This post originally appeared on O’Reilly Radar (“2 makers, 2 robots, 2 visions“). It’s republished with permission.

By James Turner

If you haven’t been to a Maker Faire, it can be hard to describe the vast and diverse array of exhibitors and events, and no set of interviews can do the event itself justice. But recent conversations with makers Scott Bergquist and Ian Bernstein do offer a decent representation of what Maker Faire is fundamentally about.

What follows are the stories of two very different robots, both of which will be in attendance (in some form) at the upcoming Maker Faire Bay Area.

The errand bot

Bergquist will be showing the Driverless Errand Car, a design concept for an autonomous vehicle system that delivers goods and runs errands. Bergquist admits that his idea is well ahead of the technologies required, but he wants people to start thinking about how society could benefit if fuel-efficient robotic vehicles were running errands without requiring human interaction. As he likes to put it, “Why drive a 4,000-pound vehicle to get a quarter-pounder at McDonalds?”

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This post originally appeared on O’Reilly Radar (“Softly buzzing phones could yield better augmented reality“). It’s republished with permission.

By Jenn Webb

Current augmented reality technology primarily relies on the cameras in smartphones to connect users to surrounding environments. But is this interaction actually disconnecting users from reality rather than plugging them in? In a recent interview, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley said the camera sometimes gets in the way.

The screen shouldn’t be between you and me, or me and the place. If the phone buzzes and I look at it silently and know what’s going on, I think that’s the experience Foursquare is going after. It’s less to do with the screens in front of people’s faces …

Crowley said a more subtle interaction could actually result in a deeper connection to the surrounding environment without interfering with what’s happening in real life.

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By Peter Meyers

This is part of an ongoing series related to Peter Meyers’ project Breaking the Page, Saving the Reader: A Buyer & Builder’s Guide to Digital Books. (Note: This post originally appeared on A New Kind of Book. It’s republished with permission.)

The iPad and other touchscreen devices seem perfect for replicating the page flip. After all, one of the first gestures users “get” is the swipe: it’s intuitive, it’s quick, it’s fun. And despite the power packed into today’s tablets, virtual page flipping isn’t as useful as its print counterpart. For starters, paging speed is noticeably slower than what you get with a wet pointer finger and the latest issue of, say, People.

A bigger problem lies with a common digital publishing culprit: trying to faithfully replicate all the “features” of print. A regular magazine has pages, the thinking goes, so by golly we’re gonna reproduce pages in the digital edition. Lotsa problems with that approach, but for this post let’s tackle the “filmstrip”-style page-browser found in many e-magazines. Consider Fortune’s, for example:

The “Page Viewer” icons are too small to deliver useful info

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This post originally appeared on O’Reilly Radar (“View the iPad as a magazine opportunity, not a container“). It’s republished with permission.

By Jenn Webb

As more magazines take advantage of the iPad’s popularity, one thing thus far has been clear: most publishers are simply reproducing their print products on the digital screen.

In a recent interview, Matthew Carlson, principal of experience strategy and design at Hot Studio Inc., said established magazines are thus far missing the boat by producing iPad editions weighed down by bloated files, slow downloads and locked content:

Magazines have traditionally thought of themselves as kind of a locked book, of a complete, discreet object. Ideally, something that is going to be really interactive or live out on the web needs to be more like an open book — like if you took the cover of the magazine and turned it outside in so that people could discover and access the stories more effectively.

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This post originally appeared on O’Reilly Radar (“The purpose of gamification“). It’s republished with permission.

By Gabe Zichermann

Frequently couched either as a question about demographics or as a personal statement (“I don’t ever play games”), gamification is dogged by questions of suitability of purpose, appropriateness of context, or even the semantic conflict around the use of the word “games” itself. Whether you fall into the supporter or detractor camp, it’s clear that gamification is inspiring debate and raising questions: play vs. work, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, authenticity vs. contrivance, just to name a few.

So perhaps the best place to start addressing these issues is with the basics: what can gamification do, why do we care, and what are its limitations.

Gamification’s main purpose is to help people get from point A to point B in their lives — whether that’s viewed through the lens of personal growth, societal improvement or marketing engagement. We all have the intrinsic desire to be the best possible people we can be, and to make the world in our image of its maximum potential. However, most of us lack the systems thinking (and discipline) required to get to that goal. What games do well is expose complex, learnable systems that users can engage with to achieve personal mastery — and thus accomplish something aspirational.

Weight Watchers is an example. If you ask someone who has successfully lost weight how he or she did it, they might answer with an emphatic “Weight Watchers!” What they don’t say is “diet and exercise,” which is actually what they did to lose the weight, regardless of pedagogy. Mastering the system — in this case Weight Watchers’ gamey approach of points, levels, challenges, leader boards, etc. — becomes what the user most identifies with as having caused their success.

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