At the recent TedGlobal in Edinburg, Imogen Heap used wireless gloves to control her musical performace. Very cool. Check out the post on cnet’s Crave blog)
Persona (www.personamail.info) is an email client that was designed to change the perception and experience of sending and receiving emails by focusing on People, the Conversations between them and the Knowledge shared in emails today. This is a reaction to the paradigm of emails presented in spread-sheets seen with most email clients, where a focus on presenting data prevails over the needfor a personal touch.
Conversation, People, and Attachment View. Persona allows you to see your emails the way that suits you best.
Conversation View focuses on ongoing discussions presenting related attachments, messages sent, and messages received in one convenient place.
People View groups messages by sender and allows retrieval of emails by sender.
Attachment View is a revolutionary, unified, and seamless birds-eye view on the media shared via email. Attachment View presents shared YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and Facebook links alongside actual attachments.
Please read more at www.personamail.info
Wiring is alive and kicking. Yippi !!! This open source hardware + software electronics prototyping platform is just releasing its 1.0 beta version, with new hardware and major updates to the IDE application. Check all the details at http://feed.wiring.co. If you don’t know Wiring, know that it is very closely related to the evolution of Arduino. It started with the great thesis work from Hernando Barragán at Ivrea many years ago. We have 2-3 boards in the Interaction Workshop if you are interested. We’ll try to get a few of the new models probably. To put it short, it is like a supercharged Arduino with more pins, more everything and more juice for people who love to dig in the guts of electronics and microprocessor programming (comparison table).
…in Istanbul on 14-21 Sept. Looooooooooooooots of workshops, panels, etc.. http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/
Mazda is organizing the Challenge & Inspire 2011 Competition and is calling out to all art-lovers to share their most inspiring, innovative or creative ideas. By doing so they can win a trip to New York.
The European final will start in just a month’s time so to make sure you have the best chance of winning some of the amazing prizes, get involved right now!
Underneath you can find relevant information around the competition:
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Competition Video: http://bit.ly/MazdaVideoSVE
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Facebook:Â http://www.facebook.com/mazdasverige
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Inspiration:Â Â http://bit.ly/MazdaIdeaSVE
-Â Â Â Â Â Â How does it work? http://bit.ly/HowItWorksSVE
Be Inspired!
Create an app for S40 (the not smart cheapo phones) and win lots of money!
5th Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Awards Competition !!! AWARD SUM 6.000 Euros !!!
28th-30th September 2011
Tampere, Finland
http://www.mindtrek.org/ubimedia
Competition deadline: June 15th 2011
The Ubimedia competition seeks to broaden our understanding of where and how ubiquitous media will influence our future life. We are looking for disruptive artistic visions as well as clever near-to-market solutions off the beaten tracks! This includes any range of innovative ubimedia, pervasive, or ambient products and services. The Ubimedia Award is a highly interdisciplinary competition and we invite Designers, Computer Scientists, Artists, Economists and Engineers to take a stand on the following questions with their entries:
* What is the particular aesthetic experience opened up by the rise of ubiquitous and ambient media?
* What constitutes the specific intelligence that drives future media environments?
* How will location- and context-aware media services change our social life?
* How will our future lives look like in the era of ubiquitous computation, and how can society benefit from these advanced technologies?
The total award sum for the Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Award is 6 000€.
The sum can be awarded to one entry, divided between several entries or not awarded at all if the award criteria set by the jury are not fulfilled.
Valid competition entries include:
* Pervasive and ubiquitous games
* Ambient installations
* Artistic works related to ubiquitous media and computation
* Business models and management strategies
* Ambient and ubiquitous media technology
* Ubiquitous and ambient media services, devices, and environments
* Context aware, sensing, and interfaces for ubiquitous computation
* Ergonomics, human-computer interaction designs, and product prototypes
* Software, hardware and middleware framework demonstrations
* Ambient television
* Any other inspiring work in the broad context of ubiquitous media
All ubiquitous, pervasive, or ambient media products, services or prototypes which have been finalized during the previous year after 1st January 2010 are eligible to take part in the competition.
Please check out the website http://www.mindtrek.org/ubimedia for entry forms and current information.
***Flash seems to have a tricks up in it’s sleeve still…
SourceBinder is a node based visual development environment for Flash 10.
Instead of writing code you assemble a set of building blocks on a canvas and wire those blocks together. This allows you to rapidly create Flash applications.
You can export those applications into regular Flash SWF file.
SourceBinder will be available free of charge for any purposes.
via Lorenzo
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w06zvM2x_lw&feature=player_embedded]
123D is a new modeling tool that is made with home fabrication in mind, either with 2D assembly kits or direct to a 3D printing service or your MakerBot . And it’s free! Also there’s a lot of free content like bearings, fasteners, tubes and pipes and a lot more. Windoze only.
Tinkercad was released a while ago. It’s a cad tool in your browser using WebGL and HTML5. Also made with home fabrication in mind. And the company is from Helsinki! Yay!
Following on Mikko’s post a few days ago about Maqetta, I just got to see Hype a Mac application to prototype and create animations in HTML 5 websites with a similar interface as flash.
Hype, an application for creating HTML5 animations, has been launched by Y Combinator-funded company Tumult Inc.
Hype uses a keyframe animation system, much like Flash, and allows users to record motion and transitions easily. Hype’s scene editor runs by WebKit, one of the most advanced browser engines in terms of sheer HTML5 and CSS3 support.
This could be very interesting as a prototyping tool for Iphones and Ipads.
According to Tumult, Hype is for designers and Flash developers who need to be able to bring the capabilities of the older format to the modern web, and iOS in particular.
The blog first started in November 2006 with a blog post by Jorge Furuya titled Egocentric interaction. Now a few years later, we just hit the 1000 posts mark.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the blog over the years with writing content, updating the theme, commenting or just reading it. We now average ~150 visits per day, and about 6000 pageviews per month.
“Substantial cash prices” – apparently.
The purpose of Invent With Nokia is to gain access to inventions that may be of use to Nokia in its quest to develop new mobile products and solutions for our consumers. These inventions may or may not be covered by a patent application, a granted patent or a registered design.
Technology areas we are looking for
- Ideas related to mobile phones
- Ideas related to mobile phone applications/services (e.g., for an applications store)
- Wireless standards (cellular, wlan, etc)
- Mobile device features (user interfaces, sensing applications etc)
- Mobile device concepts (mechanics, displays, cameras, etc)
- Mobile applications/software applications/services (e.g., maps, navigation, social networking, music, games, email, etc.)
- Mobile services infrastructure/Mobile service provider (e.g., for an applications store)
- Mobile software/Operating systems
- If your invention is not covered by the areas above, but you have a very good reason to believe that it would add major value to our business, or even change the way consumers achieve mobility, then we would still like to hear about it
Yay! Hopefully these will find their way to the lab soon!
http://store.arduino.cc/eu/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2
Also Arduino store is now open, as you might have guessed.
Sales pitch:
“TinkerKit simplifies electronic proptotyping throughout a wide variety of sensors and actuators soldered on orange-coloured boards you can hook up to the Arduino through the Sensor Shield and three-pin cables. A little signal amplifier helps to stabilize the signals running on the cables, ensuring clean analysis from the sensors even on long distances (1m-5m). TinkerKit has been conceived for school teaching and museum exhibitions, allowing the setup of interactive environments on the run, without using soldering iron or breadboard. TinkerKit is the result of years of award-winning experience in Interaction Design. For a long time it has been developed as an internal tool, improved bit by bit project by project, client by client.”
image source
Google recently announced a new hardware push to go along it’s Android platform, namely the Android Open Accessory Development Kit. The first implementation is a slightly modified Arduino Mega matched with a shield, all this supported with a new API (software library) in the Android OS. It is far from being the first solution to hook up external hardware to an Android phone, but this combo is now officially developed and supported fully moving forward. It is great to see Google adopts Arduino at the hardware level. They comply with the full new Open Source Hardware (OSHW) initiative, which is quite nice. But on the other hand, it imposes a set of new approaches and protocols by the all mighty Google that depart from current hardware/software solutions and other people’s innovative works (like the IOIO). Nothing is never perfectly fine in this world, but this is a great step forward for physical computing and the expension of hardware tools/support in sync with (major) software development.
One thing I am happy to see is the CapSense library, meaning you have a capacitance sensor built right in (on the shield). I bought a CapSense board a few years ago, so it was a nice surprise to see this popping up again in the kit. Sweet. You can read all about the new kit + sdk on the developers site: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/usb/adk.html
Make Magazine through its blog has published a nice writeup on the new kit.