Augmented Shadow_document from Joon Y Moon on Vimeo.

People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them. That’s the idea behind Sorin Matei’s project, Ubimark, which embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed.

A video of the pilot book, Around the World in 80 Days:

Mr. Matei, an associate professor of communication at Purdue University, says that the initial book is just “an exercise in pushing the envelope as far as we can,” and that scholarly publications will be available in the future with the embedded feature.

Trackmate is an open source initiative to create an inexpensive, do-it-yourself tangible tracking system. The Trackmate Tracker allows any computer to recognize tagged objects and their corresponding position, rotation, and color information when placed on a surface.

Trackmate uses a small, specially designed circular barcode that stores information which can be easily decoded by the Trackmate Tracker. The tag measures less than 1″x1″ square and contains a six byte unique ID (over 280 trillion unique IDs are possible).

(Via Make Blog.)

I installed the software, plugged in the USB reader, and was immediately able to turn my Field Notes notebook (a souvenir from PaperCamp NY 2009) into a physical hyperlink.

So, now, if I wave my notebook at the reader, my flickr photostream opens in a browser. Ta da.

After about an hour of use, I’m excited by the possibilities that Touchatag offers as a prototyping system. The interface for setting the tags up is a little odd, but understandable after a minute or two of experimentation.

I was initially disappointed that the default URL application only handles GET requests, which would make a REST API difficult to interface with. Some perusal of the developer documentation, however, suggests that custom applications, while not easy, would be doable.

And anyway, it’s a $30 RFID prototyping toolkit, which takes touch-based interaction design and makes it accessible. To complain about the details of the GUI they’ve created for setting up your touch-based prototype is to miss the point entirely.

Verdict: if you’re interested at all in tangible interaction design, go immediately and pick up a starter kit.

Lately, I’ve been doing the exercises in Making Things Talk.

I put some pictures here.

Although I’ve got a DYMO printer, I thought I’d test and see how well Moo stickers would work with the current geohash generator.

The stickers are gorgeous, and perfect for, say, putting in the margins of a book or on a printout.

But they’re a bit small, which means that although my iPhone _can_ read them (with the free NeoReader application, search for it in the app store), it’s still a bit hit-or-miss.

(Would like to see how well the G1 handles it, with its, ahem, superior camera and barcode reader.)

Still, with a bit of tweaking, I can see this working if you wired the Moo API up to the automagic hash generator, and get a pocket full of geohash tags…

What I find compelling is what isn’t visible here: the photo was taken and uploaded with an Eye-Fi and digital camera, without any prompting on my part, except for taking the camera and leaving the camera on. (I got a twitter direct message when the upload was done, which was pretty cool.)

So the photo is pretty high resolution. I just viewed it on full size on flickr, and was able to scan the QRCodes successfully using my iPhone. That means that, conceivably, you could use the Flickr API to trawl your photostream for new photos, check for QRCodes, interpret them, and… what?

That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?

Maybe there’s an existing URL that matches the (unique geohashed) QRCode, and you get that dropped into the photo as a link on a photonote?

Maybe you _own_ that domain name, and you’ve got a CMS or blog running on it. It could create that URL if it doesn’t exist, and put the flickr photo on it.

Maybe there’s text in that photo, now captured at high resolution. If Evernote can trawl through photos to OCR them and make them searchable, then, well, that’s a good proof of concept, right?

(When I mentioned this to Charles Warren, he pointed out that you could run the text against a Google Book Search. That’s another possibility.)

The point, here, is that it’s getting easy to grab image data and put it into a form that’s accessible through a data-centric API. Like Flickr’s (for example). You can do that with a ScanSnap sheet-feed scanner, or a digital camera with eye-fi, or a cameraphone, or a camera mounted above your desk.

That’s my pet obsession: getting unique, tagged data into an API, and then making the transition between the digital shadows and their physical equivalents as frictionless as possible. I’m calling my pet instantiation of the concept “Paper Bits,” and it’s what I’d like to discuss at the PaperCamp that Matt Jones suggested.

I’m not a real programmer: I’d like to create this as an open source software project, and have no clue where to start on that. So, any suggestions are welcome…

There really is too much to summarize in a single post, but here are some of the highlights as I saw them.

People

I had the honor of meeting and befriending some amazing folks. A partial list:

Jennifer Magnolfi, Matt Jones, Timo Arnall, Matt Cottam, Michelle Malott, Chris McCray, Charles Warren, and probably a half-dozen others whose contact data I haven’t pulled out and reviewed yet. (Sorry!)

We managed to spend most of the summit sitting at a table in back, with half of us working on their presentation for the next day while listening to the presentation, and the other half listening to the presentations and exchanging (occasionally snarky) comments on twitter.

The GooglePhone’s internal compass and its ability to do an augmented-reality view with it, using Google Street View, was the technological nerdgasm of the weekend.

PaperCamp

The highlight of the weekend, for me, was meeting Matt and Timo, and getting to talk about paper as prototype spime.

(It was a bit gratifying, when meeting Matt, to be greeted with, “Oh, you’re that guy!” Admittedly, that’s usually what people say when a locally infamous eccentric shows up at a party, but it was fun nonetheless.)

Timo made the insightful comment that the idea of just attaching a URL to paper is kind of broken, and we need richer and more interesting interaction patterns. He and I agreed that the usability of QRCodes is quite poor as they stand, but they are a printable, inexpensive analog for passive RFID and touch interaction in some ways.

Matt percolated a bit, and came up with the idea of having a PaperCamp event for like-minded people to explore what can be done with printable protospimes.

Matt’s suggested topics:

• Way-new Printing
• Protospimes
• Ingestion/Digestion/Representation
• Bionic Sketching
• Folding/Structure
• Paper’s Children

(“What would Paper’s Children be,” I asked. “That’s the point, I’m asking you,” Matt said.)

(I have some ideas about that, but let’s save it for later.)

Memes!

Some ideas that got bounced around, from talks, hallway discussion, and drunken ranting:

• Personal Informatics
• Game Mechanics for motivation and change
• Manatee Rape Waivers – band name, or legal necessity?
• The lack of personal fear in a welfare state (Norway)
• Warren Ellis won’t actually eat your heart if you buy him a beer.
  (Matt claimed this, but I’m still skeptical)
• Obama as the president in Independence Day
• RFID fields as physical objects
• Wii Fit and Nike Plus –- and how you should be able to change and record the messages in both
• Will the FUBAR security fiasco in Mifare RFID chips harm NFC adoption? (Yes.)

So, in other words, we made as much sense as you’d expect.

On the whole, as I said later, it was simply refreshing to show an example of my thought experiments and for people to not look at me like a dog that’s been shown a card trick. Worth the price of admission right there.

Thank-you’s

I really have to thank Dave for inviting me, and of course the summit organizers, Michelle Bauer and Mary Craig for allowing me to attend. Also, everyone else for being generally awesome.

What’s next?

Well, I just got this, from Matt Jones:

@paperbit 15.24, restate your assumptions.

Sounds like a good place to start.

There is nothing, really, to see when the link is clicked. For now.

I, too, find [Social Objects] a useful paradigm for web service design and community building.

Stop me if I’m wrong, but this is what I got out of the concept: A social object is something that you care about enough to form a social bond around. It’s an interesting, external thing.

Or, to put it another way, a social object is something “sticky.” It’s a node that gathers attention and acts as a network link between people.

In LibraryThing, the object is a book. On Flickr, it’s a photo …or a short video. On de.licio.us, the objects are URLs or tags. On Twitter, it’s short messages.

In blogging, the objects are sometimes posts, and sometimes something more nebulous: a shared interest or tag. This is one way that I feel blogging on Wordpress or Blogger or TypePad could be improved, and one reason why my posting here is sometimes sporadic: there’s no easy, accepted way to make those social bonds, without doing a lot of extra work to hold it together. There are ways: to name one, you can create a Technorati search, or subscribe to feeds and piece the threads together yourself, or use the comments on the blog itself (and then subscribe to the blog comments, I suppose), but the experience is fragmented and frustrating.

This is a difficult problem to resolve: in a network of independent actors, without a coherent service to form explicit bonds, is it possible to make a “sticky” social object? Can you still form an automatic, explicit bond in the absence of a controlling authority? Can you do it in a way that’s as easy as commenting on a Flickr photo and then getting to see the rest of the conversation through email?

(I’m using the term “explicit bond” to mean a way in which you can set a flag, so that changes to the object get pushed towards you, like a comment on a Flickr photo, or a @reply in Twitter.)

I hope the answer to this question is “yes,” but as of yet, have no idea how it would happen. Or, if it’s happened yet, would someone tell me? I’d like to stop doing the gruntwork myself and let the computer do it. I hear that’s what they’re for.

MJ: Well – let’s dial back the Delorean a little to Jyri’s coinage of “social objects.” He was coming at it from social science, specifically “Actor-Network Theory” where sociologists consider everything to act on everything else – people, environments, tools, and consider these systems to understand how people socialise with each other, mediated by tools, objects, environments etc. So the ’social object’ in Jyri’s thinking is the centre of gravity of some social transaction. And it’s also the trigger… and the transmitter of sociality. The canonical case being a photo in Flickr.

RF: It functions as both artifact and instigator?

MJ: Yep. In dopplr’s case it’s the “trip.”

RF: It’s the thing I’ve created, and placed into the network for others to react to and generate from.

(Edit 1:57 PM, Monday; April 14, 2008: Alex De Carvalho says, via Twitter: ’social object’ had been coined in sociology papers before @jury and I discussed the term at Reboot7. He links to this blog post on the subject, where he details the origin of the phrase.)

The conversation is worth reading, and skips from topic to topic. It’s hard to pin down what I took away from it, so I’ll just point and gesture wildly at the interview in the hopes that someone else will see what grabbed my attention. Or, you know, not.

MJ: I think this is somehow the consolation of these personal informatics. We find data about ourselves – these patterns, somehow affirming.

RF: All of this data is hidden from us, and we’re the one’s generating it… we aren’t equipped, cognitively, to learn anything more than impressions from our own actions. In attempting to gather more complete pictures of our behaviors - and gain better analysis of ourselves – what’s our motivation?

MJ: Well – coming back to the social aspect. The overlays of these patterns with those of others are a new kind of feedback we haven’t had at any scale before. And we do flock well. So perhaps that’s how we will learn and change our behaviours… in a “supercontext” if you will…

In a low-tech way, that’s what Dave Seah’s Printable CEO is good for. It provides an accumulated data set for introspection. It’s a low-tech, explicit tool… meaning, you have to decide to capture the data, it isn’t captured for you.

That’s not a bad thing, mind: the act of stopping, thinking about what you’ve done, then noting it is itself valuable, I think. I wonder if the PCEO would be so effective if the data capture was automatic.

Anyway, go check it out.

(Via Matt Jones (again).)