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!

Tomorrow the envis team will be hanging around at Schwäbisch Gmünd to have a look at the latest work from the students. We expect some innovative concepts at the media lab like the last years project from Jonas Heuer and Jürgen Gräf. Notput is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting.

All basic clefs, note values and accidentals exist as single wood elements. Whole, half, quarter and eighth notes differ not only in their form, but also in their weight: Long note values are heavier than short ones. The idea is pretty simple and the experimental approach is enjoyable and informative at the same time.

Why don´t we use tools like that at school?

»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.

»Providing dynamically changeable physical buttons on a visual display« was developed by Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson (Carnegie Mellon University / USA). It´s all about  a visual display that contains deformable areas, able to produce physical buttons and other interface elements. These tactile features can be dynamically brought into and out of the interface, and otherwise manipulated under program control. The surfaces they describe, provides the full dynamics of a visual display (through rear projection) as well as allowing for multi-touch input (though an infrared lighting and camera setup behind the display).

To illustrate the tactile capabilities of the surfaces, they describe a number of variations we uncovered in our exploration and prototyping. These go beyond simple on/off actuation and can be combined to provide a range of different possible tactile expressions. A preliminary user study indicates that the dynamic buttons perform much like physical buttons in tactile search tasks. The official paper can be downloaded here.

Another flexible approach called impress comes from Silke Hilsing (FH Würzburg / Germany). Impress is the deliverance of the touch screen from its technical stiffness, coldness and rigidity. It breaks the distance in the relationship of human and technology, because it is not any longer the user which is subjected to technology, but in this case the display itself has to cave in to the human. Impress is a chance of approach of user and technology, above all, from technology.

It is a matter of a flexible display consisting of foam and force sensors which is deformable and feels pleasantly soft. Impress works with the parameters position and time like other touch screens as well, but in addition to that, it reacts, above all, on the intensity of pressure.

The user can merge in and collaborate with technology more than ever. He can squeeze out information and fly through rooms, he can form three-dimensional and put objects in motion by deforming the surface. Four short applications allow an insight into an absolutely new world of deeply sensitive and intuitive interaction possibilities. This project was created by using Arduino and Processing.

via infosthetics & FH Würzburg Blog

What most of the media tables out there (especially multi-touch tables) are missing is haptics: Touching a multi-touch table surface to sort photos or resize maps is great, but try using it without looking, and your fingers will quickly wander off that on-screen virtual button, slider, or keyboard. The SLAP project changes this — by letting you put real, physical widget set like a keypad (a), knob (b), slider (c), keyboardknobs (d), and other controls right onto the table. Being able to feel those controls makes it much easier to use them without looking.

The trick: the controls are made from silicone and acrylic, so they are transparent, and the computer inside the table can detect their position on the table surface and project the right labeling right onto those controls from underneath. This makes it easy to, say, relabel a SLAP Keyboard from US to German keyboard layout (without paying much money to Art Lebedevs OLED keyboard), or to make a SLAP Button look like a Play button to control videos in one instant, and the next moment turn it into a button to save a file.

But how do SLAP controls know what they should be controlling? Easy — just double-tap your finger, say, next to a SLAP Keyboard and on a text editing window at the same time, and the two are connected: whatever you type on the SLAP keyboard will end up in the text window. This way, SLAP controls bring haptic and tactile feedback back into the world of virtual, on-screen table interfaces, combining the advantages of physical and on-screen controls. And since they are just passive objects, with no electronics, they are simple, robust, and cheap — something researchers and designers will appreciate when prototyping the tabletop applications of the future. For more information, visit the website of RWTH Aachen.

Our Chemieraum projects input device had a similar approach. We think that a combination of tools and touch will be the future or what do you think?