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?
Published on October 27, 2009 1:15 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Tags: electrical impulses, engagement, eye movement, gesture control, physical space
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.
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.
Published on October 26, 2009 4:05 pm.
Filed under: People and Devices Tags: city competition, pedestrian activity, public transportation system, street games, urban exploration
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
Published on October 16, 2009 11:04 am.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Tags: experience, tactile feedback, technology
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
Published on October 15, 2009 10:14 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Devices
5 Gum Augmented Reality Music Mixer Demo
A very intriguing use of Augmented Reality for content creation, not just informatics and product demonstration. Now it gets interesting.
(via 5gumFrance)
Published on October 13, 2009 7:53 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Devices Tags: content creation, music
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Funny how meaningless the graphic above has become, and how quickly.
via graphpaper.com – Phone
Published on October 13, 2009 6:30 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Tags: graph, permanence, signage, ubiquity
Immaterials: the ghost in the field
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.
via Touch
Published on October 13, 2009 4:30 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Devices
World’s First Ever Touchable Hologram
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.
via StillOutandAboutTown
Published on October 12, 2009 6:55 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Devices Tags: holographic image, interface, tactile feedback, ultrasound
Amphibious Architecture:
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.
via Vimeo
Published on October 10, 2009 5:04 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Devices Tags: feedback loops, living architecture, sensors
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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.”
(via A Daily Dose of Architecture: Half Dose #68: Pneumatic Amplifier)
Published on October 10, 2009 11:03 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Devices Tags: amplifier, architectural discourse, landscapes
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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)
Published on October 10, 2009 5:01 am.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Tags: business data, conversation, real time
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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)
Published on October 9, 2009 5:01 am.
Filed under: People and Devices Tags: david hockney, digital expression, iphone
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 [...]
Published on September 11, 2009 10:40 am.
Filed under: People and Devices, Things I Have Written Tags: interface, learning, logic, questions, tools, trust
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 [...]
Published on September 3, 2009 10:26 am.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Tags: branded utility, brands, experiences, functionality, le centre pompidou, learning, teaching, technology, tools
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 [...]
Published on May 5, 2009 10:26 am.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Tags: creative process, drawing machine, edge, insight, investigations, prototype, steven m johnson, visionary concepts
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 [...]
Published on April 13, 2009 12:03 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Tags: human participants, physical space, six degrees of separation, stanley milgram, strangers, tisch school
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 » [...]
Published on April 10, 2009 9:21 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Devices Tags: continuous gestures, fingers, keyboards, language model, libraries
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 [...]
Published on April 3, 2009 2:24 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Devices Tags: design laboratory, designers, place, repair