For Christmas this year, I spread a silly little vid amoung my friends.

The Ocarina iPhone app converts your iPhone into a real – you guessed it – Ocarina. It uses the microphone to convert airflow into sound. It's been around for a while and received alot of attention since it came out. But what actually triggered me to check it out was the whole experience the creators offered.

There are heaps of music applications out there, but what separates this from the rest, is that there is a community actively generating so called "scores" for this app:



Next to this, you can also see other people play all over the world.

Obviously, the creators want you to learn how to play: they dedicated the startup screen to it. But when you take a closer look, you notice that they have put some effort in a PHP platform for the community to generate and share scores.

The power is in the usability / readability. Instead of notes, scores just show how to place your fingers. Every music newbie can play and share any tune with a bit of practice.

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The next generation of high-end mobile phones have a few things in common:

• Camera
• GPS
• Fast processor
• Fast internet connection 
  

So I was discussing earlier this week with two of my colleagues how all this could be used in future mobile applications. We ended up thinking about a augmented reality navigation concept (and named it AUGNAV to keep things easy) which could look like this: 

The camera could be used for input footage on which the phone augments a layer with virtual navigation information while driving. It would be capable of doing pattern recognition to detect road signs and correctly display the navigation path live on the footage.

Usually addresses are in a brochure or other printed media, so applications that could read those with OCR (text recognition) software by just taking a snapshot would be a convenient feature.
 

Same thing for surfing the mobile web: just like Skype recognizes phone numbers on websites, we think it's fairly easy to come up with software that is able to spot addresses on contact pages and provide an instant touch-to-navigate button:

University website with software rendered navigation button

Technically the live image pattern recognition and augmentation would be a bit too much for current mobile processors; but our guess is that will just be a matter of time.

We documented the ideas and limitations in detail within a scientific paper owned by the University for exploring research purposes. Available on request for interested developers.

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Interesting findings for if you ever end up in the process of multiplayer (adver)game design.

Usually there are 2 major concepts to work with: cooperative and versus styled game plots.

Our hypothesis stated that a versus styled game-mode is most engaging out of the two.

After some intensive research, we found this to be true.

A significant difference in emotional expression was perceived within players when playing the same game in two different modes. If you'd like to know the details about the research, the paper is available on request.

32 participants were asked to play a set of wii-tennis in pairs in these 2 major game modes:

Left: player 1 versus player 2 -- Right: cooperative mode

Then we recorded the end-game situation where they realized they either won or lost. This resulted in 64 short video clips, showing the exuded body language of the players.

The 5-second recordings (separated from opponent or allied and having the sound muted) were then shown to 18 external raters. They had to indicate if the player either won or lost the game. Besides this they had to rate how sure they were on a 5 point likart scale.

 
Possible confounding factors and reliability are discussed in the paper, although we believe the results are quite reliable.

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