My friend Arjun pointed out to me that Indians view this country as “Mother India.” The first time I visited India, in early 2005, I had what I suppose is a typical reaction for Americans – I could just not believe how many people there were everywhere! As someone pointed out, India has 1.2 billion souls – four times the population of the U.S. – in an area 1/7th the size of the U.S. So everywhere I turn I see not only people, but many times as many people as experience leads me to expect.
Archives for 2006
Long Flights
My friends are constantly going back and forth from San Francisco to Australia, and I understand that these flights are among the truly gueling contests of bottoms-against-seats in the entire world. In past trips to India, I have flown to Europe first, which is about a 10-hour flight, and had a civilized layover of a day or so, and then continued on an 8-hour flight to Delhi. Breaking up the “seat time” like that can be quite enjoyable. Some carriers even have Internet access onboard, and although the bandwidth is only a trickle, it’s enough that it provides significant connectivity with the outside world. (On past trips to India I have had limited Internet access in-country, and getting on a flight that allows me to trickle the email in, and then take a look at it before I hit Europe, can give me a head-start on those important messages that have been arriving in my inbox while I was away from the Internet.)
The Bean and Other Curiosities
Chicago’s Millennium Park has a huge outdoor performance venue, which replaced the old “bandshell” and it also has a number of other art-in-public-places featres. If you’re in the Chicago Loop and have nothing to do for an hour, it’s worth crossing Michigan Avenue to see The Bean. This is a metallic, mirror-finish sculpture somewhat like a kidney bean, they say. I say it’s more like an alien from outer space that happens to have plopped itself down in the park and is attracting Earthlings to eat them.
This sculpture attracts hundreds of adults and kids at a time. As you approch the bean it is so reflective that at first you don’t realize that it’s even there – it looks like the concrete pavement just extends up into the air. As you get closer it’s clear that the bean is reflecting images from 
around the plaza. Then, you wonder “where am I?” And I will tell you that’s not so easy to figure out. You see people standing across the plaza waving at the bean – what they’re doing, of course, is looking for the waving reflection to they can spot themselves.
Not only can folks walk around the bean, they can walk under the bean, where there’s an even more complex set of reflections that have your mirror-image moving around at right angles to the floor.
It’s a fascinating piece of optical art.
Building a Pervasive Game
I arrive in Chicago just after noon on Friday the 13th. Nah, I’m not superstitious. But knowing that my journey was to begin on Friday the 13th helped me remember to get all that accumulated work done so I would be ready to travel. The flight left San Francisco at 6am – so Thursday nightconsisted of packing and a little over 3 hours’ sleep, and then up at 3:45 for the ride to the airport. San Francisco International airport is actually a pretty civilized place at 4:30 in the morning – people are drowsy and polite. The lines are tolerable, especially for the self-check-in, meaning that I could walk right up to a kiosk, punch the touch-screen with my finger a few times and I was ready to go within a minute.
Having spent the first half of my years in Chicago, I was used to the flight. Kind of like commuting. Chicago is so central to the US that it’s a perfect base of operations – you can get anywhere in the country in 4 or 5 hours. Of course, I measure flight length in terms of “computer battery capacity.” This is a one-and-a-half-battery flight, as measured by my current Mac Powerbook. Day flights are “longer” because I have to keep the display brightness cranked up (draining the battery faster), whereas night flights measure shorter because I can dim the screen, thus saving the battery. I can squeeze three hours out of a single battery on a night flight.
“Pervasive Games” are games that are played out in real life, but directed by an unseen presence which in our case is a computer program. (There are lots of forms of pervasive games – many involved real life puppet masters, who work behind the scenes to invent (on-the-fly) new puzzles and to adapt the game to those who are playing it. Some games are one-time-only, designed for a group who will play the game and then it’ll never be played again – we designed and played one of these one-timers in Palo Alto this summer. Red7 pervasive games are based on a complex piece of software that runs on our servers, and is driven by a game scenario, composed of a set of rules that the software uses to determine what the players do at each step along the way.
Browse the web on your phone
This isn’t exactly news to everyone – those of you with cell phones that have large-enough LCD screens probably already know that you have a web browser (of sorts) built into your phone. If you have subscribed to the appropriate data services (provided by your cell phone carrier) then you can view web sites on your phone. The biggest (“biggest” get it?) limitations are 1) the size of your LCD screen; and/or 2) the limitation that most (and I mean ALMOST ALL) web sites just do not cater to smaller screens and do not provide information in small enough chunks. [Read more…]
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