king talk

Alright, so here’s our future according to Nokia: we are wearing clunky bracelets at night, are permanently stalked by some weird guy and our communication will heavily rely on emoticons. On the plus side: we won’t have to readjust our behavior because data structures will still be navigated using text menus.

So even though Nokia deserves appreciation for coming out with a future scenario in the first place, it is sad that they apparently didn’t have the will to make it coherent. To me, it seams like they had a great vision which then has been gradually watered down in order to make everyone in the company somewhat happy. This is sad, but it’s even sadder that this kind of creative destructivism is something quite common in todays industry.

(via Jens Franke)

3D projections you can touch. Sounds like sci-fi to me, but has been presented at the Siggraph 09 in New Orleans. Scientists from the University of Tokyo developed this so called »Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display«. Basically this adds tactile feedback to a floating image trough ultrasonic waves. Looks very high tech, but in fact they have utilized two wiimotes to track the hand movement.

via crave & Shinoda Lab

After we reported about Microsofts new Xbox project called NATAL, we have to tell about about this new concept for that console. It´s called Milo, a little 3D avatar boy which could be your new friend. You can share your problems with him, go outside in his world, play around and have fun with Milo. The real world is connected to the virtual one via 3D gesture recognition. You even can draw something, share it with Milo and talk about it… Maybe you can use another outstanding project from Microsoft called Songsmith to sing together with Milo. Everything is possible with this extraordinary masterpiece of absurdity.

Come on Microsoft… What´s wrong with you? It looks like you want to create a tool for all the little Bill Gates nerds which are unable to feel real emotions while they are having a real talk to real people making real fun in this really extra evil world. Well done!

via SimpleAndOpen

The freeware »Mightier« is an independent puzzle action game developed by Lucas Pope and Keiko Ishizaka and was one of the finalists of this years 11th Independet Games Festival (San Francisco/CA). Play as the »Engineer« and the »Actionaut« to solve puzzles and collect items in each sector. First you have to print so called »puzzle« from within Mightier using a color printer. You have to solve the puzzle by drawing on the page with a dark pencil or marker. Scan the puzzle into the game using an attached web camera. A high-powered space laser carves the solution and the Actionaut is dropped onto the surface, which you have drawn before. Now it´s up to you. Take control of the Actionaut and collect all the »Datagons« in each sector. I think it´s quite fun to play otherwise the detour of the drawing via the web cam is quite tricky.

The way of converting the 2D images into 3D models reminds me of the »Teddy project« (1999) by Takeo Igarashi, a sketching interface for 3D freeform design. You can draw and configure your 2D sketch in space. If you test it online, you will notice that the interaction is very clumsy. The 3D library of Teddy is Open Source.

via Schröder+Wendt

For over 20 years researchers have been looking at ways to go beyond the mouse and keyboard to interact with computers. One of the most promising areas has been tangible user interfaces; physical objects directly coupled with digital information. These new interfaces have typically required expensive technologies and complex installation procedures, limiting them to the context of specialized research labs and museums.

Trackmate is an open source initiative to create an inexpensive, do-it-yourself tangible tracking system. The Trackmate Tracker allows any computer to recognize tagged objects and their corresponding position, rotation, and color information when placed on a surface. Trackmate sends all object data via LusidOSC (a protocol layer for unique spatial input devices), allowing any LusidOSC-based application to work with the system.

via IG Wiki Posts