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!

Our WordPress Article Count says this one ist number 250. Time to celebrate over one year of news and stories about Interface and Interaction Design mixed up with a little bit of envis. For the next 250 blog posts we wish that we can provide you with some information about hot and new and sometimes weird stuff again. At the moment we are preparing the relaunch of the envis-precisely website. We‘re confident that we will get it going the next weeks. The blog will be redesigned too, so watch out!

We reported more than a year ago about the cookie-sized, computerized tiles that can be stacked and shuffled in your hands called Siftables. Last year Siftables was a research project initiated at the MIT Media Lab. Since then they have all finished their graduate work, and last summer they formed a start-up company called Sifteo. With support from True Ventures and the National Science Foundation, they are now hard at work developing the next generation of the technology to bring their vision of Siftables to the world.

This year they’ll be creating games, reaching out to developers, working with manufacturers, and running beta tests with players. They look forward to continuing to get to know everyone, and to working with you to create the future of play. In addition to this you should follow the Sifteo blog, because this start up is going to be hot. They will be on sale this year… Watch out!

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?

We received a mail from a friend this morning, who told us that our Arduino Icon Redesign was brought to life. The Massimo Banzi´s students of CIID (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) baked a cake based on the icon for the Arduino IDE.

And Massimo Banzi seemed to be surprised, but happy. How long did he spent eating this Arduino Mega Cake…?

via Arduino Blog

Does anyone know about the litl? It´s a so called »Webbook«, a tiny computer without anything, just made for browsing the web and reading RSS-Feeds. This gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. The hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by this Boston-based startup, rejects three decades of convention. But what can you do with it? Just browsing the internet seems to be nice, but the developers should asked theirselfs: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? (John Thackara)

If you want to buy a litl, you a get a small computer which is radically downsized for about 700 bucks (!!!). It has a 12″ display, an Atom Processor with 1,6 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 2 GB Flash Memory, 1x USB and a 802.11g Wifi chip, that´s it. It even hasn´t enough space for a operating system so they offer you »litl OS« which has two modes. A simple grid view and a 3D view based on the z-axis which reminds me of Apple Time Machine.

In my opinion these product has three main failures. First of all it´s a tool which can only do one thing, browsing the internet and receiving atom feeds. This is a nice idea, but chumby is already doing stuff like that. You can get this small device which is able to play wifi radio, play games and use one of 1500 additional applications for about 100 dollar. And chumby offers you a touch sensitive display,…

which brings me to the next failure. It is the way the user is interacting with the product. You can chosse between a reduced QWERTY keyboard, a touch pad and a remote… Why? What´s about touch? What´s about motion tracking? A radical product like these is screeming for new ways of interaction. The litl offers you a very light weight computer with a small display. A touch interface would be a more direct way of navigating and browsing the content especially in 3D mode. Last but not least…

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Barely a week has passed since the Deutsche Museum opened up the gates to our latest project, the brand new ZNT (Center for New Technologies). This week the Museum published this »Making of« Clip. Can you imagine that it looked quite like that one week before the opening? With a hundred of willing hands working there and some serious sleep deprivation the exhibition could open in time.

via youtube channel of Deutsches Museum

After weeks of sleep deprivation and a lot of hard work, the ZNT (»Center for New Technologies«) at Deutsches Museum in Munich finally opened its gates to the public today. It’s a fully interactive permanent exhibition about bio- and nanotechnology – with an interaction concept conceived and produced by envis precisely in cooperation Haslbeck Ausstellungsprojekte and other partners – introduces its visitors to the world of very tiny things.

The whole  concept is based on 33 interactive mini laboratories made of steel and glass. They provide the guest with information about the opportunities, risks and the fascination of nanotechnology. The visitors are no longer just spectators – they become explorers in this exhibiton.

The widespread use of digital technology has become commonplace in modern science and is also reflected in the exhibition. The entire front surfaces of the cabinets are actually touch-sensitive panels. By simply pointing to an object, the visitor gets access to additional information on the central information display. This interface then offers further explanatory pictures or short films.

Closing the gap between the visitor and the information as directly as possible was one of our main goals. We created the interfaces, interactions and the media systems for the labs and other special units as well as the motion design of all informal short movies.

A lot of positive press feedback was published just in the last few hours. German TV news show »ZDF heute journal« calls the exhibition a »spectacular, new, interactive show« and the Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer believes it is »the new crown jewel« of the Deutsche Museum. We humbly agree.

You can watch the whole clip of heute journal (Minute: 22:04 – 26:06, German) or visit our ZNT flickr set for some more pictures if you want. Some additional information and an entry at our portfolio will be published asap…

Hello everybody. It´s time to introduce you to the brand new issue no.2 of Germany’s finest magazine for interaction design called weave. It will be released on Monday, the 16th.

And envis has written an article again. This time it´s all about prototyping, but I don´t want to tell more about it. Just go to the next kiosk and grab yourself a weave…

For selecting one of the audiovisualizations which were produced by the 3rd semester at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, Benedikt Groß came up with a RFID controlled »remote« for the clips.

Every block has a little picture and a short project description printed on the front. You have to lay one these blocks into the black frame for choosing a clip. Every block has an integrated RFID tag which represents a number inside a system. A RFID reader is mounted under the surface of the table reading the current state.

It looked like a improvement of the Slideshow Block installation from 2006. Every slideshow had a wooden block as representative to select and start the show.