king talk

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.

Gestures are common place in multi touch application development. Interaction Designers need icons for wireframing or just for documentation of the work. Ryan Lee released a vector based icon set for gesture under Creative Commons Licence. You don´t need to reinvent the wheel again. This so called Gesturecons include 42 icons for the most popular gesture like panning, flickering etc. You can download it the zip with .ai, .pdf and .eps files here…

via UX Strategie

»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.

As we featured the puzzling ZDF microsite in 3D, we thought about showing some other portfolios with a 3D User Interface. Some of them are not actually new and maybe already known, but we think they´re still worth to be shown:

http://bestiario.org

http://recom-cgi.de

http://www.varywell.com

http://www.screenvader.com/root.html

http://lab.mathieu-badimon.com

http://www.whitevoid.com/portfolio.html

I was really excited by the game »shout n dodge« today. A simple flashgame that reminded my a bit at the helicopter flash game, but this time you don´t have to click. (Fight the mouse!) After you allowed flash to use your microfone, you have to scream. The louder the higher your character will rise… Beware! Red quads trying to block your way… SHOUT LOUDER!… Puuuh…

This game and some more can be found at Sophie Houlden´s website. Her goal is to program easy to use games in 48 hours. Other games like Towlr Podge and Pineapple22 are also fun to play.

via momasurfer

… was the topic of the free informative event held by Microsoft Germany at the department of Informatics at TU Munich. They wrote in their invitation that Microsofts wants to talk about the influence of a better user experience and how they want to improve it in the near future. It sounded good, so I signed in with low expectations, because i couldn´t imagine that they had something completely new popping out of their sleeves. The best talk of this event was held by Peter Kirchner (Program Manager ISV). He was talking about »modern user interfaces« and tried to push the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which includes Visual Studio and Expression (Microsofts answer to Adobes Creative Suite).

Peter said something like… »In the 80´s there was the revolution of the desktop metaphor and the graphical user interface. Later the internet was getting more popular and is now still known as the web 2.0. The next challenge will be the development of more natural user interfaces and new ways of interacting with a device or application … In the future we will see more intuitive and easier to use applications. If you want to know what Microsofts new user experience will be, just look at the Surface table. The way like virtuality and reality is merging and how simple and direct the user can navigate are just some examples … If we compare Windows graphics with the work of game developers and how they forced the graphical performance to the maximum for visualizing rich graphics, we recognized that our graphics didn´t utilize the power of modern computers until now.«

Hmmm, what do you think about it?