king talk

As you might know, we are huge fans of shiny things. That’s why we were particularly thrilled when we got the opportunity to work on an installation for gold vendor Pro Aurum, who recently opened a new branch in Munich. Together with our partners neustart and Büro Achter April, we created an interactive installation for information visualization (try saying that ten times fast!) for their lobby.

It consists of an LED wall and a touchscreen terminal. The wall shows various information graphics about gold production, trading and about the company itself. All graphics are composed of little golden particles that flock together in order to form shapes, graphics and text.

The project has been done in Flash, using our very own FAME-Libraries.

There is a Flickr set as well.

Every new business niche goes through specific stages. Launch, proof, competition, consolidation. The business of your genetic code has now entered stage two, proof. Also known as, show me the money. Of all today’s start-ups it’s the best known, 23andme, which seems to be facing the stiffest headwinds. It has slashed prices, brought in new leadership, and faced no small amount of media ridicule, as reporters start asking the hard question — what’s it for? While 23andme has headed directly toward the mass market, Knome has headed to the class market. It puts its genome sequences on a stick, puts the stick in a box (above), then gives the box a fancy lid.

Compared to Moore´s Law the improvements in genetic engineering are more frequently. In 2001 a test costed about 3 million EUR. Knome said that they will store you genetic data as a backup. One of the investors for Knome is Google and the founder of Knome Anna Wojcicki is the wife of Google founder Sergei Brin. As Google is aimed to restore all data, this becomes all little bit scary. To Google:»I like your search engine, using maps everyday and I enjoy youtube, but don´t scan my DNA, please!«

via Sueddeutsche Zeitung (13th August 2009) and ZDNet

»AstroTable« is a prototypal interactive installation designed for an exhibition context. Astronomic principles of planetary movement can be explored and understood very easily. By placing one of the eight discs, representing the »Laws of Planetary Motion« of J. Kepler as well as the »Laws of Gravitation« of I. Newton, on the sun one can select a specific topic.

Smoothly animated, the solar system fades out, an abstract layer for visualization appears. The selected disc represents the sun’s mass. By spinning it, one »manipulates time«.

The disc remains consistantly spinning at that rate by itself (and a bit of electronics…). One can accelerate and decelerate it and thus manipulate the visualization. An audio comment completes the explanation. By removing the disc, one goes back to the solar system view.

This project was done by Andreas Brendle, Fabian Gronbach, Eduard Warkentin at the course »Interaction Design« from HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd under supervision of Prof. Beck & Prof. Krämer.

Besides the talks at TOCA ME 2009 (Munich) the visitors could play around with a 70inch multi touch table from strukt. The struktable was running different playful apps. Often very abstract, like a color picker tool, but fun to interact and watch.

You can find the whole documentation of the multi touch research at www.multitouch.at. They´re using vvvv for the blob detections and as software for creating interface elements. While they were developing the application, they used the 15 inch wide screen multi touch display from Stantum, the SMK 15.4. It´s affordable, you can buy the developer kit (including API) for about 3.000 EUR.

Another great Blog for multi touch research is the one from Tim Roth (Zürich). At his blog you can find the latest news about hardware and software regarding multi touch tables. Another nice developer blog comes from Johannes Luder Schmidt. Just check both. If you´re interested in multi touch, you still may know the NUI Group from Sweden. They are one of the early pioneers in documenting multi touch development for the masses and they have a great tracker called tbeta (former touchlib). This tracker and some demo applications can be downloaded for free and installed for all systems. We used it for our german multi touch tutorial and had really good results. Alternatives are the Touché framework (Mac only) and the opentouch. Jens Franke (PAGE author) said that they should track faster and more precisely. That´s what we need  ; )

continue reading …

As I had to search for a good definition about Interaction Design for our business plan, I suddenly found out that there was no explanation therefor at the german version of Wikipedia. I couldn´t believe that there´s no definition about what we are doing everday at the website for the »world´s collective knowledge«. What´s wrong with this world? Even Teletubbies have their own definition there.  ; )  Only one article was trying to define Interaction Design as a design discipline which was declared as a synonym for Interface Design. The author merged both terms and was always writing about »Interface/Interaction Design«.

But for me both terms are not the same… okay… Every Interaction Designer will probably design an interface at the end of the design process, but it´s still not the same. So I began to write just 2 or 3 sentences about IxD until I received a message from the author (redirected Interaction Design to Interface Design). »Hello, i´d noticed that you will change my redirection. Until now I couldn´t find the difference between this term and the existing article about Interface Design, so try to define the opposite properly, otherwise i´ll keep my redirection.« Argh… I didn´t want to spent more then 10 minutes for that article, but this message forced me to make a change… Yes I can  ; )  I was really inspired by the formal quality of the english version. I took many of the informations, translated it into german and mixed it with some informations which I already know about IxD.

Afterwards I implemented my improved graphic of Dan Saffers visualization of the »Interaction Design Disciplines«. Some hours (and one angry girlfriend) later I finished the article and went to bed… Some minutes ago I found out that my article was accepted and I received a new mail by another Wikipedia author saying »Thank you have finally splitted up this two terms in two articles – it´s awesome«. Yeah… Me likey when things work!

P.S. If you think that there could be added some information, feel free to write something. You just have to get a Wikipedia account and change something at the »Interaction Design« article.