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
.............................................

Mutsugoto

Mutsugoto is an interactive installation that invites couples to experience an intimate communication over a distance created by Tomoko Hayashi, Stefan Agamanolis and Matthew Karau.





Begin by laying on the bed and wearing the special ring. As you relax and think about your partner, gently move your hand around your body. These movements are traced on your own body as well as your partner laying in the other bed. Twinkling spots give a hint of where your partner is drawing. If you follow your partner’s movements and your strokes cross, the lines will react with each other and reflect your synchrony.

Don't forget to check the beautiful video of Mutsugoto. This is the first time I've seen ambient remote communication being that beautifully achieved and that sensual.





In 2003 Tomoko Hayashi created Intimacy is a series of accessories for people who exist in a long-distance relationship. The accessories are a combination of ties or undergarments with jewelry such as necklace or ring. Each accessory encloses jewelry inside and is heat-pressed to make an embossed pattern of the jewelry on its surface. Lovers can take the jewelry out to give it as a gift to their lover in a distant location. This allows lovers to share the memory of the object remotely and feel close to each other. The embossed pattern will fade away little by little (through pressure, moisture or heat) with daily use. When they meet again, the lovers can recreate the pattern by pressing the piece with a very hot iron.




Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

iPhone case

Nice skin for my iPhone!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Vein Viewer

The VeinViewer by Luminetx™ uses a combination of near-infrared light and patented technologies to image vascular structures, thus allowing physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals to clearly see accessible vasculature (or lack thereof) in real time, directly on the surface of the skin. The near-IR camera located the subcutaneous veins and project their location onto the surface of the skin.

This technology reminds me of the device used to visualize inside a baby in the e-baby's video.


Screenshot of the e-baby video - 2003
Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Painting on real objects

Deepak Bandyopadhyay, Ramesh Raskar, Henry Fuchs have built a prototype system for virtual painting on real movable objects. A project from 2001 that should by now be easier to democratize!

Imagine a world where all the objects around you can be animated and augmented interactively in real time; where you can, for instance, paint virtual designs on objects in the environment, which then stay in place as you modify or move them around! This opens up new possibilities for interaction in augmented environments, and gives rise to new applications in tele-immersion, medicine, architecture, art and user interfaces.

Check also Kimiko Ryokai's digital paintbrush. Her brush allows artists to draw digitally with an "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

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
.............................................

Social Resonance: Balancing Reputation with Tangible Design

Online data about our everyday activities is available for almost anybody who takes the time to spy on us. Everything that makes us live in the real world through emails, video, photo, blogs, online shopping, calendar, to name a few, is "trackable". We are entirely public, our virtual identity is somewhat the shadow of our physical existence. Not talking about avatars up to anonymous content that gives us a second life on the screen, but wouldn't that be scary to have our anonymous virtual self reflected back to us?

The research of Alyssa Wright at MIT's Ambient Intelligence research group directed by Pattie Maes consists of the ongoing design of a tangible reputation system, Social Resonance, that uses a wearable device to merge face-to-face interaction with online networking.

I love her attempt to bridge a virtual identity with a "real world" one. New forms of tangible systems can be designed to leverage the strengths, and bridge the discrepancies, of reputation systems. Like its virtual counterparts, this system aims to make explicit the perspective of anonymous actors. Yet unlike online reputations, this system is negotiated through real world action and signals.



Reputation data is mapped to an ambient display and used to preserve public readability without creating personal distress. At any state, the device is on and provides readable data. It is the shift between states, visible over time, that allows for introspection. Social Resonance attempts to map the journey, not the destination, between colors.


Mapping resonance to 5-phase color shift


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

DIY music box

Traditional musical boxes normally have a single tune (unless you have an advanced version with different cylinders). But in this case, the music box, which is hand cranked, has a strip of paper that passes through it, and the little holes in this strip determine the tune. The Music Box comes with one strip of paper already punched with the tune 'Brahms Lullaby'. There are then 2 blank strips of paper and a hole punch, which will allow you to create tunes of your own! It makes for a fun and interactive way to learn and create music. The Music Box has a two octave range, and can play chords, not just single notes.


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Insect telepresence

Suppose we can make a miniature camera whose motion can be controlled by a human. Put this camera in a colony of insects, and the human will gain a whole new perspective on the insects and their biology. Blow up the image to scale down the human appropriately, and amplify the insects sounds as well, and you have a complete telepresent experience that is incredibly exciting and educational at the same time. Technically, camera technology, optics and manipulation are well up to the task. A complete insect telepresence exhibit is now being constructed for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's entrance, in collaboration with the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, by Stacy All, Angela Demke and Ben Shamah at the Toy Robot Initiative.



Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Finally I got an iPhone

This week end I bought an iPhone. I never bought a phone so far, I wanted to feel I could still be lost. As mentioned in an interview for neo-nomad, I did not own/use/carry a cell phone. I was exclusively on Trillian and Skype. It started becoming an handicap, friends want to organize things, my research group needs to reach me in a blink, I felt too unreachable!

I am still working on the design of my own gear. Well, yesterday I tested the Apple Macbook air, it feels like two sheets of paper maintains the all thing together. Too fragile. Very light. The design is too beautiful to be touched, held, hugged and smashed. When design becomes a constraint, it kind of misses the point. After all, materials are socially constructed through a sensory education and tools.

The iPhone, on the other end, looks beautiful and sturdy. The only inconvenient is its shiny screen that easily becomes a repository for oily molecules. Other than that, it is traveling in a brown sock in my bag. What better casing than a sock! It can protect anything, and I just slide the iPhone in and out of it and feels part of the smooth iPhone finger tip design! I could not help it: I took pictures of the Stuff-my-love and Terminally Juvenile-iPhone combo!


The expected features are awesome. I spent an hour at the Apple store bombarding the salespersons with questions. I am satisfied. Now that I've used it, I love it. One of my fear to use the roaming data versus wifi is gone. It is fast enough! I can read my pdf on it if the data comes from the mail. One thing that bothers me is that I cannot import my bookmarks from firefox, I cannot download my pics/movie from the web, etc... So to fix that problem I looked at some third parties apps. I made a list at the end of the post. If you recommend some necessary ones, let me know. Apple lists the popular ones, but unfortunately not popular to my taste.


Now the 2008 updates are pretty cool. I wanted to design a GPS system connected to an iphone. Well the map location works pretty well. The newest version of Maps allows you to find your approximate location using information from Wi-Fi networks and cell towers. Drop a pin on the map then drag it to a specific location to get directions and real-time traffic information and search for nearby points of interest. The new Hybrid map view lets you see major street names on top of satellite imagery.

A few samples to code the iPhone.




As a start I selected a good list of iPhone apps. My favorite ones so far are the Erica utilities, a collection of handy command-line utilities. picSnap snaps one picture (jpg) from the command line. sendFileByMail takes a file to send by mail. It opens the mail program, creates a new message with that attachment, snap2album snaps a picture of your screen and adds it to your Photos library on the iPhone.

The essential one seems App.Tapp. It supports installing, updating and uninstalling applications from multiple sources.

iFlickr is pretty neat too. This is an app to take pictures on your iPhone and upload to your Flickr account.

I have aim and will now install MobileChat. Also not tested yet but IM+ for Skype is now available on the iPhone ...



Mobile-RSS is a native iPhone application which remembers all your feeds and give you an easy interface for viewing, adding, and removing.

Also why not the Nes.app, a fully functional, feature-rich Nintendo emulator, or the Sketches, a way to sketch a simple diagram as a quick reminder. "Scribble your thoughts quickly, select a picture from your photo album to draw notes on top, you can even erase your drawing by shaking your iPhone, as if it were an etch-a-sketch!"

And to finish by a pedometer, an experimental iPhone application to measure steps as you walk. SiffyTech author of this app, also provides us with their source code.

Those will be my first try. Many more to test!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................