king talk

When we were at Campus Futuro in Madrid to showcase our installation Quasar Interactive, I had a short conversation with the people from La Catedral. They now published the video. Enjoy!

First of all: We’re back in Munich! After a lovely little bus tour that took almost 36 hours nonstop, we can finally start publishing some in-depht updates about what we actually did in Madrid.

Our new installation Quasar Interactive now has its own microsite! It’s still a little beta, but we’ll keep updating it as we finalize our project documentation.

Also, we took the liberty of uploading the following little clip to YouTube in order to give you a peek into what Quasar Interactive actually is. Sorry for the crappy audio quality – again, we’ll have something better up as soon as possible.

In our ongoing effort to do some video documentation for recent projects, our focus now turned to the Center for New Technologies at Deutsches Museum, Munich.

As you might know, the exhibition opened in late November last year, featuring an enormous amount of interactivity. Every single one of the 33 huge display cabinets has a touch sensitive glass surface under which various objects and screens reside. By simply pointing his finger, a visitor can access different levels of information, combining the benefits of digital data with the tangibility of real objects.

Watch the video to see how it works! More information can be found on the official portfolio page.

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.

The idea is simple and nice. Take a wind mill and put some colorful LED lights on it so everybody can see. The so called Siemens SuperStar was created by multimedia artist Michael Pendry for the company and was displayed till January in Munich (close to the Allianz Arena). Pendry convinced both Siemens and the Stadtwerke München (Munich City Utilities) to let him install this art piece on one of the utilities’ wind turbines. It was created to showcase and promote sustainable energy and green innovation. Passing cars on the motorway could find this a little bit distracting, but it looks good.

9.000 OSRAM LEDs were superglued to a wind turbine in just under two weeks. Thanks to smart energy systems like smart grids and power highways, it only consumes as much energy as a hair dryer! The 9.000 LEDs put out as much light as 20.000 Christmas candles.

I think it´s pretty amazing that a project like this was done in Munich, a city which is known as a conservative city, but Munich’s Mayor, Christian Ude, has been an enthusiastic proponent of the energy-efficient spectacle from the start and hopes his city will be the first of its size to meet all energy requirements from renewable sources.

via Andreas Brendle

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We just added a new project to our portfolio! »Q & Awesome« is an installation and web application for large conferences that makes Q&A sessions much faster and more effective. Read all about it on the official portfolio page.

Are you sick of big panorama banners with your logo at your next event? Try this so called FLOGOS. They print your logo in foam and let it fly around the city. Sounds weird? Of course it is, but we like it.

It starts quite standard. Two people are juggling circles on a multi-touch wall. But then, they start using brushes and sponges to draw on the wall, there’s physics simulation and finally there’s people playing space invaders the way it’s supposed to work: by throwing rubber balls at a huge screen.

Plus: music by sigur rós.

Multitouch Barcelona

via Fabrik

Holy sh*t! It’s a giant, floating, responsive, colorful, mist-projected installation! Usman Haque created this marvellous piece of media art especially for the Glow 08 (OK, this post IS a little late…), a dusk til dawn festival in Santa Monica. The image, projected on a wall of mist, adjusted its appearance and behaviour as the noise level of the crowd changed. As you might know, anything that makes lots of people scream, chant and cheer totally kicks ass in my opinion. And if it is combined with floating, colorful projections, it’s simply pure awesomeness!

Kudos to Usman, and shame on me for not knowing about the mere existence of Glow.

via Interactive Architecture