Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

In order to further our understanding of the behaviors developing around mobile technology, we have been reaching out to experts across the globe for their unique insights. By doing this, we are able to escape ourselves and become exposed to new perspectives.

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and tech consultant based out of Portland, Oregon. Previously, she was involved with PR and digital strategy at Wieden + Kennedy and has blogged for the Discovery Channel. She founded CyborgCamp, a conference on the future of humans and computers.

With all the hype surrounding augmented reality, we asked Amber to clear things up and help us put the technology into perspective.

Amber: In a way, augmented reality has been hyped for years. It's been used for military and corporate purposes, and it's been quite expensive. But augmented reality really started as virtual reality. It was a little too early for its time. For one thing, the idea of the interface was not stable yet. The idea of wearing a heavy helmet on one's head is not socially, economically, or physically feasible.

Now that mobile devices and webcams are available to enough people to make augmented reality a more common occurrence, AR speculation has blossomed once again. iPhones and other mobile platforms now contain locative technologies, accelerometers and ongoing connectivity. They've become a common and affordable interface, allowing augmented reality to finally have more than a few common platforms to stand on.

Virtual Reality is often defined as an opaque experience that is separate from the real world. But mobile devices are melting into our reality instead of taking us away from it. We are using information to connect us to people and to plan the experiences of our future self and those around us. We are using personal mobile devices as video game controllers for the world around us. Virtual Reality has dissolved into actual reality.

We are gaming animals. All throughout history, games were substitutes and simulations of war. Now our wars are fun. They're soft wars. The race to get the most followers and most views on a website. The race to share. They're still very evolutionary, we're just playing the game on a different platform that doesn't involve us physically as much as mentally and strategically. We've become emperors of our own empires, sending out robotic troops to scrape websites, gather RSS feeds and plot trajectories on digital maps. We have robots that grab and tell us our stats. We count our troops. We have Facebook walls that, when printed out, would span the length of Egyptian temples. They'd also contain as just as much history.

The first augmented reality was spice, and that was a heavy market for the Europeans, who had a quite a lot of bland food. Augmented reality is hyped a little like that. Marketers find it tasty, and business writers like to sprinkle it onto a lot of the passages they write. It makes the tech go down faster, so to speak. For more on that, I'd watch Bruce Sterling's keynote at Layar.

Stay tuned for more of Amber's thoughts on the topics of location based services, the internet of things, slow data, and more.

In Korea, the snack sausage is sometimes used as an iPhone stylus. Now, thanks to Casecrown, those of us in the United States can order one for ourselves.

Live in a cold area where you have to use gloves to avoid frostbite? Or maybe you just want to keep your fingers warm. Then you know how much of a hassle it is to take off your gloves to use your apps. Or just to have an alternative for your fingers because you can't use pens or clothed hands.

A single sausage costs just $0.99, but keep in mind, these ones are not edible.

[via intomobile]

During London's six-day East Festival, agency Chance Collective has fixed up a bike, connecting it to the grid for a more interactive social media experience.

The Twike for the East Festival has been fitted with a cell phone programmed to tweet out messages when it comes within range of key areas of the festival.

Along with messages tagged #eastfest and @eastfestival, users can follow along via Flickr and an eventual Google Maps mash-up.

[via mashable]

For those with departed loved ones, visiting a cemetery can become a way to remember them. Traditional grave markers display information like name, birthday, and the date a person died, but so much more about the individual is lost. RosettaStone decided to fix this, bringing mobile activated multimedia content to a connected graveyard.

The company offers small data tags that can be attached to any gravestone.

The device uses NFC-RFID tech to allow mobile phones that are capable of reading NFC data to get images and text that they can enjoy as the visit the graveside. The device is a palm-size stone tablet or a coin-size stick-on polymer tag called a Data Tag. The Data Tag sticks directly to the headstone and text and photos associated with the tag can be uploaded and managed by the buyer directly to an archive site included with the purchase.

This is very similar to Kuyou no Mado (Memorial Service Window), where a Japanese company was embedding QR codes into memorial stones for mobile interaction.

While today's mobile phone technology limits the use of RosettaStone's product (there is a URL for devices that cannot read RFID), it does demonstrate an interesting concept. They have taken a strategy that is familiar to mobile marketers (path/presence) and applied it to the gravestone.

[via slashgear]

The Pew Research Center is polling users to answer the question How Millennial Are You? After taking the quiz, users are ranked on a scale placing them within a certain generational group.

A couple mobile related questions that affect "Millennial score" include:

Thinking about your telephone use, do you have...

Only a landline phone in your home

Only a cell phone

Both a landline and cell phone

In the past 24 hours, about how many text messages, if any, did you send or receive on your cell phone?

No text messages on your cell phone in the past 24 hours

1 to 9 text messages

10 to 49 text messages

50 or more text messages

Mobile connected culture is taking off with today's youth. Take the quiz here to find out your place in all of it. Then compare the results with others' here.

One could argue that time-tracking was one of the first digital utilities to go mobile, just look at the wrist watch. Now with smart devices and app stores, designers have gone all in and developed a variety of creative clocks.

Creative Applications explains why:

Time is a concept easily understood and eagerly visualised amongst artists. The collection of apps below show not only how time can be visualized but also the sheer imagination that exists out there.

From U-LOCK to 365 Alarm Clock, check out CAN's collection of  creative clock apps here.

In order to further our understanding of the behaviors developing around mobile technology, we have been reaching out to experts around the world for their unique insights. By doing this, we are able to escape ourselves and become exposed to new perspectives.

Clark MacLeod is a Canadian born designer who has been living and working in Hsinchu, Taiwan for the past 11 years. He's been fortunate enough to work on a wide range of projects -- most recently he has investigated collaborative systems (including mobile) for the Creativity Lab at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). While working as an engineer at ITRI, he spent some time creating ambient and tangible interfaces, sound art, and helped create on of the first UX teams in Taiwan. His current focus is on launching a couple of iPhone apps and something completely different, a new line of cotton and canvas bags.

When asked about his background and relationship with mobile, he explained an interest in technology as an enabler for lifestyle. Clark quotes the BBC's Eric Huggers when describing himself as one of many "who love the convenience of mobile services when they're on the move."

On your blog, Popwuping, you track the ‘culture of mobility’, could you describe what elements feed into and enable this? What patterns are you noticing?

Fashion, devices, services, places to work, places to play, and design are themes that I follow. I try to make sense of an increasingly mobile society and share what inspires me.

One thing we try to remind ourselves to do is to look back in order to observe change. Have you been following any specific developments in mobile culture or user behavior?

One change I have been observing is the way people personalize their mobile devices and the way in which they carry them.

As phones got smaller it was extremely common to see females of (almost) all ages attaching straps or cute tchotchke as a means of projecting personality or values and as a means to be able to actually find these small devices in their bags. But as people move to devices like the iPhone, this strategy is replaced by personalization inside the phone; what apps they have, the social networks they frequent, the wallpaper etc. They buy cute cases and bags but I haven't seen this to be as prevalent as before.

Though it's very hard to imagine in an engineering culture like Taiwan, I am slowly seeing less concern about specific hardware features as compared to software. Photography is a huge national hobby here, making the camera in the phone perhaps the last vestige of concern. I think people are becoming more interested in the intangibles vs. the tangibles when it comes to choosing a device.

You are based in Taiwan. What cultural differences have you noticed in mobile, both consumer side and industry side, between Asia and the West? How are certain age groups making use of mobile devices differently?

I've lived in Asia for the past 12 years so it's a bit difficult for me to come up with a contrast. My impression is that the industry here is far more developed than what is available where I grew up in Canada. 3G networks are ubiquitous, unlimited data is fairly cheap and there are far more devices to choose from. I still find it amazing that I can be standing in a field in some remote part of Taiwan and still be streaming YouTube videos to my kids.

I may not have an accurate picture of how young people in Taiwan use their devices but I see differences in frequency of use across age groups. I notice younger people using their mobiles far more than people my age. Young people see it as more of a social enabler than purely a communication device. I notice many people my age see the ability to be always connected and reachable as a disadvantage. I have a friend who for years avoided getting a mobile phone simply because he didn't want to be contacted outside of working hours. To avoid interruptions, I send my calls to voice mail for most of the day. But across all age groups most people here could not imagine leaving their home without their mobile, it's an intrinsic part of peoples lives.

What mobile services or startups do you see picking up steam in Taiwan or Asia in general? Are there any you are a fan of?

Plurk is still immensely popular here and they have a fine mobile version but I'm not a fan.

I do have enormous respect for the work that researchers at the Information and Communications Research Laboratories are doing. One of their projects, Pocket Channel, is promising. Pocket Channel allows for real time video broadcasting on a 3G mobile to other mobile phones, essentially allowing the same kind of instant news coverage we see with Twitter but with video. They describe it as enabling everyone to be an instant news reporter.

I have also recently seen a demo of StreetImage - a web service that allows people to upload their own street videos. You can build sharable trails which can be annotated and searched by the other users. It's something I've always wished that Google streetview could do. They have developed an app for Android and the iPhone. The latter of which can be downloaded from the app store. Very cool stuff from a technology stand point.

Also worth noting is Openmoko, based in Taipei, and their open source mobile phone.