A really really tiny Arduino/USB compatible board currently on kickstarter.
$10, 6-pin (3pwm), 8K memory
Soon in a fishing store near you.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXkf62qGFII]
UID has some of that coiled wire somewhere, so you can build your own lures.
KinÊtre is a research project from Microsoft Research Cambridge that allows novice users to scan physical objects and bring them to life in seconds by using their own bodies to animate them. This system has a multitude of potential uses for interactive storytelling, physical gaming, or more immersive communications.
Nice french-derived project name, but terrible pronunciation in the video!
It’s this time of year, and SIGGRAPH 2012 is celebrating the greatest computer graphics advances of the year.
Kyle McDonald has been exploring possibilities of face tracking using FaceShift Studio, an affordable markerless facial performance capture in development since 2009 and presented presented over the years at the SIGGRAPH conference. The tutorial below show you how to connect it to other apps in realtime via OSC with FaceShiftOSC, and connect to openFrameworks via his ofxFaceShift addon.
Pretty amazing facial tracking, and fun noise making!
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“This [film] is about patient and dedicated teaching, about learning to look and visualize in order to design, about the importance of drawing. It is one designer’s personal experience of issues that face all designers, expressed with sympathy and encouragement, and illustrated with examples of Inge [Druckrey]’s own work and that of grateful generations of her students. There are simple phrases that give insights into complex matters, for example that letterforms are ‘memories of motion.’ Above all, it is characteristic of Inge that in this examination of basic principles the word “beautiful†is used several times.â€
Yikes!!! Interesting to see that we still see these kind of videos in 2012. That is “corporate crap” no matter how you twist it.
Coursera and Stanford University are offering an online course about Human-Computer Interaction this coming September. It’s free, so if you are not studying Interaction Design at UmeÃ¥ Institute of Design, check it out.
https://www.coursera.org/course/hci
There are many more courses: Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society, Internet History, Technology, and Security, Gamification, An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, etc.
This project combined the collective talents of musicians, dancers, programmers, designers and animators to create an amazing visual instrument. Music is created by the performer’s motion as captured by a pair of XBox Kinects and processed by custom software written in Processing and openFrameworks.
Custom Logic, a duo from New Zealand, presents in two blog posts (part 1 and part 2) how they develop the interface. A very interesting read, especially regarding the use of a double Kinect setup. Excellent documentation uncovering successes and struggles from wanting to build a gestural sound control interface. Nicely done!
Google seems to do everything these days. In case you missed this, they released an API and runtime to create interactive installations. Still on Mercurial, so compiling needed. Binaries soon.
Although the website is not as sleek as one would desire, I found this tool to be pretty interesting when it came to linking people of various large corporations to each other…questions start to surface.
Check out their intro video: http://mapper.nndb.com/pr.html
The Eyeo Festival brings together the most creative coders, designers and artists working today, and shaping tomorrow. The festival is an amazing three days of talks, labs, demos & events fueled by the people and tools that are transforming digital culture.
Some videos of the 2012 edition are now available on vimeo.
Each year, Microsoft Research hosts an annual faculty summit. Leading academic researchers and educators join with Microsoft researchers to explore the latest research results, collectively discuss the challenges faced by the community, search for the best approaches for addressing those challenges, and identify new research opportunities.
This year, the presentations are streamed live at this page. Talks and keynotes span two full days, with varying topics close and not-so-close to computer science. Check the agenda. Those ones look particularly good to me: NUI Research Snapshots with Patrick Baudisch, Custom Devices for Research from Bill Gaver, Albrecht Schmidt and James Scott, Research in Focus: Adventures in NUI by Desney Tan.
We have two IxD first year UID students heading to Redmond this week for the occasion. Siri Johansson and Shivanjali Tomar will be presenting their language learning Lango project. Have fun on the Microsoft Campus and make sure to connect with the numerous UID alumni working in the Seattle area.
The 2012 Core77 Design Awards results are trickling in on daily basis, and we’ll soon have the complete listing. For the full interactive experience of the IxD category (who doesn’t like rollover action?), head to the Interaction results page. You can watch the announcement video with Matt Jones and Matt Webb, presenting this year’s crop of nominees and winners.
What’s your impression of the winning entries? For me, I find the projects are generally really good. It’s great to see ex-UIDer Yufan Chang get a nomination for his thesis project at CIID. I’m not sure I like the Feel Me and the Haptic Intelligentsia nominations. For me, they are tech-heavy solutions that lack some consideration for how we, humans, evolve and deal with the world. Our relation to touch and materiality is absolutely more complex than that. The relation touch = valuable IxD is very tempting but a tricky stance in my opinion. Those projects do bring back some materiality/tangibility into focus, but in a naive way if you ask me. Anyway, just my mini rant about some IxD that is out there, claiming meaningfulness just by tying craftsmanship and technology loosely together.
The professionals projects are top-notch, and happily recognize great IxD beyond pixel-beauty. The entries have overall good purpose, story or value embracing a sweet mix of the social, the physical and the technological.
Other notables from UID: Maxime Dubreucq and his EG helmet in the Equipment category, plus Metin Kaplan with Airship_Sunrise and Alistair Warren with his UMV Urban Mail Vehicle in the Transportation category.
For 2013, it would be nice to have some IxD UID projects in there :-) IxD boys and girls, get your video camera and soldering iron ready for next year’s instalment!