When atoms become bits!

Directly from Japan, look at the Tuttuki Bako Virtual Finger Game! 100% real and fantastically crazy by simply sticking your finger in the hole and a digital representation appears on the screen. Then you can use your virtual finger to play all kinds of cool mini games... from swinging a panda to having a karate fight with a tiny little man. It's so odd yet so wonderful.

You can find it at ThinkGeek

Digital carpet

This December, ENESS stopped the public in their gift grabbing tracks with an alternative celebration of light at Melbourne’s QV square. A digital carpet took over the square after dark and compel interactive connectivity between friends and strangers. Abstract messages and images that overlay the surface responded to activity and the public was responsible for designing the space with colorful particles of light as they play through the square.


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
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Intense things happening in World of Warcraft

Ok some intense things are happening in the virtual world. As if controlling a level 70 character was not enough trouble, these guys (and girls) control *five* 70 characters at the same time in 5 boxing setups on their own. An example:



I am speechless, all that stuff said about my little virtual identity expressed through physical means is a piece of coconut compared to the mental strength required to visually maintain and control 5 avatars running quests and killing bosses at the same time.

So if someone is up for running a 25 men dungeon on his own, there is still this possibility:



This raises interesting questions for the future of human computer interaction, because Blizzard allows you to run multiple copies of WoW on the same computer, we need special joysticks, probably new interfaces for elbows to control 2nd class characters, the feet to control the mages (they are our DPS after all they need sone action), and of course I would leave the hands for the tank warriors. Some speech recognition would be also of great help to switch stances.

A new class of displays and controllers is on the way.




More online discussion about WoW and more discussion about multiboxing!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
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An insight into John Maeda's shoe design for Reebok

The king of simplicity is revisiting the new frontier in business competition.
John Maeda' shoe design accompanies Reebok's trend for mass customization and brings his perspective on what can be done on the shoe "canvas".

In mass customization, firms have thrown away the old paradigm of Mass Production by creating a variety and customization through flexibility and quick responsiveness. This is a new logic more suited to a world in which stability and control can no longer be maintained.

Elastic visualization

A cluster within my delicious' tags visualized with 6pli

I discovered 6pli, a beautiful and useful tool for delicious tag visualization and navigation. The 6pli system connects to your delicious database and uses the bundles to bridge between very different content. I find this tool amazing; it is finally an answer to my struggle in navigating among my delicious catalog.
You can contact the creator of the tool, Santiago Ortiz, to create your own account.
More about his work.

Santiago --What is nice about order is that is very difficult to keep (because of the god entropy), so there is always eccentric posts, as the image shows:

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks). Project Gutenberg reached the following milestones as per dates:

1 eBook in 1971
10 eBooks in 1991
100 eBooks in 1994
1,000 eBooks in 1997
10,000 eBooks in 2003
100,000 eBooks in 2006


Don't miss the science-fiction bookshelf!


Illustration from Ullr Uprising by H. Beam Piper

Motion and identity

A few little dots moving make a figure look male or female, heavy or light, relaxed or nervous, happy or sad. A fun tool to play with by Bio Motion Lab.

Another famous tool that I love, sodaconstructor, a Java applet that animates two dimensional models made out of masses and springs. In this one, emotion and anthropomorphism take place at the spring level.

A while back, Le ciel est bleu designed very successful moving creatures depending on gravity points.


In the robotic sphere, Guy Hoffman's lamp is designed as a collaborative desk assistant and this by following your intentions around your desk. Even if the lamp is non-anthropomorphic per se, its motion certainly gives it an anthropomorphic credibility that serves the function of a desk assistant. Video of its first steps!

Stock puppets

8 foot tall fiberglass mannequins act as puppets, each puppet movement is connected to a face animation of the appropriate finance minister on the VGA monitor head. Via Pasta and vinegar.

The G-7 Stock Puppets are an Internet-driven kinetic installation that tracks the movements of global stock markets with seven larger-than-life marionette puppets. Using a real-time data stream, a network of PC laptops, and a complex electro-mechanical control system, the installation reanimates the abstract machinations of global financial markets as an absurdist carnival puppet show.

Web site

Motion mapping

Enlighted by Marc Downie's work at the MIT Media Lab, I just checked his company Openended Group where he co-creates digital artworks for stage, screen, gallery, museum and public spaces.
His PhD thesis (459 pages) on choreographing the extended agent is available for download online.

I selected this quote that I find particularly interesting regarding my current research ...

If you cast your mind back to childhood, you will soon discover our topic – motion-mapping – most clearly and imaginatively revealed. There in the games and pursuits of your earliest years you can distinguish this phenomenon in its three most basic forms. You can also follow each form forward in time to find out what they grew into -- forms of art.

You might start by bringing back the movement games you played so ardently as a child – in particular the games of imitation and mimicry, like Copycat, Follow the leader, Charades, Simon Says, and the innumerable variants you and your friends would improvise. These games had you map the movements of others onto your own body, sometimes in the simplest one-to-one transformations (as when you followed the leader), but sometimes more intricately, as when you mimicked a lion, or a horse, or a gladiator...

What's next with social networks?

I recently thought of creating a social network for dead people. Everyone could provide their digital representations, biometry information, simulation of personal touch that would only be revealed when dead. However, Mission Eternity is a similar concept that Regine Debatty noticed at ISEA.

The M∞ ARCANUM CAPSULES contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem: as infinite data particles they forever circulate the global info sphere – hosted in the shared memory of thousands of networked computers and mobile devices of M∞ ANGELS, people who contribute a part of their digital storage capacity to the mission.

Video




Arcanum Capsules contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem.

Eness

Everlab's 1 hour circle by Eness

I recently had the pleasure to meet Nimrod Weis, co-founder of Eness.



I discovered his Pixile work, an interactive digital sculpture which transforms a series of static objects into an interactive illusion giving this powerful illusion of real-life objects spinning, changing and responding to each other.



I love Virsual, their digital rocking horse, a wireless, ride-on rocking horse equipped with its own motion sensor device. As riders saddle up a 3D game is activated and displayed on screen. I definitely can tell how much children would love this.



Their latest installation commissioned by Audi to exhibit at the New Audi TT launch in Sydney next week. So if you are in Sydney, check it out!
Video.

A series of four translucent screens, each representing a solid cross section of time and space, Three dimensional objects rapidly passing through. These sections deflect, ricochet and manipulate thousands of virtual particles contained in these cross sections. The high impact point of collision between space and matter create an endless amount of esthetical beautiful iconic formations. The gravity of the particles are effected by camera tracking, meaning that the particles direction and velocity change depending on the position of the viewer.

More on Eness' web site

More bad guys

More guys are doing bad stuff on the web. This time amazon noir.

Amazon Noir was scripted as a internet-movie. The whole digital action (media hack) was carried out in the global massmedia, within the art world and on a highly sophisticated technical level in the clandestine matrix of our global networks.
The Bad Guys (The Amazon Noir Crew: Cirio, Lizvlx, Ludovico, Bernhard) stole copyrighted books from Amazon by using sophisticated robot-perversion technology coded by supervillain Paolo Cirio. A subliminal media fight and a covert legal dispute escalated into an online showdown with the heist of over 3000 books at the center of the story.

More on the The Big Book Crime by Regine Debatty on wmmna, also Burak Arikan shares his analysis of the holes in sociable web media systems and is looking for ways to use the holes for reverse exploitation. In his artwork he uses software-as-service strategy.

A while ago, I heard of the WhiteTunes, bad people who used to download high-res iTunes music videos from mac G4's. The WhiteTunes were not responsible for these illegal actions. It was definitely due to these huge temporary/(in)visible files that iTunes was infesting the computer with. Such a software bug is unforgivable!

video-cards

Children playing with Moving Pictures

Tangible artifacts have been linked to video as a way to support collaborative exploration of a video collection. More recently, Labrune and Mackay designed the TangiCam, a tangible camera made of two cameras on a circular frame to capture both the child and the video of the child. Researchers have worked on token-based access to digital information. See also pioneer research done by Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer.

A broad range of interactive table-tops have been designed for collaboration. From Yumiko Tanaka’s Plable, a traditional looking table under which children can build an imaginary world, to the DiamondTouch table that allows the collaboration and coordination of multiple users at the same time, designers developed a new concept for movie editing to help children understand the process of editing. In Moving Pictures, children arrange tokens on a table, guided by a GUI, in order to create and visualize the storyboard of a movie.



Plable

The Plable web site has awesome videos both of the process and the final project.

This interesting concept started to take a more "card shape" with Mika Miyabara and Tatsuo Sugimoto, the Movie cards, a set of printed cards that can be re-arranged in any order. Their bar code is used to identify them on a digital screen. Regine Debatty gives more details about this very interesting project.
Also, TVS explores the manipulation of digital video clips using multiple handheld computers.



Movie Cards

Recently, Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi created the Siftables, a set of small displays that can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. I bet that these miniature video cards will lead to very interesting projects ...
Paper on the siftables.



The siftables

Philips Design developed Pogo, a system that allows replaying visual sequences using tangible objects with a stationary computer for capturing and associating media to objects. Even though these systems invite capture and editing of the movie segments, they donnot propose the publication of the final movie created and the possibility to share it with peers remotely. For this reason, Moving Pictures integrates a videojockey mode to allow children to perform a final movie as much as inviting them to revisit the movie impact.


Pogo

Allowing authorship as a design principle in most Tangible Interfaces is rare. It is probably due to the fact that it requires a very flexible interface and a software architecture that takes care of data management. This design principle can allow children to become active participants instead of simply observers. In Moving Pictures, tangible media containers can easily be integrated in mobile technology and also be combined for performance using a video jockey platform. Maybe a new version could use the potential of the siftables ;)

Upgrade! Boston - Turbulence talk

Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director of Turbulence invited me to give a talk. So April 12th at Art Interactive I will present some of my work. There is a rumor that Dr Yasmine Abbas might also be available to share her latest findings on the neo-nomads.

See you there!

Digital marks

A little bit on digital marks, I selected a variety of them.

The semacode, a two dimensional code that encodes a URL. The picture below is the semacode of architectradure. Thank you Michael Surtees for the link! This tag embed the URL address of my blog, that can be read by your cell phone and send you to its page. I guess it avoids typing in the URL and you can rapidly go through a series of web sites using the respective tags.


semacode of architectradure

It is especially useful for combining physical space to digital content. The Semacode's Software Development Kit has is developed for ubiquitous computing by creating visual tags for objects and contexts, and read them using a mobile camera phone. The physical Wikipedia called Semapedia , created by Alexis Rondeau and Stan Wiechers, allows you to add place tags on places and things to link them to the relevant Wikipedia articles.


trash can with a wikipedia tag

Semacode technical paper

Urban tapestries allows public mapping and sharing by combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems. This system was linked to Natalie Jeremijenko's famous feral robots -open source robots for investigating contaminated urban sites- and called Robotic Feral Public Authoring: "Adding the sensor readings to online mapping tools, such as Urban Tapestries, suddenly brings the relationships between environment and home vividly to life. It enables people to feel they can learn about their environment and have the evidence to do something about it"

Yellow Arrow allows a community to tag places using arrows. You can post a message using the arrow and anyone could retrieve it using their cell phone. Another method to link digital content to a physical place. The community of yellow arrow is quite big. Their blog.



Elens allows anyone to create talking landmarks. Developed by the MIT Media Lab it allows anyone to tag a place by adding a sticker on a physical location, sticker that can later be scanned by a cell phone, in this case the Motorola A1000.

M-views developed at the MIT media lab in the interactive cinema group -media fabrics- with Glorianna Davenport, explores the "ideas, methods, and culture of mobile cinema, which is experienced in temporal and spatial narrative segments that can be delivered on context-aware mobile devices."

In 2002, I researched with Glorianna Davenport on technologies to allow digital information to communicate with the physical space. I worked on Passing Glances a system that enables users to create ambient urban interludes through the use of SMS text messages. Associated graphics and storytelling were projected in the urban space.
CHI'04 paper
Enarrative5 2003 paper

With these tags, the physical space is tagged to the digital space. One can think the other way around and tag the virtual space with physical content. That is what Josh Lifton told me he was working on the other day. Josh created a plug sensor/actuator network, called the dual reality lab, that links the MIT Media Laboratory space to a virtual lab space in the Second Life online virtual world.


Location of the MIT Media Laboratory in Second Life

More info technical about the plug

Design and Intuition

Designing interactions book

Few weeks ago, I asked my advisor Hiroshi Ishii to lend me the Designing interactions book from 2007 in which he presents multisensory interaction design. I particularly liked the organization of the book in a form of a small encyclopedia of interviews illustrated by successful examples from the first PC prototypes to the existential design of the RCA interaction design department.
The book can be discovered online with streamed interviews and samples of work.

Video interviews

Video interview of Hiroshi Ishii

Video interview of John Maeda

Today, Hiroshi invited Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, to talk about "Design and Intuition" at the MIT Media Lab and to introduce his book.

abstract of the talk
Interactive technology is everywhere, seeping into every crack and cranny of our lives. It's not just the mouse that we use for pointing and clicking, plus the desktop and windows on our screens. It's the TV we watch, the iPods that help us enjoy music, video games, digital cameras, phone services, Palmtops, plus the aesthetic, social and cultural interventions that we experience. Bill Moggridge will describe a design process that is common to these examples. He will show how design opportunities can be identified by discovering people's latent needs, behaviors, and desires, and by creating new ways to serve and support them. He will demonstrate how designers can visualize new products, services, spaces, media and software-based interactions, and bring them to life by prototyping. He will discuss the values inherent to Design Thinking and the processes that can help to harness the power of intuition in designing interactions.

bio of Bill Moggridge
Bill Moggridge is cofounder of IDEO, independently ranked by business leaders as one of the most innovative companies in the world. A Royal Designer for Industry, Bill designed the world's first laptop computer. He pioneered interaction design and is one of the first people to integrate human factors into the design of software and hardware. He has been a visiting professor in interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London, lecturer in design at the London Business School and a member of the steering committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. He is currently consulting associate professor in the joint program in design at Stanford University. His book Designing Interactions is available from The MIT Press.

Moore Pattern

Inspired by the wooden kinetic work of David Roy, Jeff Lieberman just created Moore Pattern a kinetic sculpture that overlays patterns on top of one another using two counter-rotating bead-blasted aluminum disks, driven from a single motor below with a belt drive mechanism.

Watch the video to witness the moiré effect.

Sculpting Behavior

Hayes Raffle not only just had two full academic papers accepted to the first class conference IDC 2007: Interaction design and Children but he is also a talented sculptor and designer. His Super Cilia Skin reflects his aesthetic sensibility and his ongoing passion for kinetic sculpture.

Video

Super Cilia Skin

After co-creating and designing the award-winning ZOOB® building system, Hayes joined the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and created Topobo, a 3D constructive assembly system with kinetic memory and the ability to record and playback physical motion.
Video



a ZOOB® creature


a Topobo creature

If you happen to be in the bay area, don't miss Hayes' talk, open to the public, that he is giving at the Berkeley Institute of Design, UC Berkeley, March 6th, from 1 to 2pm.
Information about his talk.

During the talk, he will explain how with Topobo children can assemble sculptures that dance and walk. He will present Fuzzmail a program that allow children to write a message that unfolds in time. He will show how with Jabberstamp children can embed stories, sounds and voices in their original drawings.

Robotic furniture design

Woojuin


Woojuin magazine table

Designer Victor Vetterlein works on robotic furniture. His Woojuin (2007) is a light fixture inspired by pod architecture & robotics. In the Woojuin magazine table, the reference to robotic is clear, and proposes a critique on automated lives in a digital age.



More pictures on Moco Loco and Archinect

Issey Miyake by Etienne Mineur

Stunning interactive graphic piece for Issey Miyake by Etienne Mineur. Jean-Jacques Birgé talks about la derniere valse of this work.



Spring summer 2007 women collection.
Spring summer 2007 men collection.
Collections designed by Naoki Takizawa for Issey Miyake.