king talk

For our latest article in WEAVE magazine, we took a closer look at Microsofts Kinect and how you can do some really interesting things with it. You will learn how to use OpenFrameworks to write an extremely robust and versatile tracker that works great for interactive installations.

Gary Flake from Microsoft research delivered a fascinating demo of »Microsoft Pivot«, an experimental technology which focuses on browsing collections of content and pages, rather than individual pieces of content.  It looks like if the Zooming User Interface (ZUI) is based on the idea of Microsoft‘s Photosynth technology which was presented by Blaise Aguera three years ago. The concept of viewing, filtering and pivoting collections of web pages based on various attributes pulled from the content represents an exciting possible future state for web browsing. I am very curious to see how this technology evolves, and whether this type of application could be used to create views of custom large data sets, spot patterns and identify actions.  I also wonder how long it will be before some of this functionality emerges directly within Bing – exciting times!

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?

Just two questions: Who authorized this and by which illegal substance was he or she influenced?

At least there already is a funny edit:

via fscklog

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