Stop motion Lego movie by a seven year old girl!

Playful Inventions and Explorations: What's to Be Learned from Kids?

With their boundless curiosity, fertile imagination, and natural mastery of the art of self-directed learning, children have much to teach adults about creativity and innovation. That's perhaps even more true with today's "digital natives," says developmental psychologist Edith Ackermann, whose work explores—and exploits—the intersections of play, learning, design, and technology. An educator and researcher, Ackermann has consulted for LEGO and the LEGO Learning Institute for more than 20 years and worked under the direction of Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist renowned for his studies on children at play, at the Centre International d'Epistémologie Génétique. She has taught at Harvard, MIT, and other universities.

Video

Collaborative tablets

Jak Spencer designed a hardware based solution for group meeting collaboration. Four touch surfaces are used individually by meeting participants for group work. The hardware platform combined with a software solution to aid collaboration in meeting environments. It has been designed specifically for Architects and Designers to work on 2D drawing files and 3D CAD files.



The system combines an intuitive interactive user interface with cutting edge touch technology. Users can work in presentation mode where the full 32’ surface of an LCD monitor becomes multi-touch enabled, or in collaboration mode – where the touch surface is broken into 4 separate tablets.

The project has developed from early stage blue-sky designs, through concept selection and detailed design development to a real prototype. In the prototype the top left hand tablet is fully functional with the electronics housed in the frame, whilst the software has been simulated to suggest methods to ease design collaboration. Have a look at the video for more info.

Your hand is the new magic wand!

OnObject designed by Keywon Chung (my officemate!!), Michael Shilman, Chris Merrill and Hiroshi Ishii is a small device user wears on hand to program physical objects to respond to gestural triggers.



Attach an RFID tag to any objects, grab them by the tag, and program their responses to your grab, release, shake, swing, and thrust gestures using built in microphone or on-screen interface. Using OnObject, children, parents, teachers and end users can instantly create gestural object interfaces and enjoy them. Copy-paste the programming from one object to another to propagate the interactivity in your environment.



Watch the videos!

Applications

Children recording on objects

System

SIGGRAPH 2010 : Emerging Technologies Trailer

Magic books

Talking about creative projects and about amazing people, Etienne Mineur, who was my professor in Paris (lucky me again!!) along with Bertrand Duplat just released their éditions volumiques.

They consider paper a new computing platform, envisioning an OS made of paper, video games in paper, etc... They also research on the relationship between the act of reading and the physical handling of a book along with their relationship to new technologies. The core concept in this work is to stop opposing the digital world to the paper world but on the contrary to find a synergy and complementarity: working on tangible books, connected and magical.

Here they are, this new series of prototypes and research on this subject, some of the magic book will be available in September 2010!

Some avant-première videos!

(i)Pawn







(i)Pirates





The Night of the Living Dead Pixels







Meeting-Zombies







Le livre qui tourne ses pages tout seul







le livre qui disparaît

Ok go magic numbers!

Jeff Liebermann has created so many creative projects I blogged on, including a few collaborative projects that we worked on together (lucky me!) Now he is doing the coolest music videos. Recently, Eric Gunther and Jeff Liebermann just made a music video with OK GO. You've seen Ok GO on treadmills and in their backyard, but you've never seen them like this. With some fancy cameras and a little magic, they figured out how to dance with time.





For those of you who like numbers...

The fastest they go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives them a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total they shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse - over a million frames of video - and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh, and notice that it's one continuous camera shot.

They also made a special friend in the process. Her name is Orange Bill and she's a goose. You will agree that she clearly has a future in music videos.

The song is called End Love and it's off their new album.

And they had hella fun making it and I believe them!

A tribute to a love for books

French Artist Olivier Vaubourg, based in Zagreb, Croatia, explores the relationship between light, textures and the chosen words of books he loves.

The enlightened Machiavelli

Baudrillard | The perfect crime | Blood

Lyotard | Condition post-moderne | Ligne

Guattari | Chaosmose | Slice

Do you feel the power ?

Amazon's reviews

I was reading some Amazon reviews and stumbled onto this dude's reviews that are hilarious!

Start with the Creative Fatality Gaming Headset, and you'll move onto the review for Uranium Ore ...



I will spend more time reading Amazon's reviews from now on, thank you Adam!!

Video feedback and recorder on toy accessories

Working on tangible video capturing, editing and performing systems since '00, it is nice to see a product that is directly translated from my research! At the MIT Media Lab, I was Mattel fellow for four consecutive terms and for my PhD I created Picture This, basically dolls with camera integrated in their accessories to alternate view points, record and play back videos. Mattel will release their first doll with video recorder integrated in July 2010!



Pictures from Chick Chiplets

So more details about the product, Mattel developed a toy that features a video camera built directly into Barbie’s necklace with a LCD video screen on her back, so you can record and view everything that Barbie’s seen and experienced!



You can record videos up to 30 minutes long and even edit videos (add music and sound effects) on Barbie.com. The Barbie Video Girl Doll will cost around $50 and will be available in July 2010...