First, I just came back from the UK with two iPads. They have been available in Europe for a long time, but not in Sweden. I couldn’t figure out a sensible reason, other than major lobbying from the swedish network providers. Anyway, we have two 16GB wifi-only units in the lab for your iPadding pleasure (see how happy the girl is on the product shot!).

Second, a HP Touchsmart 600 PC has been purchased for making multi-touch work more accessible and easy-going. The all-in-one solution computer provides multi-touch capabilities without the typical hardware setup: aligning camera, starting 3 applications to mashup everything, and fiddling with video filters. It’s not the best MT platform out there, but it was cheap.

Finally, we have received the Roland MDX-40A, a new small CNC machine/robot to take over the atom-world. The motivation for getting this type of machine is to experiment, play and push the boundaries of computer-controlled activities. How do you mix and blur the line between computation and the real material world: drilling 500 holes in a particular pattern, making PCBs without chemicals, engrave your portrait in a piece of wood, make a custom case for your next project, etc. It will take a few more weeks before it is fully operational, but the machine is finally here. Yeapi.

Check out the product page for all the nifty details.

It uses a Wiimote hack!! Yaay!

Link here

TEI (Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction) is a really great conference. For 2011, they are starting a Design Challenge competition only for students. The venue is Funchal, Madeira in Portugal, not bad! Here is the full call for participation:

Always wanted to fly, zap your enemies with lightning, or own an invisibility cloak? Now’s your chance to apply your design and engineering skills to achieve your dreams. TEI 2011, the fifth international conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction, is delighted to announce its first student design challenge, which will focus on superhero costumes and accessories. More information is available below and on the design challenge website: http://www.tei-conf.org/11/participation_/design-challenge/

Looking forward to seeing you (and your superhero alter ego) at TEI 2011!

IMPORTANT DATES
October 31st: Entry deadline (a simple email with details about your team, nothing actually due)
December 10th: TEI early registration deadline (confirm challenge participation by registering)
Dec. 10th-Jan. 22nd: Project development
January 23-26th: TEI conference: design presentation

PRESENTATION, JUDGING and AWARDS
Projects will be presented at a special runway event held during TEI 2011. Each team will have 5-10 minutes to dazzle the crowd with a demonstration of their costume in action. This presentation will be modeled on a fashion runway show, so teams should arrange to have someone wear and demonstrate the costume in person.

We will award cash prizes of $1000 each in three categories:

• Inventiveness
• Quality of execution
• Presentation and style

All TEI attendees will vote to elect the winners in each category.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

See all the details on the TEI 2011 website

Check also Beyond the touchscreen: Projecting the future short article from the New Scientist.

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) recently revamped its quaterly student magazine XRDS, which is largely run by students. The first issue celebrating the relaunch is titled The Future of Interaction. It contains many interesting texts related to IxD: a profile on Hiroshi Ishii, brain and natural interfaces and a bunch of other nifty stuff. There is even a little tutorial for coding an app for real-time face detection using a webcam.

I received the print version at home as a student member (it’s quite cheap btw), but it is also available online via the ACM Digital Library (should be accessible while on UMU network or at the library). Or contact me if you are keen on getting the PDF version.

http://xrds.acm.org/

It comes from Roger Linn, the sampled-sound drum machine guru who is behind some of the most famous drum machines out there.

You can read all about the new musical instrument on his site: http://rogerlinndesign.com/products/linnstrument/index.html

Also, while at it, check his nice New High-Tech Musical Instruments page showcasing a lot of novel muscial instruments, and his list of drum machine projects. A clever man for sure!

This low cost self-balancing skateboard project is a mix between the Segway-like scooter and Electric Segway Skateboard we’ve covered before. Add an Arduino microcontroller, a motor, and some sensors to a standard skateboard and you get a wheeled vehicle which does the balancing job on its own.

Link

There is more media coverage listed on the official site and the CHI2010 Madness Youtube page.

It is always interesting to discover the history, process and ideas behind a product or service. It was nice to discover their early Lemur prototype back from 2003. The interview presents nothing really new or ground-breaking about the future of multi-touch. But throughout the article/interview, you realize that multi-touch is so much about all the hype and crap right now (rotating videos or ten-finger painting), it’s difficult to find and appreciate well-thought and truly meaningful multi-touch offerings. I personally have seen only a few (2-3) on the Microsoft’s Surface and the iPhone. Out of gazillions apps and developers out there, that is a pretty low success rate I would say. It’s not the norm but more the exception. Sure you can say that the “pinch to zoom” gesture is great and useful. But with only 2 touches, it kind of the low-end of multi-touch.

So it goes back to the whole ecology of multi-touch that Mr. Largillier talks about: getting all the pieces together is totally not trivial. The design approach (and understanding) has to match the hardware and software integration. And like always, details, details, details. The details matter very much: latency, robustness, accuracy and the likes.

Anyways, go and read the article:
The Future of Multi-Touch: Behind the Scenes with Stantum, JazzMutant Co-Founder

Matt Brown, designer and human extraordinaire of IxD 2009 and Design Fancy fame, seems to have done it again. But this time, he charmed no other than Paola Antonelli, of all sorts of fame. With Core77, she’s curating this exhibition for Significant Objects, and assigned Matt the difficult task of coming up with a story around the use of a (past-future?) material.

Here’s a peek:

When I first met Ron Chutney I was 16 and looking to cut a record. Sang a few songs for him at his studio and I remember my voice being horrible and embarrassing, so imagine my excitement when Ron heard the first track and said, “Yeah we can Crumpter that up just fine.” Crumpters. Today auto-tuned vocals are all the rage, but no one remembers the analog version Chutney created back in the late ’50s. It was a way for guys like me to get an acceptable track out. You see, if you sang through it, your voice would be pitch perfect every time, “like an angel,” Ron would say. Nowadays they teach advanced harmonics in the third grade, so I probably don’t have to explain to you how a Crumpter works — but I will anyway. Each one has to be made by hand, in the winter, in Detroit.

You can read the full article, and see a whole lot of additional images, here. Congrats Matt, witty and entertaining as usual.

We have a great Interaction Workshop with tons of items, devices, gadgets, tools and such. Since we started the workshop 3 years ago, it’s been a struggle to keep track of the stuff, what we have in stock and what students/staff are borrowing. Last year, we started using paper lists, but it’s really far from a good solution: the lists become really messy and pens don’t write that well on vertical sheets!

I had this Booking System in mind for over 2 years now, and I’m quite happy to release it to the world today. It aims at solving a few needs we have in the Interaction Workshop:

• Have a master list of what we have and its value. For insurance and administration purposes.
• Keep track of what students/staff take out of the workshop. A booking system that allows people to see our list of equipment/devices and what is currently available for borrowing.
• Show what similar items are available if the selected one is not available.
• Provide information, support, links or other data for how to use a particular piece of equipment.
• Manage bookings (create/edit/return) fast and efficiently with RFID tags on items and users’ access card. Swipe-Swipe-Click-Click => You are done (or something like this)!

So the first public version is now online at http://www2.dh.umu.se/iworkshop. As you will notice, I didn’t spend much time on the visuals. My goal was to first have a functional system out and ready for use. This project has been under my TODO list for so long, I had to get it out in whatever form. In my opinion, it is missing a few key functions/things like images of the items, and a few other nifty things, but this will have to wait for a later version. I’m not in Umeå this Spring and integrating a webcam functionality from abroad is not trivial. Also, I want to see how people use it and adapt it to what people need or want.

The system is web-based using the CakePHP framework, and it uses AJAX and Javascript extensively. The dedicated station in the Interaction Workshop has a RFID reader hooked to it, and tag values are sent to the browser via a Processing + AppleScript + Javascript bridge.

At the moment, guests and students can not create and return bookings. This has to be done by staff (anyways most of the stuff is locked). We’ll see how it goes like this and adapt along the way.

Send all your feedback to me. And let me know how enjoyable or painful it is to use.

Here’s a new video by Julien Vallée* and Nicolas Burrows. It’s kind of a nice summary of what we learned in those four days with him. Only done more nicely.

*the fellow that came up to Umeå last November to give the IxD 2 students a workshop on stop-motion video.

Read about how it works here.

Spy away! Take no prisoners.