From the PDF document:

Welcome to the brave new world of designing interfaces for Kinect! Successfully designing these interfaces and interactions isn’t easy, but the reward is great and will delight your users and enable solutions that were either not possible or too expensive to be implemented just a few years ago. This Human Interface Guidelines document is meant to share what we’ve learned about designing Kinect interfaces with you and set you off on a path towards success that avoids major pitfalls we’ve found, highlights effective designs that we’ve used, and lets you focus on the unique problem that you are solving with Kinect. As we continue to learn and grow, we will update this document to reflect our findings and capabilities, with the hope that our knowledge will help make your user experience the best it can be.

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Interaction design at its best. Dont forget to record your own muscle music at the end! ;-)

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Hey we know these people, they are just next door at the <a href=”http://interactiveinstituteumea.com/”>Interactive Institute UmeÃ¥</a>.

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<a href=”http://www.tshirtos.com”>http://www.tshirtos.com</a>

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This is not a new release; just really nice to watch if you haven’t seen it yet.

From youtube:
Destino is an animated short film released in 2003 by The Walt Disney Company. Destino is unique in that its production originally began in 1945, 58 years before its eventual completion. The project was a collaboration between American animator Walt Disney and Spanish painter Salvador Dalí.

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Mechanical touch typing on an iPad, no problem! Industrial designer Austin Yang built a rig so “users can enjoy the old feeling of typing and also the lastest technology”

http://www.austin-yang.com/index.php?/projects/iturntable/

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Really amazing gems and classics from another era.

There are many more, check them out on ATT’s youtube channel or at
http://techchannel.att.com/showpage.cfm?ATT-Archives

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Processing.js augmented with Bret Victor‘s mind-blowing talk on using a responsive programming environment.

http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/

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Clever IxD or over-designed?

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You remember SimCity? I personally spent hours playing this game many years back, watching my urban creations grow and collapse. The game is scheduled for a major new release in 2013, see the newest trailer.

I always have been fascinated about how such games could be developed. The level of complexity seems unmanageable. Electronic Arts made a few clips showing the capabilities of their new game engine. It’s all about agents, simulations, rules, resources and paths, and the following behind the scene videos make it look quite simple and easy.

Complemented with a 3 parts series: scenario 1, scenario 2, scenario 3

If you want to discover a bit more about the GlassBox game engine, read up this article.

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Today, August 15th, is the last day that Adobe lets you install Flash on your Android mobile. After that date, no more (link). Adobe offers a nice roadmap for Flash/Air, exposing some of the arguments behind stopping Flash on Android. While this is good news for moving towards an all-HTML5 ecosystem for mobile interaction, it also means that designers are loosing a nifty tool for building prototypes on mobiles. I have never been a huge fan of Flash, but I have used it extensively on many projects, to quickly cobble graphical interface ideas and hardware into something that is semi-workable and presentable. It was never very elegant (remember that serial – network socket bridge!) , but it worked well enough in most cases.

What are the alternatives to build and deploy interactive prototypes on mobiles these days?

Native apps
It requires commitment to learn a suite of tools and APIs, but this gets you close and personal with the mobile platform. You can directly leverage the built-in features (multitouch, geolocation, sensors, etc).

Cross platforms frameworks
The main idea is to develop once and output to many platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Web browser). In this category, you will find Adobe Air, PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova), AppMobi, Tizzi, and many more. In general, these frameworks excel at working with the look of the interfaces, not so much how to connect things in the background, i.e. getting the accelerometer data from the mobile device. And trying to connect to hardware is often challenging or just plain impossible. Network protocols are easier to work with though.

Specific prototyping apps
Processing 2.0 (still in beta) has an Android mode to work on this mobile platform. It also has a javascript mode too, easing the development of projects for the larger web interworld. OpenFrameworks is now capable of building iOS and Android executables. Not all features are supported, but it is a joy to see that OF can now work on mobile platforms.

Are you using Flash to prototype IxD projets on mobile devices? How will you adapt your practice? Will you miss it?

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… from Disney… now with 100% more touching sensation!

REVEL is a new wearable tactile technology that modifies the user’s tactile perception of the physical world. It can add a layer of artificial tactile texture to almost any surface or object, with very little if any instrumentation of the environment. As a result, REVEL can provide dynamic tactile sensations on touch screens as well as furniture, walls, wooden and plastic objects, and even human skin.

REVEL is based on Reverse Electrovibration. It injects a weak electrical signal into anywhere on the user’s body, creating an oscillating electrical field around the user’s skin. When sliding his or her fingers on a surface of the object, the user perceives highly distinctive tactile textures that augment the physical object. Varying the properties of the signal provides a wide range of tactile sensations.

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Another very nice video from the Focus Forward series. Great story of two industrial design students from Lund who were able to bring their vision of an inflatable bike helmet to market. Sure it’s not cheap in its first inception, but it’s going somewhere!!! Nice work Anna and Terese!

http://www.hovding.com

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