There were no major issues raised or functionality that had been omitted but there were a few perspectives that had not been considered.

‘Where is the project set?’ – The concept was initially aimed at the next evolution of the web where the system would have a knowledge as well as an understanding of the content and the context. Since then it has been re-branded as a step between now and then as to be functional, the concept needs to have the next evolution in place and as such people may not be able to relate very well.

‘What about bad data?’ – The toolbar relies on meta-data at the current level of the internet, data about data, so if there was a ‘bad’ meta tag either accidental or malicious there could be incorrect generation of links. The solution to this is a system by where each sentence is evaluated at a time and a positive or negative number associated with it based on whether it matches the rest of the content or not. The same applies to any other data that is searched. The page is then given a total and a decision is made as to whether the page is ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. These are displayed depending on the safe-search preferences, similar to Google. All this would be done by a crawler that indexes websites and their content, like the way Google and other search engines index.

‘Is it social, can I comment or rate?’ – No it is not. The problem with social networks and searching is that the social aspect of it would detract from the functionality of the search. There is no direct user interaction with the information provided other than a passive observation of it. Users can not comment, ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ links generated, again similar to how the Google search works. The main function of it is to provide and answer to a search query. The main function of the toolbar is to automatically link sites together to make the browsing / searching process much more fluid and natural.

The development of ‘extras’ continues but will not be fleshed out, more added as a chapter in the report about possiblities, extension and the future.

According to research, users will uncover all of the text and continue to search for more text rather than creating their own design. Maybe the text needs to be visible all the time? Or would that be too much information on the stamp initially. Would people be able to create a design with the text constantly showing?

The stamp needs to be simplified. Maybe the explanation of the stamp’s purpose could be written on the pack. There is also the possibility for a collector’s case, or the combination of the two.

It was a ‘live’ environment so there was the ‘Virtual Earthquake’ going off in the background and the ‘Red Carpet’ crowd cheering loudly, all of which meant it was difficult for people to understand Shoutbox as their shapes were quickly overridden with the ambient sound pollution.

When the room was quiet though and a small group of people came in, it was easy to see them enjoying Shoutbox. Once the simple explanation was given they tried it out for themselves and created shapes. Some even had competitions to see who could create the largest shape or the fastest shape.

Even when there were no groups in the room you could see members of the Interaction course playing with it. Tom was playing a piece of wood like he would his bongos to create a series of shapes that were in time and also played back the same noise. He said “it would be great for VJs”.

The only problem with it is one that was expected and that is running it from my laptop. We have perfectly good G5 quad core Macs in iLab but we can’t use those, instead we were stuck with some old G4s that had no microphone input, the MaxMSP trial had expired on some of them and some had an administrator password that nobody in the entire faculty knew.

For the delegates tomorrow the flash .swf file will need resetting after every group so that it is a smooth as possible. Even though the shapes are deleted after a new one is created, where there is a very loud consistent noise (like from either of the other two sound based installations) the collision detection struggles on the relatively poor performance of my laptop.

Here are some pictures of today. Click to view the whole set in Flickr.