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?

There have been a lots of rumours the last weeks about a new Apple MacBook Touch Tablet Computer heated up by Gizmodo and their 100% source. After all here comes Microsoft with its own concept for a tablet called »Courier« (using a font without counters… little punks).

The interactions are really inspired by the iPhone. It´s all about the smooth sliding-wiping-dragging-dropping-zooming way of controlling this device.

They idea of combining a touchscreen with a second tool (pen) is not new, but I like it. The pie menu looks a little bit old-fashioned, but I think this will be redesigned for a possible series product.

After product innovations like the Apple AirBook the product design of the CourierTablet looks really heavy. This should be redesigned as well. After that prototpye it´s 1:0 for Microsoft within the race for a mobile tablet computer. We will see how the answer of Apple will look like… I hope that the insider informations are wrong and the body should not just look like a bigger iPhone. Urgh…

via Gizmodo

Narrated by Tom Selleck, and directed by Fight Club’s David Fincher, the ads began in 1993 and were (mostly) remarkably accurate, predicting: E-Books, in-car GPS, tablet PCs, E-ZPass, video conferencing and video on demand. Take a look…

via Gizmodo

Alright, so here’s our future according to Nokia: we are wearing clunky bracelets at night, are permanently stalked by some weird guy and our communication will heavily rely on emoticons. On the plus side: we won’t have to readjust our behavior because data structures will still be navigated using text menus.

So even though Nokia deserves appreciation for coming out with a future scenario in the first place, it is sad that they apparently didn’t have the will to make it coherent. To me, it seams like they had a great vision which then has been gradually watered down in order to make everyone in the company somewhat happy. This is sad, but it’s even sadder that this kind of creative destructivism is something quite common in todays industry.

(via Jens Franke)

The american computer developer Apple wants to patent a technique, which allows the transmission of the user motion to the screen. Apple submitted an application in December 2007 at the US patent office.  The patent was published last week, it´s officially called “Motion Tracking User Interface”.

This technique can match the movement of defined objects like your head, hand or an ordinary object like a cup of coffee to a virtual object at your desktop. Apple mentioned that e.g. the motion of your head could rotate a 3-dimensional teapot on your screen. Nowadays we use mouse, keyboard, graph tablet or trackball to interact with our computers, but for every device the hand of the user is needed. This technology should help the user to navigate without using both hands.

Apple published a patent some weeks ago, where they merged a display with image sensors. This could be the fundamental technology for the motion tracking. The whole patent is the answer to the 3D tracking system of 3DVsystems called Z-Cam, which was actually aquired by competitor Microsoft and will be used in the Natal project, which was shown at this years E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles.

via heise

This months edition of PAGE, a famous german design magazine, is featuring its new special interest magazine for interactive design called weave, with a 38 page strong preview. Weave will be all about web design, conceptual design and the development of new media.

Jens Franke wrote an excellent leading article about the »Generation Interactive«. He questions: »What are the next interactions beyond Wii and iPhone? And how will Designers and Developers be influenced by that changes?« At page 14 you can find a quote about prototyping from one of our team members Thomas Gläser. It´s just one statement of our philosophy, which asserts that »prototyping will help you to step back from restrictions of current design software which is limiting your work. Quick and dirty mockups can give you an early insight about the quality of the interaction with a device or application.«

The first edition of weave will be published in September. You can pre-order here…