king talk

As i love supporting good friends when they produce such awesome work, i thought i would post something that a friend has recently been involved with. The video responds to the Munich 2018 Winter Olympics hosting bid. The interface design and animations are by Marc Osswald.

Marc was approach by Schusterjungen & Hurenkinder and Technik und Design GmbH in München to produce an interface system that would coincide with making München stand out as a vibrant and inspiring city to host the famous winter games in 2018.

The interaction helps the viewer navigate themselves around the famous Germanic city of München. The user is able to explore around the ‘proposed’ sites that are being turned into Olympic and tourist hotspots. Many of us already know that München last hosted the games in 1972 in where the Olympia site still stands to this day; I hope that if München wins the bid that the old site will both reflect and being incorporated in a way that responds to its history.

The interaction was used as a showreel piece during the winter Olympics this year in Vancouver, Canada! Bravo to Marc for such nice use of interface design!

If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google is working together with Sony, Logitech and Intel to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. This is an incredibly exciting time for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We’re excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.

Controlling applications by your eyes is not a completely new technology. The known optical methods like you know it from Tobii are not user friendly enough, because the gadget always needs to be calibrated first and varying ambience conditions make it hard to track the eyes. NTT DoCoMo reveiled their latest development at the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona. Particulary this could be a good invention for small gadgets which lack of space for controls. It seems to react very directly. Maybe the next future way of interacting with tiny devices?

One of my favorite authors, Don Norman, has released a new essay about design research and technological innovation. It think he is right, writing that »successful revolutionary innovation is rare … most new product development is innovative, but at a very tiny, incremental level«. First of all many »major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this design research stuff«, but they are not popular from start. »When I was at Apple, I watched many innovative products fail. Badly done? No, simply ahead of their time.«

But what is the solution? »… incremental improvement is the most powerful and important mechanism for a company, all the excitement revolves around the dramatic breakthrough. And yes, the payoffs from these inventions are so large that their success cam compensate for the risk … Once a product direction has been established, research with customers can enhance and improve it. Beforehand? Leave it to the technologists. They will get the grand ideas running, but their implications are apt to be complex, overwhelming, and just plain horrid. Horrid applications? Yes, but that’s good news: we will forever be indispensible.« True, true…

I think nearly everybody has noticed the release of Apple’s magic mouse, a pimped out mouse featuring multi touch technology. After three years of hype around that technology it finds its way at mobile phones and newly on this over 40 year old input device. What would Mr Engelbart would have thought about it?

Nearly as long as we are using the mouse, Apple and Microsoft are fighting one another. After the first rumours about a new multi touch mouse came up earlier this month, Microsoft released some ideas for a multi touch mouse. Just watch and enjoy… the FTIR mouse is weird, the »Side Mouse« could be a complety new experience (I´m not sure if it’s positive or negative). At the end I like the mechanical solution of the »Arty Mouse« somehow. Could probably work for 5 fingers?