division
• Randy Stude, Intel, Director of Gaming Program Office
• Susie Wee, Director, Mobile & Media Systems Lab, HP Labs

• Susie described the next-generation gaming experience by VooDoo + HP Labs. More on this in this post.
• HP Labs has been developing technologies for 40 years. With VooDoo, HP Labs is focussed on applying these technologies towards gaming.
• HP Labs technology areas for gaming include: Experience design, multimedia (audio/video/graphics), mobility, networking, management, security, sensing, context, social media, and web.  HP Labs has a global presence in America, Asia, and Europe, which is important to help us understand how gaming is viewed in done in different parts of the world.
• VooDoo + HP Labs are creating the Next-Gen Gaming Experience. This is an immersive visual experience, a social mobile experience, and a physical experience.
• Susie transitioned us to the main part of the evening- The technology demos!

HP Labs Technology demos
We showed 4 HP Labs technologies now aimed at gaming and the HP TouchSmart PC.

• Panoply: Seamless, curved display that fills the gamer’s field of view. Uses multiple projectors and real-time video processing algorithms to do geometric and photometric calibration to make them look like one immersive display.
• Pluribus: Better-than-theater-experience multi-projector display. Uses multiple projectors with video processing to get better contrast, greater brightness, higher resolution, and better color rendition.
• Misto: Touch screen display in your living room coffee table. Examines new interaction models for sharing, controlling, and interacting with media and games on your tabletop.
• Mscapes (a.k.a. Mediascapes): Multimedia experiences bridging the physical and virtual world. Allows you to create games using sensors (location, IR beacons, heart rate monitors) to trigger multimedia. More on this to come in May!

Any thoughts?

Tags: gaming, HP Labs, VooDoo, HP Gaming Summit, gaming strategy, HP

Feel free to add a URL in your comments.

I just finished a week in Singapore serving as an international panelist for A*STAR‘s Thematic Strategic Research Programme on mobile media. Every time I go to Singapore, I am impressed with how the country manages its research. Singapore has a very good understanding and appreciation of how research can benefit the country and its people, and it invests accordingly.

The government provides significant research funding to universities and research institutes and it has established organizations to manage this investment. It directs research by having calls for proposals on strategic themes such as mobile media. It also has nation-wide strategic initiatives such as Intelligent Nation 2015 and Interactive Digital Media.

The country takes a long term view on research. For example, the A*STAR Science & Engineering Research Council states its objectives as:

• To develop a foundation of high quality research in key disciplines;
• To nurture human capital for research; and
• To promote information dissemination and technology transfer

Singapore continually evolves its approach as it sees what works and what doesn’t. It solicits feedback by asking international reviewers to serve on boards and panels to evaluate their work and hold it to the highest quality standards.

Singapore views research as a way to develop technologies that can help the country stay competitive. It actively tries to find ways to transfer technology to industry, building linkages with the global industry. It also encourages and supports its researchers to participate in international standardization efforts.

Singapore very strongly views research as a way to train and develop its people. It explicitly states manpower training as a primary objective. It has established programs to identify its brightest early on and provide them with special development opportunities.

Singapore understands the importance of working globally. It allocates funds to bring international researchers into the country to help develop the in-Singapore researchers. It also has programs to send its researchers to other countries to give them international exposure. Singapore struggles with finding ways to keep researchers in the country, since many of the researchers value international work experience. But the country also has an understanding that it should develop researchers as best as it can and it maintains a goal of having a fraction of them to stay in the country.

It is very respectable how Singapore views and respects research, keeps the long-term benefits in mind, and invests in its research and researchers accordingly!

Singaporeans: Did I get this right? Do you have anything else to add?

All: How does this compare to how other countries manage research?

Phil McKinney has a great post on Permission Based Innovation, so please take a minute to read it over. From my perspective as a manager, all I can say is that he is right on with all his points. I have a few additional points:

1. The creativity of a team far exceeds the individual creativity of the team leader.
2. An idea that comes from the passion of a team member is 10 times more powerful than an idea that comes from the team leader.
3. An idea that strikes the passion of both the team member and the team leader will go 10 times faster than an idea that strikes the passion of only one.
4. A great idea needs a champion to see it through.

I’ll be the first to admit that the creativity of my team far exceeds my creativity as an individual, and I wouldn’t want to have it any other way. I want my team members to share all their ideas with me, and if there is another manager between us then I want them to share their ideas with their direct manager, too. Managers need to hear new ideas from their team members, whether half-baked or fully-baked, and whether aligned or not aligned with current activities. In fact, since I run around the world talking to different customers, partners, and business units, I am often aware of new activities that my team members are not yet aware of; so many seemingly unaligned ideas often end up being much more aligned than originally thought!

I can say that an idea that comes from the passion of a team member is 10 times more powerful than one that comes from the team leader, because at the end of the day it is the team members that do the work to move the ideas forward, and an idea that hits the team member’s true passion will move 10 times faster than one that does not. Why? Because if it strikes your passion, then you’ll think about it all the time and you’ll figure out any way to get it done. You won’t even see obstacles, as you’ll just push them aside as you work towards your goal. Also, you’ll not only think about your idea while you’re at work, but you’ll think about it when you’re brushing you teeth, and that’s when you’ll have the Eurekas that will move the project forward!

An idea that strikes the passion of both the team member and the team leader will go 10 times faster than an idea that strikes the passion of only one, because both need to work together to pave the road for moving forward and clearing the obstacles out the way. Again, the team members and the team leader travel in different circles, so if they are both aligned on the idea then they can work together to make it happen. This includes getting resources to move the idea forward, getting buy in from different parts of the organization, and forging relationships with outside organizations to make it happen. It also includes getting more people excited about the idea.

Now, for the next part on how to have the conversation with your manager. When you present a new idea, please be ready for a two-way conversation to further develop the idea. This way, you can work your idea into one that hits both your passion and your manager’s passion and needs, and as discussed earlier this will make it move 10 times faster.

Also, make it clear to your manager what role you would like to play in moving this idea forward. Is it an idea that you think is important but are not able to work on or is it an idea that you want to champion and pursue? Both are important. Managers are usually looking over many projects, so we really need champions to drive ideas and projects forward at the level of detail needed for it to be successful. So, it’s important for us to know if you are willing to be that champion. It is also important to share ideas that you think are important but can not pursue, as these are still good ideas to keep in mind. Just make this clear so your manager knows how to position your idea in his/her head.

Finally, let your manager know your level of passion behind your idea. If I know that someone’s idea comes from a 20 year hobby that they’ve been spending their nights and weekends on or that it solves a long-time problem that they have been concerned about, then I’ll actually consider that as experience and passion that will roll into the project and increase its chance of success. And again, if it crosses the right level of passion then I know I’ll be getting those brain cycles as you’re brushing your teeth- another key element to success!

Actually, one last comment. Don’t be discouraged if your manager doesn’t immediately jump up and down about your idea. Chances are it took you a little while to conceive and develop your idea, so they will need some time to fully understand it the way you do. So give your manager a bit of time and some extra information to help understand and appreciate your idea. If you keep bringing it up every so often, then he/she will see that you really are passionate about the idea and will take that into consideration too. Another advantage of time is that things may evolve in the business that might make your idea even more relevant and important over time. So, if you have a strong passion and idea, don’t give up! Rather, have the two-way conversations to work the idea into your and your team leader’s passions!