mobile assassins
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"Cell atlantic" personal cellphone booth offers portable privacy
Out of the many gadgets and devices that have been featured on these pages over the years, the last one you'd think someone would make improvements upon would be the personal cellphone booth invented last year by Nick Rodrigues, which seems to perform its intended duty almost perfectly. Well NYU student Jenny Chowdhury, the same person who brought us that team-building Mobile Assassins game, decided to take the mobile phone booth to the next level by making it both lighter and more private. Instead of the folding plastic and metal design built by Rodrigues, Chowdhury decided to use Chinese merchant bags to stitch together her cleverly-named, full-length "cell atlantic" phonebooth, as a symbol of the structure's nomadic nature. Chowdhury hopes that people seeing or using the booth will take a moment to consider the impact of cellphones on our daily lives, while forcing them to stand still and concentrate on a call instead of engaging in the usual multitasking.[Via textually]
In Mobile Assassins, cameraphones do the shooting
Students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program at the university's Tisch School of the Arts have just completed a hi-tech version of the game Assassins, in which players use their cameraphones to take a picture of their target and score a "hit." Designers Jennifer Chowdhury and Ran Tao will unveil the game, called Mobile Assassins, at tomorrow's annual ITP Spring Show, after which it will be available for the public to use in controlled situations such as college orientations, trade conferences, and other events where you wouldn't be getting photographed by complete strangers. To enter a game, players must first take their own photo and MMS it to the MA server, after which they are sent a picture of their first target; if the first target is successfully "assassinated" without first snapping the assassin's picture, then the next hit on the target's own list is reassigned to the assassin. This all sounds a bit complicated, so if you're ever involved in one of these tournaments, your best bet is to lock yourself in a room for most of the game, only to reemerge just in time to counter-strike the other remaining player and claim your victory.[Via picturephoning and WMMNA]
