king talk

The Economist has put up a very nice web special about the sources of people’s inspiration. While the content is certainly worth a closer look, what completely consumed me was the navigation. Fragments of images are projected on cubes that are arranged in space. The interesting part is that there are certain angles from which the fragments form images.

While this kind of navigation is impressive and great fun to use, I can’t help the feeling that I might have read much more of the content if it was presented in a more straightforward way. The site illustrates just how fine the line between great user experience and distraction really is.

I first stumbled upon Rhonda some months ago (how the hell could I not write a post about it then!?). It is a very interesting 3D drawing application made with openframeworks. The basic idea is to always draw in 2D, but to be able to rotate your drawing around any axis at any time, thereby creating three dimensional wire artworks. You get a pretty decent impression from the demo video on their site.

What’s new is that Rhonda now has a sister project called Sonic Wire Sculptor, which is all about music. The y axis translates to the pitch of a note and the whole drawing is revolving in 3D. Again, the demo video gives you everything you need!

3D projections you can touch. Sounds like sci-fi to me, but has been presented at the Siggraph 09 in New Orleans. Scientists from the University of Tokyo developed this so called »Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display«. Basically this adds tactile feedback to a floating image trough ultrasonic waves. Looks very high tech, but in fact they have utilized two wiimotes to track the hand movement.

via crave & Shinoda Lab