Inventing Interactive
I recently posted a link about research leading to creating a real-world holodeck. So it was interesting to discover these three films, created for Sony, which showed another technique for creating immersive experiences. Sony’s “trick” is to use projection mapping — which normally looks best from just a single static view point. They made the […]
I’ve heard the term digital native a lot, and the idea of them — kids that have grown up with digital technology and for whom it’s a natural part of the world. But there’s a even stronger implication: that they understand it so deeply that they view the world fundamentally different than non-natives. This video […]
Microsoft recently released a future vision video — looking at how people might get things done 5-10 years in the future. It’s a quite beautifully done piece, full of detail and scenarios. They’ve also put up a website which describes elements of the video in more detail. But what’s surprising is the intensity of the […]
This new ad from IBM, promoting their Smarter Healthcare initiative is more idea communication than interface. But, it’s nicely suggestive of the complexity of information that doctors and patients need to deal with. And it’s a teaser for the potential of IBM’s Watson in the health care space. As a side note, sorry for the […]
The blog Huds and Guis has put together three great video montages of UI design from the 2001 film Final Fantasy. The film may not be all that great, but these UI sequences are a lot of fun to watch. Definitely UI candy! It’s an interesting collection of holographic displays, globes and spheres, small detailed […]
Nike, as part of their Jumpman campaign has created a series of commercials called Dominate Another Day, or D3. And the really cool new blog, Huds and Guis, has posted some background information as well as all six videos. Head-up displays, augmented reality, and transparent screens; They aren’t the deepest fantasy UIs, but they’re still […]
Here are three interesting vision scenario projects from Michaël Harbourn, a designer currently studying in Paris. There’s a fascinating aspect to these projects — I’m not sure if the student, foreign (non-US), or product-design orientation is the source. But his use of morphable surfaces, and quiet, almost meditative, presentation style, is pretty neat. Aeon is […]
Here are a couple demos from Microsoft Research that I’ve recently discovered that are full of interesting future interaction ideas. The first video asks what we could do with touch-interfaces if we weren’t limited to finger (and multi-finger) input. What if we could use our whole hand? Called Rock & Rails, the technology demo proposes […]
Here’s a charming Augmented Reality vision piece, “Medley,” created by Mattias Wozniak and Björn Svensson as part of their Masters Thesis at Lund University in Sweden. It’s full of great, beautifully delicate, examples how AR could be incorporated into everyday life. A nice contrast to some of the alternative nightmarish advertising or boring corporate scenarios. […]
For Disney’s “TRON: Legacy,” Bradley Munkowitz, better known as GMUNK, was the lead animated graphics artist. He assembled and led a team of GFX all-stars who conceived, designed and animated approximately 10 minutes of UI sequences and holograms at Digital Domain for director Joseph Kosinski and visual effects supervisor Eric Barba. I was so happy […]
Space Fence is a $60-million future US space surveillance network — claimed to be able to detect objects as small as 10 cm (four inches) at heights up to 30,000 km (15,000 nautical miles). One of the key contractors, Lockeed Martin, recently posted a video (also on their How website) showing a vision of how […]
ImageFlow is a recently published project from Microsoft Research which aims to re-think the nature of image search. Rather than displaying search results in a grid or flat page-like layout, ImageFlow uses a 3D space in which the searcher can explore the content. The project is built upon some fascinating prior research. Specifically, that user […]
Here’s some super-interesting work from the Nokia Research Center showing five future mobile interface ideas. The introduction film is a charming animated scenario called Morph. It demonstrates some possibilities nanotechnologies might enable in future communication devices. But it’s not just dreaming, there’s some pretty hard-core science going on behind the scenes. Much of the vision […]
Check it out, two new films from BERG — what a great way to start the day. They’re sketches exploring ideas and principles behind Dentsu London‘s communications strategy Making Future Magic. The films don’t feature a lot of interactivity, they’re more about communication and information design. But they are quite beautiful, and calm, visions of […]
The first time I experienced a haptic interface was back in 1990, when I got a demo of Margaret Minsky’s Sandpaper system at MIT. Using a force-feedback joystick, users could move the screen’s cursor across a textured area and the joystick would simulate the feeling of resistance and surface. It was pretty cool to see […]
Look! Look! Look! My friend Keith Knueven has created a new logo for this blog! Take a moment, visit his website TDOOKK.com, and then hire him, immediately, for all your projects — he’s great! Thank you Keith!!! When I started Inventing Interactive, at the beginning of the year, I had no posts planed and no […]
When I was a kid I loved watching the 1970’s tv show Space: 1999. For some reason it was only on around 11 or 12 at night, and so I had to stay up late, which gave watching it a kind of other-worldly experience. A few months ago Sean Adams did a great post on […]
Using a timeline slider to scroll through video to find the moment when an object is at a specific position is awkward and never very precise. Dragon, a project from the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University, looks like a very cool solution. Dragon lets you directly manipulate objects in a video. With the […]
Swedish firm TAT (The Astonishing Tribe) has created a future vision of screen technology. Set in 2014, it shows some interesting technologies and use-cases — featuring stretchable surfaces and transparent displays. What’s super-cool is that the film is the result of an open innovation experiment. TAT asked people for input on what sort of inspirational […]
Get your 3D glasses back out — there’s more red-blue goodness ahead! Keiichi Matsuda, who created Domestic Robocop, has a new project: Augmented City. The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital […]