C’était la belle époque où les images avaient une grande valeur “soit sage, tu auras une image” et les marketers de l’époque ajoutaient souvent des images avec leur produit, comme le chocolat poulain, mais aussi des produits pharmaceutiques.

Ma grand-mère collectait toutes ces images précieusement, parfois les collait dans des livres de compte recyclés en albums, et conservait le tout pour distraire tous les enfants, petits-enfants, ou cousins qui passaient du temps chez elle.

De sa collection, on en a peut-être malheureusement qu’une partie, mais j’ai scanné ce que je pouvais et je partage les scans au fur et à mesure sur www.vieillesgravures.com.

Comme ma grand-mère était une grande collectionneuse, je mettrais aussi les scans de ses autres trésors (timbres, cartes postales, photos).

Find some great advice here. And below are some additional, and hopefully concrete questions you might want to find answers to during your round of interviews:

Projects

• How many projects are going on currently in the team and when will the next round of projects be decided? When next can you influence/start a new project?
• How are projects proposed and selected? Top-down: top level managers decide on the projects. Bottom-up: everybody has a chance to make a proposal. Who decide and how?
• Could you work on your project ideas/research interests?
• How many interns are available to the team/researcher, and under what conditions? How are they recruited and from where?
• Is there funding for subcontracting work? How much, for what type of work, under what conditions?
• Where does the project funding come from, for what and what are the criteria? Often there are different types of funding for different types projects.
• Can you work on smaller, personal projects?
• Can you buy hardware/software/books/licenses? How much/how often/what are the conditions?
• How are collaborations with universities/professors funded? How can you start or continue a collaboration. With what universities do the lab/team collaborate with?
• Do you have support/help to market/present your work externally (e.g. high quality videos, slides)? Is it encouraged/required/optional?
• How many persons/managers do you report to? For what, how often, and what is their profile?

Lab

• How are projects documented? How are project documents shared internally? Do you have access to all the code/documentation/data of the research and/or non research projects done in the company/lab/team?
• How many projects are highly visible externally/open-source?
• How many persons do you know personally or know the work of?
• How many people blog externally, on what, and what do they say?
• Are there regular internal/external presentations organized? Paper reviews? How much interaction is there between all the researchers?
• Do researchers have a mentor?
• Can you collaborate across teams/labs, under what conditions?

Conferences, Travel

• How much do researchers travel to conferences, and under what conditions? Only if a paper is presented. Is there a type or list of conferences one can attend?
• Can you submit papers to any conference you want? Is there a process to review the paper before you can submit it? What are the conditions to submit your work?
• Can you be on conference PCs and are the travel and expenses reimbursed?
• In what conferences have you seen researchers from that company? What kind of work did they present?
• How is the authorship decided for publications? Are you managers always authors/co-authors on the publications?

Evaluation

• What are the objectives given to researchers/teams/projects? In numbers: publications/articles submitted/accepted, patents submitted/filed, technology/algorithms transferred to products,  demos/presentations given internally, … In qualitative terms: review by peer/team/manager/360 assessment.
• How is the quality of the work evaluated? Based on numbers (as above)? Who evaluates, and what is the profile of the person(s) who evaluate your work.
• What does bad/good/great evaluation mean? Compensation/advancement/rewards/other?

Money

• What are the types of compensations, and what are the criteria? Base salary, bonus,  expenses, publication/patent bonus
• What are the compensation/rewards for publications/patents/presentations? How much and what are the conditions?
• How are salary augmentations negotiated? Based on what criterias?
• Do you have a company credit card?
• How quickly are your expenses reimbursed?

Organization

• What type of researchers are they looking for? Researchers with Phd that publish a lot and have a good external visibility ; researchers+entrepreneurs that can think of business models and sell a project internally and externally ; researchers+engineers who can think of big ideas and implement them ;
• Do managers have a technical role or a management role?
• What and when were the last changes in the research organization?
• What are the lab’s current strategy/targets? Create new technology/patents/services? Support current products? Explore new areas? How often do they change?
• How many technologies/projects have transferred to business units/products? When, how long did it take, what did it take? How does the research lab impact/influence products? Ask for concrete examples.

Work life balance

• Can you work from home? How often?
• What’s the average age of the researchers? Life-style?
• Do you have compensations for commuting/public transport/company shuttles?
• Do you have a private/shared office?

Side activities

• What are the policies related to working for yourself, your personal websites/projects, a startup, open source projects? (better to alert the company of any current/future involvement you may have with other companies/organization)
• How easy is it to have side activities? How many people in the lab have their own startup on the side? Is it encouraged/frowned upon?

In SensorComix, we leverage and build upon a previous project called Nokia Mashups where SMS conversations are displayed with rich graphics representative of who’s having the conversation, the place where the communicants are located, and what they’re talking about.

The idea in SensorComix is twofold: add another dimension of expressiveness to SMS conversations, and add playfulness.

I personally have tons of stories about SMS mishaps and miscommunication, and from what I’ve seen in our projects and user trials, I’m surely not the only one. For example, a girl sends an SMS to her boyfriend asking him about something, he replies ‘yes’. The girl sends quickly another message telling him how rude he is. The boyfriend sends back that he’s in class and has no time to elaborate. Another example with yet another couple communicating, the boyfriend asks his girlfriend if she went to an evening work event, then quickly in another SMS, asks her if he’s going to see her in the evening. He gets a reply of ‘No too tired’ and assumes it’s the answer to the second message.

SMS messages are a strange way of communicating. They’re short, and because the input methods are limited to small physical keyboards, or tiny keypads, or onscreen keyboards, people are limited in how much they can write, and how clearly they can convey all the nuances in their message. SMS are sent from mobile phones, and have become a preferred way people communicate whenever and wherever they are. But often people are busy, they’re going places, they’re in meetings or in class, with other people, and they may not have time to write clear and unambiguous messages. SMS are asynchronous but nonetheless there is some expectation that the other person is going to reply, sometimes quickly, especially when SMS are between people in a close relationship or when the persons are suppose to meet or plan something together.

In SensorComix, the user writes the SMS and can use one of four different gestures that add different graphical elements to convey an emotion associated to that gesture. For example, rubbing the phone will make little hearts pop up. Shaking the phone will make a fire and flames appear. The four gestures we’ve included are those:

• Rubbing, to convey affection
• Shaking, to convey impatience or anger
• Tapping, to poke
• Knocking, to get attention

With SensorComix, one can write the message, and quickly add an emotion to it with a simple gesture.

It’s best seen on the video:

Details on the demo implementation

We used Nokia tablet devices N810, a SHAKE SK6 sensor and a MAC laptop to create the prototype. The demo does not send SMS or MMS, but is hacked together to let the user takes an N810, see a comic with preloaded images (that one can change), write a message, enter gestures on the sensor which will display animated graphical elements on the comic, and send the message. The other N810 will receive the message and display the message with the comic, message and animated elements, and one can then reply to the message.

The messaging application showing the comic and the input text for the message is actually an HTML web page, which is served by the MAC laptop. But the actual comic and the animation that appear when entering a gesture are done with a Flash/Flex component embedded in the Web page. The laptop runs a custom Python HTTP server which does 3 things:

• Serve Web pages to the clients. There are 2 types of web pages, one for sending a message, one for receiving a message. The server also provides all the images displayed in the comic.
• Connect to the SK6 sensor via Bluetooth. The server reads the data from the sensor and performs the gesture recognition.
• Communicate via permanent sockets with the Flash/Flex component embedded in the Web pages. When the Web page for sending a message is displayed, the Flash/Flex component opens a socket with the server, registers as ’sender’ and will receive the information to update the comic: the message being typed in the HTML input textarea, and which animated elements to display which should correspond to the gesture recognized by the server from the sensor data.

To run the demo, I create a ‘Network’ on the laptop. The server runs on port 80 on the laptop and I open the browser on the N810 to the URL http://[IP address of the laptop]. This configuration is somewhat stable but not highly robust. I could demo it without too much trouble for a couple of hours at TEI. During the development, there were few hiccups to circumvent with the Flash/Flex – Python socket communication. The advantage is of course that you don’t need the N810 to develop the code, you can just run the Flash/Flex in your laptop browser all the same.

For the gesture recognition, I wrote some custom simple code to identify the 4 gestures. Only 2 different sensors out of the several provided on the SK6 are used: the touch sensor (rubbing and tapping) and accelerometer (knocking and shaking). The recognition is robust enough that I don’t recalibrate the SK6 at all, but the knocking gesture was the one that was not recognized well. I should just rewrite the code. We did the project before this SHAKE  Drivers Google project started and haven’t had a chance to look into it.

There is tons of work going on at Nokia Design on gestures. See Gesture Design and the video here.

Wikipedia n’a pas encore de version française pour Tangible User Interface, absence qui pointe encore une fois le retard de la recherche française en la matière.

Une interface utilisateur tangible, c’est une interface utilisateur grâce à laquelle l’utilisateur interagit avec des informations digitales à travers l’environnement physique. Par exemple, dans la démo SMSlingshot, il s’agit d’utiliser un lance-pierre (objet réel) pour tirer un message (objet digital) en direction d’un écran ou d’une projection d’écran (environnement physique comme une la façade d’un batiment par exemple). Le lance-pierre contient un petit écran et un clavier pour taper un court message type SMS. Une fois que l’utilisateur active le lance-pierre, l’écran affiche le message sous forme de tag ou graffiti, comme une balle de peinture explosée sur un mur, avec le message écrit dedans. L’ensemble lance-pierre et écran ou projection constitue une interaction tangible.

Une personne utilise le lance-pierre pour lancer un nouveau message sur l'écran

Installation du SMSlingshot

D’abord, très bon point pour TEI, toutes les publications sont disponibles directement à partir du site. Pendant la conférence, toutes les présentations ont été enregistrées sur vidéo et transmises live, et seront accessibles du site Web bientôt. Le flux Twitter n’était pas super actif pendant la conférence, ce qui n’est pas plus mal du reste.

90 projets ont été acceptés, avec près de 30 démos présentées dans la session démo, et 30 publications présentées dans les sesssions principales.

Le domaine de recherche couvert par TEI est relativement jeune (la première conférence TEI a eu lieu en 2007), et la communeauté dynamique, relaxe et accessible. La jeunesse du domaine et le fait que la communeauté soit particulièrement enclin à créer et implémenter des idées, et soit aussi très sensible aux arts et design font que – c’est mon avis – les gens sont restés humbles et ne se prennent pas la tête. Ca a été un plaisir d’assister et de participer à la conférence.

L’émergence ces dernières années et l’utilisation de plus en plus facile et peu couteuse de différentes plateformes de développement hardware et software ont rendu la création de prototypes tangibles beaucoup plus faciles. Les platformes telles qu’Arduino sont particulièrement populaires non seulement parmi les étudiants et chercheurs, mais aussi les designers, artistes, éducateurs et enseignants.

Je pense qu’à l’heure actuelle, la communeauté TEI a un peu de mal à positionner son travail. Le but est-il de créer des objets ou environnements utiles aux gens, par exemple, des applications éducatives pour les enfants, de comprendre comment on peut améliorer les interactions utilisateurs classiques en incorporant des composantes d’interaction tangibles? Ou bien les projets restent-ils du domaine de l’art: certes beaux, nouveaux, intéressants et parfois provoquants, mais d’utilitée pratique limitée? D’un point de vue scientifique, les projets relèvent parfois plus du domaine artistique ; et d’un point de vue utilisateur lambda, les mêmes projets sont plutôt ceux de maniaques d’informatique et d’électronique.

Dans tous les cas, l’apprentissage de plateformes type Arduino par les jeunes et même très jeunes est très intéressante. Des évoles américaines initient à la programmation des élèves de CM2 en utilisant des plateformes telles que Scratch, Arduino, ou une combinaison des deux avec Scratch for Arduino.

J’ai participé l’après-midi du deuxième jour à un studio (pdf) d’initiation à Scratch pour Arduino. C’était très bien organisé, et j’ai pu m’amuser à faire briller une diode en fonction de la lumière reçue par un détecteur de lumière. Après ça j’ai fait une version pour générer des sons en fonction de la lumière détectée, comme le montre la vidéo dessous (le son est mauvais).

Programme fait avec Scratch for Arduino

Je vais aussi recommender à ma soeur qui aime coudre et créer des sacs et vêtements d’essayer Scratch et la plateforme hardware Lilypad Arduino, qui permet de coudre et d’intégrer dans des textiles des composants électroniques tels que capteurs, accéléromètres et diodes cousus et reliés à la carte microcontrolleur par des fils conducteurs.

A quand Scratch et Arduino dans les écoles françaises?!