Ian Fitzpatrick writes, collects and shares things here.
Some of these things have to do with brands, some of them have to do with buildings and places or machines or computers (which are, you know, machines, too). Each of them has to do with people, and the ways in which we respond to the stimuli around us.
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There exists no shortage of naysayers regarding this particular tech (especially on the video’s YouTube page). The notion of reading electrical impulses transmitted by eye movement for gesture control has long been a future tech darling, dating back to (at least) the era of Firefox (the Clint Eastwood film, not the Mozilla browser).
Clearly, there are abundant opportunities to bring a mature version of this technology to market in interesting ways. I’ll spare you the tedium of enumerating them.
What came to mind immediately, though, was a seemingly lower-tech problem (for which eyeball gestures might well be overkill), namely: How can we apply online following behavior to offline entities?
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 26.09
Great Street Games is a series of installations in Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough that are triggered by pedestrian activity through public spaces, and allow for intra-city competition through increasingly-complex gameplay.
Read the full post...Projected light and thermal-imaging technology are used to create jaw-dropping interactive playing arenas in which the physical movements of players determine the outcome of the games. Develop your game-playing skills as you progress through a number of levels to help your area to victory or to simply have fun.
Categorized as: People and Devices Published Oct 21.09
The Hi-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab has created something profoundly intriguing – a series of pop-up books with an added layer of interactivity.
While the books, in themselves, are certainly something to behold, they hint at a much deeper set of implications, namely: the use of paper-thin electronics that can convey a narrative that responds to either direct or indirect user input. These popables, as they’re named, in combination with technology that reads data from the user’s environment or portable devices, might in the near-term help realize dynamic, customized storytelling – or even something akin to immersive three-dimensional textbooks when integrated with augmented reality technologies.
Until that point, of course, you might simply enjoy them for what they are.
Link: Electronic Popables on Rhizome Categorized as: Links, People and Devices Published Oct 20.09 Read the full post...
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 16.09
Project Natal Xbox 360 Announcement:
“When the Wii entered our lives and living rooms, it completely transformed gaming into a rich and more social experience. Project Natal is another revolutionary development to the gaming industry. It starts to break down the barriers between generations (even more so than the Wii), and between gaming and entertainment.”
via Nicola Davies
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 15.09
10/GUI:
This video examines the benefits and limitations inherent in current mouse-based and window-oriented interfaces, the problems facing other potential solutions, and visualizes my proposal for a completely new way of interacting with desktop computers.
via Vimeo
Link: Video on 10/Gui Categorized as: Links, People and Devices Published Oct 13.09
A very intriguing use of Augmented Reality for content creation, not just informatics and product demonstration. Now it gets interesting.
Link: 5 Gum on YouTube Categorized as: Links, People and Devices Published Oct 13.09
Funny how meaningless the graphic above has become, and how quickly.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 13.09
From this very intriguing post:
In order to study the readable volume around an RFID reader, we built experimental probes that would flash an LED light when they successfully read anRFID tag. The readable volume is not the same as the radio field, instead it shows the space within the field in which an RFID tag and an RFID reader will interact with each other.
Link: Immaterials: the Ghost in the Field on Touch Categorized as: Links, People and Devices Published Oct 12.09
Tactile interfaces are about to get very interesting. Combining this technology with something like Surface could open up all manner of intriguing options, particularly at retail outlets.
Researchers from The University of Tokyo have demoed a touchable hologram at Siggraph 2009. The project, called Touchable Holography, involves the use of Wiimotes placed above the display to track hand motion, and an airborne ultrasound tactile display created in the university’s lab to create the sensation of touch. The result is a holographic image that produces tactile feedback without any actual touching, and without degrading the image itself.
Link: StillOutandAboutTown on YouTube Categorized as: Links, People and Devices Published Oct 10.09
Despite its inherently ephemeral nature, this sort of exploration is tremendously appealing to me. Taken to a natural end, the data from this project could inform efforts at maintaining biodiversity, underwater mining, petroleum exploration and all other manner of biokinetics and environmental monitoring.
A temporary installation by the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Environmental Health Clinic at New York University.
This network of floating interactive tubes houses a range of sensors below water and an array of lights above water. The sensors monitor water quality, presence of fish, and human interest. The lights respond to the sensors and create feedback loops between humans, fish, and their shared ecosystems. Blue lights mean that the dissolved oxygen level is higher now than last week, and red lights mean the reverse. The lower lights turn on when fish are underneath. The upper lights blink when someone is text messaging with the fish.
Link: Chris Woebken on Vimeo Categorized as: Links, People and Devices Published Oct 10.09
For The Roadshow: Architectural Landscapes of Canada — “a series of linked, broad-based national events that focus architectural discourse in Canada at the level of the public, the profession, and the schools of architecture” — participating architect Marc Boutin designed the Pneumatic Amplifier, a “massive inflatable projection device that [acts] as an architectural propaganda machine.”
Link: Half Dose #68: Pneumatic Amplifier on A Daily Dose of Architecture Categorized as: Links, People and Devices Published Oct 10.09
Nuisance Machines by British design student Andrew Friend are devices that provoke a reaction from users by dripping dye on their clothes, interrupting their conversations or slapping them on their heels as they walk along a corridor, as triggered in real-time by business data.
(via Dezeen » Blog Archive » Nuisance Machines by Andrew Friend)
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 09.09
David Hockney drawing with the iPhone
Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.
- Lawrence Weschler in the NY Times Book Review
(via David Archer)
Read the full post...Categorized as: People and Devices Published Sep 11.09
Some related thoughts, disparately organized:
The inimitable Dave Coustan (@extraface on Twitter) has been up here in Boston from Atlanta working with us for the last few days. Among the many things I have learned about Dave in that time:
Dave has a soft spot for really good Pinot
Dave likes push messaging for his regular FourSquare updates
Dave [...]
Categorized as: People and Devices, Things I Have Written Published Sep 03.09
I awoke to a fantastic post on Make this morning about Youth Music Box – an installation at the Royal Music Hall in London that allows kids to construct their own original composition in a few short minutes.
Youth Music Box is a free, interactive musical experience, allowing you to create your own unique track and [...]
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published May 05.09
Allison Arieff has a wonderful column today in the New York Times highlighting the work of Steven M. Johnson – a man with whom many of you will be at least peripherally familiar. An inventor in the most whimsical sense, Johnson’s creations range from the absurd to the gloriously sublime.
In discussing his often fantastical, sometimes [...]
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Apr 13.09
Kacie Kinzer of the ITP Program at the Tisch School has created a delightful program called Tweenbots, which fundamentally flips the tables on recent interactions between machines and the city. While programs like FourSquare use computing to help human participants navigate and explore the city, Tweenbots is an experiment in which robots navigate physical space [...]
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Apr 10.09
A fascinating video that outlines an entirely new way of thinking about typing, utilizing a set of language libraries that allocate surface space based upon real-time linguistic probabilities. The video itself likely explains it far better than I might.
Keyboards are inefficient for two reasons: they do not exploit the redundancy in normal … all » language; and they waste the fine analogue capabilities of the user’s motor system (fingers and eyes, for example). I describe a system intended to rectify both these inefficiencies. Dasher is a text-entry system in which a language model plays an integral role, and it’s driven by continuous gestures.
via Make.
Link: on Categorized as: Links, People and Devices Published Apr 03.09
One of the more ingenious things I’ve seen in some time. Speaks for itself, I think.
From the Platform21 website:
Platform21 is a platform for people curious about the future. An old, round chapel in Amsterdam is our public design laboratory. Here we organise exhibitions, lectures and other events.
To us, design is a vehicle to dream about the future. What is possible, what will change and where lay the most exciting creative challenges? Every new project starts from a recent theme. This can be the future of the car or the possibilities of a technique like folding. Within such a theme we ask designers, artists, architects and scientists for a creative contribution. Existing works are combined with work in progress. Platform21 thus functions as an international meeting place, real and virtual, where professionals, amateurs and public inspire each other.
Link: on Categorized as: Links, People and Devices
Links and links and more links from Dutch curator Martijn van Osch – the frequent source of those endlessly circulating memes.
Iain Tait, of UK’s Poke, collects all manner of digital and advertising ephemera here. No, he does not have Google Wave invites.