Maybe one of you will find this useful. An article in the NYT offers some insight on the subject.
An excerpt:
“Boredom as a temporary state is another matter, and in part reflects the obvious: that the brain has concluded there is nothing new or useful it can learn from an environment, a person, an event, a paragraph.”
This year’s projects are finally online. Thanks to all the students for an amazing course. What you see here in only the tip of the iceberg. All the projects presented below are the results of only one week of work. The students tinkered, prototyped, experimented and built so much more during the full duration of the class (5 weeks)!
Electronic Collage by BenjamÃÂn Dueñas
A Tale of Two Tombs by Jose Ledon, Ruedee Sarawutpaiboon, Sotiris Kotronias
Unbranded by Mikko Pitkänen and Matthew Brown [coming soon]
Prefuse is a Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization applications. It supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. It’s kind a like Processing, but for infoviz.
Flare is a port of Prefuse for Actionscript. Try demos.
Birdeye is the same for Flex.
Read more here. (excellent site on anything related to infoviz)
P.S. Processing 1.0 has been released !!!
I was looking through the Infopornographics! post and found this tool called Skyrails.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2d312_dXEs]
Download the program here. It’s for windows, but if you follow the google code link, they say it works with wine on Intel Mac and Linux.
Three Aviary image editing tools are now out of beta and for everybody to use.  I especially like Peacock, which takes something from the video world (nodal compositing) to create new iterations on images.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aosNtWsvnk]
The more like these appear the more competiton Adobe has and … (that was uncalled for, sorry) Now Aviary has Phoenix, image editing (Photoshop without the bloat), Peacock (something different) and Toucan (color tools). Raven for vector graphics is in alpha. 3D, DTP, Video editing, and much more are coming. For free!
Start using Aviary now (IT’S FREE)
Documentary. Educate yourselves.
Part 1
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I3T_kLCBAw]
Part 2
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKZm34jsNHY]
Real time face tracking. It’s like Johnny Lees wiimote head tracking without the wiimote or IR. Maybe some of you can figure out another way to use this than just 3D games. Free for non-commercial use without facial expression tracking.
In 3D gaming
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWkpdtFZoBE]
Expression tracking
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mng_VKJ2XU]
Download for Vista (Mac version coming later)
Well, just because nothing really interesting has happened, I give you …(drumroll)… a flexible OLED screen!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2SCZvU8sGU]
via OLED-info
If you google stuff while logged on to your account, you’ll notice a bunch of new buttons next to the search results. That’s the new your own personal searchwiki. Check the video on usage
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8Pl1H0dIXE]
via Neatorama
A nice little video about the origin of the LED and how it works.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/make_presents_the_led_a_m.html
I guess you guys have probably already seen thisâ€â€but a very good idea it is, I think.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U-mvfjyiao]
Found on IDEO’s history timeline.
Well, here’s something that will be on everybodys FunWall or SuperFunWall or on all the blogs in about five minutes. Real world Guitar Hero game with bikes, LEDs, toilet paper, and flames. Amazing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlMYWuGUZlM]
Target, a giant retail chain in the US, launched a concept earlier this year requesting old Target plastic shopping bags to be mailed back (through a tie-in with the magazine Newsweek).
In return, participants were entitled to redeem one of the sturdier reusable shopping totes that were made from the old plastic bags. The totes were also sold (and sold out).
Some time ago I was shown how to layer plastic bags (Target or not) together and recombine them by applying heat with an iron to make a sturdier material you can shape or stitch together. You can make your own ghetto shopping tote, a wallet, or something a bit more useless.
