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.

WEAVE #4 is out! And once again we contributed an article, this time about creating audiovisual compositions using what we call a visual synthesizer.

Sounds familiar? It sure does, because what we are talking about is the basic framework on which our Quasar artwork has been built.

And if you know Quasar, you’ll certainly recognize the cover art of this issue! There are four different versions of the cover, all finely polished stills from the Quasar artwork. So I’d suggest you to get out there and buy all four of them!

As you might know, we are huge fans of shiny things. That’s why we were particularly thrilled when we got the opportunity to work on an installation for gold vendor Pro Aurum, who recently opened a new branch in Munich. Together with our partners neustart and Büro Achter April, we created an interactive installation for information visualization (try saying that ten times fast!) for their lobby.

It consists of an LED wall and a touchscreen terminal. The wall shows various information graphics about gold production, trading and about the company itself. All graphics are composed of little golden particles that flock together in order to form shapes, graphics and text.

The project has been done in Flash, using our very own FAME-Libraries.

There is a Flickr set as well.

I just stumbled upon this piece of beautiful interactive web art. Now, usually when saying  the words »interactive web art«, they are synonymous to »Flash«. Wel, not this time, folks. What you see on this page has been done purely with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS – complete with audio!

After both YouTube and Vimeo have rolled out beta programs for HTML5 (read: flash-less) versions of their sights, the art and visualization community seams to start getting interested in the new Standard.

While some purists are already proclaiming the end of Flash, I think it will be around for a long time to come. Yet I like the fact that it is facing more competition from open standards. And now that two major players in the web video business are starting to toy around with those standards, Adobe might finally reconsider their priorities in terms of code optimization for their player.

Here at envis precisely, we are using Flash (along with other programming tools like Processing or openFrameworks) quite a bit as you might know for a wide variety of tasks (of which only few are directly web related). I don’t think this is going to change anytime soon, if only because I firmly believe that JavaScript is a terrible terrible language to do creative stuff with. Anyway, that might change as well, so we are definitely keeping a close eye on the developments there.

We are working on something. It’s about presenting information and we are confident that it will rock quite a bit.

More to come this fall!

»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

If engineering knowledge and creativity merge together, the result will be breathtaking installation like that. This project is called FreeFloat and is a perfect example for an interdisciplinary approach. The 512 self-illuminating RGB-LED-Spheres can be positioned up to 3 meters by an electrical drive. This possibility helps to create new forms and graphics with this system. Within the matrix (3,2 x 2,3 x 1,6 meters) the content will be repositioned at every moment. Parameters like form, color and motion are controllable in real time. The conception and creation of this project is an internal development by the company MadHat from Offenbach (Germany). The event agency CCP Studios brought that master piece to the IBM booth at CeBIT 2009.

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Balls go up and down, glowing blue, white, red…

Many balls seemed to float in space building up an infographic which explains the methodologies of cloud computing.

The user has the chance to pick some detailed information about it. Depending on which term was selected the balls begin to form a graphic.

This interactive installation seems to be inspired by the kinetic scultpure at BMW Museum by art+com (2008) and the classic ballon installation electric moOns by whiteVOID (2005-2007).

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After the interaction guys, the generative art guys took over the stage at TOCA ME 09. First up: Jer Thorpe from Vancouver, Canada.

He is part of the glocal project, which is an »immense, collaborative and multifaceted digital art project that examines the making, sharing and exhibiting of images in the 21st century«. In other words, they are figuring new creative ways of using and dealing with huge amounts of data. So he defined one big rule: »Collaboration requires many mobile people in a changing environment.«

The image breeder for example is an application for, well, breeding images – literally. You select two images to start with and the software finds images with characteristics of both of them. It is not only a nice toy, but also a serious tool for finding inspiration in images!

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