Inventing Interactive

Cascade

April 25, 2011 - In Present

Cascade is beautiful new tool, developed by the NYTimes R&D Lab, to analyze and understand how news stories move through social media networks. The app takes a huge amount of data — they publish over 6,000 pieces of content every month — and displays every “sharing event” that follows from them. It displays this information using two primary modes: “Story Mode,” which lets you look at a set of stories and their associated events); and…

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Hijackers

April 18, 2011 - In Present

I had a really interesting day today as a guest critic at Art Center’s graduate Media Design Program 2011 thesis review. It was a collection of projects divided into three categories: mediated experiences, exploratory futures, and critical accounts. I’m always fascinated by graduate design projects and the idea of design research. It can be a challenge sometimes, to see the application of the work, but the questions that are raised, and the discussions that happen,…

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3D via Head Tracking

April 14, 2011 - In Present - One comment

Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay just published their work for the iPad and iPhone that uses head tracking to figure out where you are, and then adjust the on-screen image to give a 3D feeling to the display. And it looks really cool — 3D without the special glasses. The demos are part of their research at LIG on “Head-Coupled Perspective on Mobile Devices.” Their work is inspired by technology that Johnny Lee developed (and…

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Two Screen TV

April 14, 2011 - In Present

What do you do when you’re watching tv? It’s old news that we multitask — using our laptops, ipads, and phones, and do all sorts of stuff. So it’s interesting to see these recent iPad apps that try to build on that activity — giving viewers a parallel track of information to accompany what’s on the tv. Disney is using their Second Screen technology to accompany select DVD releases. Running on an iPad, the apps sync with…

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Kinected. Conference

April 6, 2011 - In Present

There’s been a lot of Kinect-based experimentation lately, and, like so much of it, this new research project from the MIT Media Lab looks pretty cool. But it’s more than just another Kinect-hack — it’s full of intriguing ideas of how video-conferencing can adapt if it’s more than just a “dumb” carrier of video. It asks the question, “what would video conferencing be like, if it knew about the participants?” The team has come up…

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Medley AR

April 1, 2011 - In Future

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. Medley is based around the notion of “augmented reality visor seamlessly integrated into your world.” With this visor as a…

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Audio Only

March 31, 2011 - In Present

A couple years ago, when judging an interactive competition, there was an entry that started with a dark screen and, in the distance, a flickering candle. Using only sound, you moved through a landscape to get to the candle. If my memory is correct you weren’t rewarded with much more than a scare and then a fairly traditional website. But it was a nice example of something I’d urged my Art Center students to explore…

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Music Discovery and Organization

March 30, 2011 - In Present

I miss record stores. And I’m feeling nostalgic today. As a kid I remember taking the bus to the three story Tower Records in Westwood, flipping through albums, searching for things I’d heard on the radio. As a teen I’d drive to the mammoth Tower on Sunset, discovering new artists via Tower’s small, but quickly growing, CD bins. In my twenties I discovered specialized stores — Aaron’s on Highland had the most amazing selection, and…

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Quick Post: Nintendo 3DS AR Games

March 25, 2011 - In Quick

Nintendo’s 3DS Augmented Reality games look pretty cool. You place AR cards down, and the handheld gives you a magic view. Nothing especially new, but it’s beautifully done and looks quite responsive. The Archery game, shown here, looks great. It makes me want one (Link via Engadget.)

Gadget: Invention, Travel and Adventure

March 24, 2011 - In Past, Present

When the iPad was released last year, there were several titles that had strong echos of earlier days of interactive CD-ROMs. Relaxing on a sofa and exploring a new world was much more enjoyable than sitting at the computer where the sense of wonder and adventure quickly transformed into frustration and an eagerness to relax elsewhere. So it’s great to see a title from “back in the day” get reissued and brought, sensitively, up-to-date for…

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