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!

The OFFF 2010 review for those of you who missed out on this years events that took place at the digital creation conference at ‘La Grande Halle de la Villette’ in Paris between the 24th – 26th June. Both myself and the Envis team were in attendance and here are a selection of the key highlighted speakers from the event.

—– Craig Ward —–

Processing particles motion test from Craig Ward on Vimeo.

Craig Ward is a British born typographer / designer currently living and working in New York City, USA.

—– Julien Vallée —–

OFFF Paris 2010 Sponsors titles from Julien Vallée on Vimeo.

Julien Vallée is a Canadian born creative currently residing in Montreal, Canada.

—– Dvein —–

Dvein @ OFFF 2010 from Ruben Gonçalves on Vimeo.

Dvein are a group of Motion / Animation geniuses based in Barcelona, Spain.

—– NON-FORMAT —–

Non-Format from Etapes on Vimeo.

Non-Format are design house based in London, recognised since they formed in 2000 by their directors Kjell Ekhorn (Norwegian) and Jon Forss (British).

—– SOSOlimited —–

We’re Sorry from Sosolimited on Vimeo.

SOSOlimited are a collective of talented audio visual designers focusing mainly on interactive installations and fun weird stuff. Currently based in Cambridge, MA, USA.

—– The Mill —–

The Mill are a large scale visual FX team coming out of London, New York and Los Angeles. They were responsible for closing the festival this year and they did so with a nice group presentation focusing primarily on their post production work they did for Nike on ‘Write the Future’. An advertisement spot that notably took the Internet by storm at the beginning of the this years World Cup.

Nike Write The Future from Wieden + Kennedy London on Vimeo.

They went on discussing the ‘making of’ and did a nice job of showing alot of the thought and design process. Storyboards, to the use of the massive tool used for realising large scale crowd environments alongside the VFX they covered throughout such an enormous project. They called it the biggest VFX advertisement ever made. Funny enough i believe them.

OFFF Paris 2010 Titles from OFFF on Vimeo.

To end our review; above we showcase the OFFF titles designed and produced by ‘The Mill’ for this years festival.

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?

One of my favorite authors, Don Norman, has released a new essay about design research and technological innovation. It think he is right, writing that »successful revolutionary innovation is rare … most new product development is innovative, but at a very tiny, incremental level«. First of all many »major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this design research stuff«, but they are not popular from start. »When I was at Apple, I watched many innovative products fail. Badly done? No, simply ahead of their time.«

But what is the solution? »… incremental improvement is the most powerful and important mechanism for a company, all the excitement revolves around the dramatic breakthrough. And yes, the payoffs from these inventions are so large that their success cam compensate for the risk … Once a product direction has been established, research with customers can enhance and improve it. Beforehand? Leave it to the technologists. They will get the grand ideas running, but their implications are apt to be complex, overwhelming, and just plain horrid. Horrid applications? Yes, but that’s good news: we will forever be indispensible.« True, true…

While you are reading this culmination of words, we are heading to Linz, checking out the ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL. We will provide you with more information, after this short break…

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

Today I received my birthday present. It´s a Kosmos Xplorer Kit with a metal detector for self assembly. The functionality of this detector is pretty simple. It generates quick electrical fluctuation of the current, a search coil is one part of the oscillator. The number of the vibrations per second (frequency) depend on the properties of the coil. If you hold it close to metal (iron, aluminum, nickel, copper, silver …) the frequency will be influenced by that. A small sensor mounted at the board recognizes this state and sends a signal to a piezo speaker (beep!) and to a red led (blink!). This little and cheap piece of technology looks like it wants to be hacked   ; )

Yesterday arte showed a documentation about cyborgs which was very interesting and sometimes a little bit scary. This clip about a brain-controlled rat was the one which retained in my memory. A laptop computer is used to wirelessly send signals to a rat’s brain, scientists found that that they could control the decisions of the rat by stimulating the part of the brain that controls its movement. The rat does have a choice but is rewarded for a correct decision with a hit to the pleasure center of the brain.

You just have to hit the right button and the rat will do so. This project reminded at our remote controlled robot, which was developed by envis some weeks ago. We thought about mounting a camera to the top of the robot, but we never would thought about to replace the robot by a tiny little pet like a gerbil or something. What is the next step? Should we hack our neighbours bobtail. Go to the zoo and brain-control the pinguins? This seems to be wrong.

The american computer developer Apple wants to patent a technique, which allows the transmission of the user motion to the screen. Apple submitted an application in December 2007 at the US patent office.  The patent was published last week, it´s officially called “Motion Tracking User Interface”.

This technique can match the movement of defined objects like your head, hand or an ordinary object like a cup of coffee to a virtual object at your desktop. Apple mentioned that e.g. the motion of your head could rotate a 3-dimensional teapot on your screen. Nowadays we use mouse, keyboard, graph tablet or trackball to interact with our computers, but for every device the hand of the user is needed. This technology should help the user to navigate without using both hands.

Apple published a patent some weeks ago, where they merged a display with image sensors. This could be the fundamental technology for the motion tracking. The whole patent is the answer to the 3D tracking system of 3DVsystems called Z-Cam, which was actually aquired by competitor Microsoft and will be used in the Natal project, which was shown at this years E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles.

via heise

While we were searching for a current, refurbished, low cost iPod Touch for developing multi-touch applications we heard a lot of rumours about the new iPhone going through the blogosphere the last days. One of the main reasons was the latest article from iPhoneApps.com. Due to the news they had to suffer from an extraordinary amount of traffic that has overwhelmed their servers. They´ve had to redirect some traffic to a separate server to avoid a longer downtime. They juste reported about some of the new technical features according to insider information. Here are the rumored specifics:

- 32GB and 16GB to replace current capacities
- $199 and $299 price-points to be maintained within a 2-year contract
- 3.2 Megapixel camera
- Video recording & editing capabilities
- Ability to send a picture & video via MMS
- Discontinuation of the metal band surrounding the edge of the device
- OLED screen (AMOLED)
- 1.5X The battery life
- Double the RAM and processing power
- Built-in FM transmitter
- Apple logo on the back to light up
- Rubber-tread backing
- Sleeker design
- Built-in compass
- Revolutionary combination of the camera, GPS, compass
and Google maps to identify photo and inform about photo locations.
- Turn by turn directions
- July 17th, 2009 release date

We will see which features will pop out and we will compare the new iPhone to these speculations. A tutorial for getting started with the iPhone Development can be found at WebDeveloperDepot.

via iPhoneApps.com & MacRumours.com