Sunshine Powered Mobile

The World's First Solar Powered Cell Phone

I think this is quite an exciting development and clearly illustrates how light can be used to manipulate these devices.

Final Project Post Listing V1.0

Complete listing of research and posts, details on relevance to final prototype and development of ideas. Also puts them in a coherent order.

Introduction

Introduction
- brief introduction to this blog.

The Brief
- outlines the key aims of the project and details what we're expected to research, consider and challenge.

Title Image
- something a little artistic to get ideas going.

Research

Foundations, contexts, general research

Remediation
- an extract which looks at where media come from. Helps to give the project a context and a foundation to work from.

The Gadget Show
- two links, one about Bluetooth and another comparing the available phones on the market. Gave me room to think about the technology itself and see the direction the market was moving in.

Video Banking - Immediacy
- a discussion about a few articles discussing mobile banking and the video banking trials. The key thing here is peoples' constant need for information anywhere they are. The fact that we can now increasingly have this information is opening up more opportunity for other kinds of information to be shared, it's just thinking of a clever way to do it.

Sunshine Powered Mobile
- the ways in which technologies are changing are affecting how these devices work too. Definitely an interesting direction to go in.

Convergence

Device Convergence - Reach for the Sky
- looking at advertisements for mobile phones. Looks specifically at device convergence and remote control via mobile devices. They're no longer just for communication and I felt this was very important when it came to designing an application.

The "Zune"
- tying in with the idea of convergence design I included this article about portable music devices - which are just as relevant to this project as communications devices.

Memory-Stick Single
- again, about how the music world is evolving along with portable devices.

Mobile Doorbell
- another remote application which makes it possible to control your home while you're away from it.

iPhone
- technology moving forward. Phones are definitely becoming miniature computers as technological capabilities advance.

Designing for devices

Stop Stealing Sheep... and invent a tiny font
- details on typefaces designed specifically for mobile applications.

Ideas

Mobile Shopping
- a fairly obvious avenue for a project such as this one. Using a mobile phone for a purchase and then using that to identify yourself at a football game etc is becoming a more common occurance. If I had taken this idea I think it would have needed to have really thought outside the box to find a new area to work with.

Mobile Burgering
- tying in with the mobile shopping idea.

Nokia Exhibits - Distributed Media
- This was what first sparked off the idea of doing something artistic with the device as opposed to something more technically orientated. I really liked what Nokia were doing and felt I wanted to take it further.

Conclusions of research

To come.

Additional links collected as research @ del.icio.us

The Big Idea

The Big Idea
- my stream of conciousness on the idea I was planning to (and did) take forward. Discusses the idea, works out problems, potential areas for expansion and details areas of research.

What's in a Name?
- development of the identity of my idea, selecting a name that suits the key aspects of my proposal.

Scenarios
- developing scenarios to help expose possible problems with my idea and help me work out how best to explain exactly what chaMEleon does.

Something to combat my idea
- the "Living World" interface design for a particular mobile phone. Like my idea it makes use of time of day, location, how much signal is available, and the interface adapts accordingly. This piece helped me to see what had been done, and where it could be developed further.

Mobile Burgering

Seems Japan's leading the way by having customers pay for their food via mobile.

Mobile Doorbell

I thought this was worth posting here despite the unit being over for everyone else.

I found it on Lifehacker which is a site you should all check out anyway.

Apparently soon you'll be able to answer your doorbell with your mobile from anywhere in the world.

Why not just leave that person with the spare key? I mean otherwise, I don't see how it's a big enough of a deal to warrant the invention...

iPhone

It's here and it's shiny.

Scenarios

A couple of scenarios to help with explaining aspects of the idea. Also some things I need to think about...

In the simplest terms possible, I want to create a device based application which automatically customises the device’s interface based upon different criteria, either set by the user or by an outside factor.

Adaptive, perceptive, intuitive. All things a handheld device should be. There is no “natural” way to interact with one, but maybe there is something that it can do to behave more naturally.

Doable Now

Temperature/Weather

Yahoo has an interesting desktop widget which along with telling you the weather vitals, visually represents the weather at that time. I can be sitting at home, and know it’s raining in Portsmouth. I really like this additional little feature, and that’s all it really is.

Scenario 1 – Bob’s walking down the street – it’s a clear sunny afternoon. His mobile calculates his location and discovers the weather accordingly. Linking to flickr, the application searches tags for “sunny” and “weather”, selects a photo at random, and displays it on his mobile background. The device selects colours from the photo, and applies a colour scheme or “mood” to the device’s interface accordingly.

Suddenly, the weather changes, a storm breaks. Linking again to flickr, the application searches tags for “storm” and “rain”, selects a photo at random and displays it on his mobile background. The colour scheme shifts from blues and yellows, to silvers and navies.

Not sure how to play this one – show the current weather, or what the weather’s going to be? Or the inverse of the weather. If it’s adapting it should match the weather. How much of a change in the weather? If the weather doesn’t change does it just update every hour?

Colour

Camera phones I’m pretty sure are capable of detecting colour – they seem to have their own magic ways to messing with the exposure so much so there’s not colour left in the photo you’re trying to take…

Scenario 2 – Bob’s going for a walk in some woods. Its spring and everything around is green. The device detects that green is especially prominent in the surroundings and searches flickr for “green” and “color”. The mood also changes to fit the surroundings. As he leaves the woods, the surrounding colours start to change, and once the device detects a noticeable difference, it picks the next most prominent colour and adapts itself accordingly.

People not leaving their phone out. How often does it change? The flickr tags for colours aren’t always accurate. Search the colour group?

Location/Advertising

Scenario 3

Bob decides to go to Paris for the day. Upon arriving, his phone detects his new location and searches for images tagged with “Paris” and updates the phone accordingly. As he walks past the Eiffel Tower, his phone recognises a Bluetooth node and bleeps, the background image changes, but this time to something decided by the promoters of the Eiffel Tower, either an inviting image, or entry prices. Once the device is out of range, it once again finds photos tagged with that location.

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I think I'm going to have it so that the device searches tagged photos within it's gallery first and then go to flickr if it can't find anything.

Also as an additional thought, I think there should be a way for the user to save images they like. Maybe there could be an online control panel as well, which would list the images used that day.

What's in a Name?

I decided The Big Idea needed a name, and eventually an identity. But I'll think on the identity part a bit more when I'm developing the demonstrations.

Anyway, there's lots of things that the application is/should be/would be so I listed some words...

Intuitive, instinctive, artistic, adaptive (evolving), blendable, automatic, emotional, natural, perceptive...

What came to mind was a chameleon.

So playing with that idea a bit, the application's titled chaMEleon - it's focus is on the user, hence the emphasis on "me".

I also tried taking out the vowels, so it was just "chmln", but that made very little sense.