March 08, 2006
Setting shortcut keys
Download of the Day: Qliner hotkeys. "Just hold the Windows key for three seconds and up pops a Onscreen Keyboard with icons on the keys that are configured. This you can you use , not only to remind you of hotkey combinations, but also for Drag and Drop Configuration."
Lifehacker
Tools for hardware prototyping
Designer's DIY. "FTD today points towards the Stanford HCI Group who have developed a toolkit for designers of digital devices. D.tools enables product designers to try out the desired functionality themselves before handing it over to the engineers to have them cast all the nifty miniaturization-magic on the item. This they hope, will lead to products that are less flawed in terms of interface design since it's obviously very tedious and expensive to alter the position of a certain button when all the electronics have already been finalized."
we make money not art
Image processing on a phone
CamReader - software for doing many things with camera phones. "Mediaseek's CamReader is feature-rich image processing software. It's based on the barcode decoder engine adopted by major mobile telcos in Japan (i.e., KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, and Vodafone). When we talk about camera phones and barcodes in Japan, it's usually about QR codes, but CamReader supports varieties of barcode formats including: JAN8/13, EAN, UPC-A/E, CODE39, QR Code(model2), Micro QR Code, Data Matrix, PDF417, OCR."
RFID in Japan
Screensaver window
Download of the day 3: Holding Pattern Screensaver. "Holding Pattern turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view. Each time the screensaver plays a unique sequence."
Lifehacker
Tabletop computing
HP Misto Coffee Table PC. "P celebrated its 40th anniversary of selling overpriced printer ink by revealing Misto, a concept from its labs that combines a coffee table with a touch-screen PC. The giant screen, of undetermined resolution, would be used by a group, which would gather around and play board games, look at maps, or arrange pictures for viewing. Since it’s just a concept, there is no indication of when or if it will be developed, and if so how much it will cost. No question, it certainly won’t be cheap—this is a coffee table that doesn’t exactly invite you to put up your feet."
Gizmodo
Fashion gaming
Wearable game weaves clues into cloth. "If you find yourself wearing clothes from a new company called Edoc Laundry, beware: Strangers may walk up to you on the street to examine the intricacies of your shirt's patterns. That's because Edoc Laundry's first line, expected to launch March 1, literally weaves an episodic, multimedia game into the fabric of the garments. The Seattle-based company is believed to be the first to attempt such a fashion feat."
CNET News.com
Time-lapse desktop
Download of the Day: TimeSnapper. "Freeware program TimeSnapper takes screenshots of your desktop every few seconds to give you an accurate picture of what exactly you’ve been doing with your time."
Lifehacker
One UI for all your stuff #2
KIT. "Keep It Together - is a new application for Mac OS X that lets you keep your stuff in one place, organize it in different ways and find it again in an instant."
Reinvented Software
Visualizing the best time to fly
Flyspy Brings The New Web To Airline Ticketing. "Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to. Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent."
TechCrunch
Music Tamagotchi
iPod to meet Tamagotchi. "Japanese company Konami will issue this summer a curious LCD-based portable game in which the player "raises" virtual characters by giving them a "steady diet" of music. "When the game, called Otoizm, is connected to a MP3 player, various characters appear according to the type of music being played. The game classifies music into 19 types, and the growth and type of character produced changes according to the type of music it listens to. More than 30 kinds of characters can be created.""
we make money not art
Visualizing the news
What's Up? News Map. "New stories are highlighted on the map, and a balloon appears with a headline; clicking on the balloon sends you to the source of the story."
Cool Hunting
Learning non-verbal language with games
DARPA's 'Social Puppet'. "game designers from the University of Southern California (USC) have developed 'Social Puppet,' a computer engine to "help soldiers learn unfamiliar languages by interacting with animated characters." For this project, financed by DARPA, the researchers have used their expertise in previous videogames used by the armed forces, such as "Tactical Iraqi." But previous games were focused on teaching language and customs while 'Social Puppet' is giving on-screen characters human non-verbal communication behaviors."
Primidi
Add 3D to maps
Maya 2 Google Earth. "It's an open-source, cross-platform tool that allows you to export 3D models as a single Google Earth Placemark (KML) file. [...] Some of the potential uses for Maya2GoogleEarth are: -Remix or augment city architecture, with your own creations. -Extract your in-game character with OGLE and bring them into Google Earth. -Design buildings and then show them at their correct geographic location"
Cool Hunting
March 02, 2006
Laser projection
Mitsubishi develops laser-powered projection TV. "Mitsubishi has announced that it's developed the world's first rear-projection TV powered by a laser instead of the mercury lamps typically used in other projector TVs. According to the company, the laser projector offers higher picture quality and a greater color range than plasma or LCD sets. No word on when these will be out or how much you'll have to shell out to get one."
Engadget
Technology in mirrors
Mirror Weather Station. "From our wacky friends at Oregon Scientific, this Mirror Weather Station may take the prize on combo products that make little sense. For just $130, you too can own a mirror that tells you the outside temperature. You know, in case listening to the radio or turning on the TV or the Internet is too tough for you."
Gizmodo
Rotating camera
360 Camera Remains Stationary While Top Rotates. "Cedric Tay of Yanko Design has dreamed up this 360 Camera, a cylindrical digital camera whose top section rotates to take a series of panoramic pictures while its bottom section remains stationary. Since the bottom part doesn’t need to move, it’s possible to secure the camera on a tripod and take an accurate series of shots to be stitched together later. The camera’s design even includes a built-in inclinometer which helps you make sure it’s level before you begin shooting."
Gizmodo
Real versions of virtual stores
The temporary physical Virtual Store. "A spectacular initiative from American department store retailing institution J. C. Penney yesterday might cause everybody to rethink how e-commerce and the future of retailing might unfold though. The company will construct a 15, 000-square-foot physical manifestation of the virtual store at One Times Square on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, New York. In our humble opinion, the opening of this temporary virtual store from March 3-26, in which shoppers can purchase the company's full range of merchandise at interactive kiosks, marks a significant development in the history of retail. We believe that traveling virtual superstores could be a part of retailing’s future."
gizmag
Tiny projectors with "infinite focus"
New PVPro mini projector has no moving parts. "The projector is targeted at eventual use with cellphones and the video iPod, and includes no moving parts, skipping over prisms and glass to use lasers for imaging. The unit also has "infinite focus," which purports to need no adjustment to optics for the image to be in focus, no matter what the distance."
Engadget
Games in school
Class, Take Out Your Games. "These days, computer games are usually pilloried for excessive violence and sex. Yet teachers across the country are bringing certain games into their schools as a way to pique students' interest in everything from history and politics to physical fitness and music theory. Among the most popular are Firaxis Games Inc.'s Civilization games, Take2's Railroad Tycoon, and Carte's new favorite, Dance Dance Revolution from Konami Corp."Business Week
Video bookmarking
Dabble: Media Bookmarking Sweetness. "According to Mary there are 97 different video hosting services - including Google, Youtube, etc. I can certainly believe this, and I’ve written on a bunch of them already. Many of these services are quite popular, and people have a number of favorites at different services. Dabble will allow people to gather all of these favorites in one place, using standard bookmarking tools like tagging, comments, etc. And there is a big focus on sharing. Simply drag and drop a video from a friend (or anyone) to your area and you have it bookmarked."
TechCrunch
Night vision
Road-Ready Night Vision at Last. "Mercedes and BMW hope to make night driving safer with dashboard monitors that expose what the naked eye is unable to see lurking in the dark. During exclusive test drives near the carmakers' headquarters in Germany, Wired News experienced the night-drive systems firsthand in the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class and the BMW 7 Series. The sedans are set to launch in the United States this year."
Wired News
February 24, 2006
Display art
Makroskop. "The installation consists of a spiral-shaped array of screen-strips on which a continuous collaged image is projected. The image is slowly grinding towards the center of the spiral. There is also sound and as a whole creates a very maelstrom-esque appearance of the piece that is quite beautiful. Apparently, there is also some degree of interactivity which allows one to touch a part of the collage in order make more images from the same context appear, thus rendering it a kind of macroscope for the pool of images."
we make money not art
Digital whiteboards
Polyvision's Thunder. "For about $100,000, Polyvision will turn a bare meeting room into a "Thunder-capable" room. The white board is replaced by a large touch-sensitive screen connected to a series of digital projectors. Sketch ideas with a finger or virtual pen onto an easel, and each resulting page is projected on the screen. Photos and even videos can be added to sketches and pages easily rearranged in a drag-and-drop manner. All that, with none of the chemical stench of dry-erase pens."
Business Week
February 23, 2006
Group voting on media
Video Bomb. "Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the internet: people submit links to the 'Incoming!' page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front page."
Video Bomb
Housing estimates
Curious About Your Home’s Value? Zillow Knows. "The site says it has data and valuations (Zestimates) on 60,000,000 homes in the U.S., and there are an estimated 85 million single-family homes in the country [...]. We tested this and the key to adding in home improvements like new windows, a bathroom remodel, and even small items like new faucets are done by pressing the “Next” button at the top of the page. ( I was able to get my total value up another $31,000 this way.) This is hard to understand when you first try the program. Once you hit next - it will walk you through many screens where you can add in everything you’ve ever done to your home."
Real Tech News
Meeting online
Is World of Warcraft the New Golf?. "Overheard, at brunch: two tech entrepreneur types discussing World of Warcraft. What server are you on? What guild? Oh yeah, me too, I heard it's a good way to schmooze. Is that true? Has logging in to the world's most popular massively multiplayer online game replaced a few rounds on the links as the way to make the right business connections in a tech-driven culture? The particular Guild discussed by the brunchers above was started by Joi Ito, who became a WoW fan after embarking on the game to do some research on social networks."Extreme Tech
Connecting people, places and time
MemoryMiner. "MemoryMiner is a brand new application that represents the first step towards a long term goal: the creation of the world's most extensive network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture. Like all big ideas, it starts with a simple premise and a mass appeal for participation. MemoryMiner is an application used to organize and share digital media using a simple, yet powerful metaphor, namely "People, Places and Time." "
MemoryMiner
"Real" 3D displays
Japan's "real" 3D image projector. "A special projector can cast three-dimensional shapes of white light between 2 and 3-meters into the air -- previous devices only tricked the eyes into thinking the image was 3D. The images are created by blasting the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at fixed points resulting in glowing plasma emissions which hang-out just long enough to etch an ephemeral image. The 3D images are, gulp, accompanied by a series of satisfying "tiny explosions" from the expanding air."
Engadget
Visualizing network traffic
Visitorville: A 3D view of website traffic. "I was intrigued to hear about Visitorville -- an application that takes a website's traffic information and renders it as a Sim-City-like world, where each page in a site is a building, and visitors appear as human avatars that travel to and fro. As the Visitorville site describes it: Buses deliver your visitors to their landing pages. There's a bus for every major search engine; plus, you can create your own custom buses for any other referrer! Watch realistic-looking people move around your page. Different avatars exist depending on the type of visitor (commercial, academic, military, etc.). To move between pages, your visitors take taxis, ambulances, fire trucks -- or any other vehicle you like. They each have their own distinctive sound, so you can alert yourself when a particular page is accessed (or even a particular person accessing a page!)"
collision detection
Projection from phones
Digislide’s Digismart. "It's offering a way to project from PDAs, cell-phones and similar devices onto a wall. Unfortunately, without powered illumination you almost need to be in complete darkness to benefit from its display technology."
Lockergnome
February 21, 2006
Using many fingers on a display
Multi-Touch Interaction Research. "Multi-touch sensing enables you to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such system can also accommodate several users simultaneously, which is useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops. The sensing technology is force-sensing, and provides high resolution and scalability, allowing for sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accomodate both hands and multiple users. The drafting table style implementation on the images measures 36"x27", is rear-projected, and has a sensing resolution of ~0.1" at 50Hz. Applications receive events and stroke information using the lightweight OSC protocol over UDP."
we make money not art
GPS trackers
LAPD to throw GPS at fleeing cars. "The LAPD will outfit cars with a device that propels and sticks a GPS onto a fleeing car. The department will mount the StarChase LLC device in the grill of some squad cars. "Officers in the car would control a green lazar light, similar to an aiming device that fixes on your target," said LAPD Lieutenant Paul Vernon on Friday. "A small dart-like device is propelled from the officer's car.""
we make money not art
More realistic navigation systems
VW and Google team to explore future vehicle navigation systems. "Volkswagen, Google, and graphics chipmaker, nVidia, are working on an in-car navigation map system and display that is 3-dimensional and more realistic than anything currently available. Users will instinctively recognize their location in relation to the surrounding topography, especially in urban areas that are depicted with depth and accurate size relationships between buildings and roads."
gizmag
February 16, 2006
Cameraphone and game intergration
Siemens launches "Kick Real" cameraphone game. "The company's "Kick Real" game provides cameraphone users with a virtual soccer field; point the camera at your foot, and you can kick a virtual ball that you view on the phone's LCD. We can't wait for this to catch on, so we can get our own kicks watching gamers staring into their phones and kicking the air."
Engadget
Animals and sensors and blogs
Pigeons to Help Monitor Air Pollution with “Own” Blog. "No, they won’t be pecking the entries into the blog with their beaks. But in August 20 pigeons each carrying a GPS satellite tracking receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic mobile phone will be released into the skies above San Jose, CA. Text messages on air quality will be beamed back in real time to a special pigeon “blog,” a journal accessible on the Internet. Miniature cameras slung around the pigeons’ necks will also post aerial pictures"
Independent Tech
Finally time for home automation?
Lights. Mood. Video. All at the Touch of a Screen.. "The promise of a remote control home has buzzed around consumers' ears for decades, but never seemed to materialize for mainstream households. Most Americans have had to behold home automation from afar, featured in magazine spreads on televised tours of the homes of the well-heeled. But just as flat-panel television prices have significantly fallen in the last year, so have the costs of putting a home's operations under a fingertip's control, many home automation makers and installers say. Even basic functions — like central control of all of a home's music, movies and television, with atmospheric lighting — now cost hundreds rather than thousands of dollars"
New York Times
Physical point and click
Mapion lets users point and click around Japan. "Want to know whether there are any good restaurants in that building up ahead? Just point your phone at it, click the building's icon and find out. That's the idea behind Mapion Local Search, a service launched by GeoVector Corp. and Japan's Mapion. The service uses a database of local information, combined with a phone that includes both GPS and an integrated compass (currently just Sony Ericsson's W21S), to provide realtime point-and-click data to customers throughout Japan."
Engadget
Communicating identity
Identity Card Concept Project. "The collection of sketch ideas uses the business card to explore and express possible future value systems. Themes explored include privacy, the value of the physical, experience, the moment of exchange, disposability, and customization."
IDEO
Desktop 3D scanning
NextEngine scans 3D on the cheap. "We're not experts in the whole 3D scanning, printing, and modeling arena or anything, but it seems to us that a $2,500 USB 3D desktop scanner could come in handy for more than a few -- especially those who might want to make a contribution to our Keepin' it real fake series. For this may we point your attention to SolidWorks, and their NextEngine Desktop 3D Scanner, which features multiple optics arrays and dual three megapixel CMOS sensors and some laser triangulation technology for capturing models of objects, which rotate on a platter out in front."
Engadget
February 15, 2006
Learning music composition
Harmony Line Music. "Hyperscore is the first and only software application that teaches students the essentials of music composition, without having to engage in years of music theory training."
MIT
Meetings in virtual worlds
Avatars Among Us. "In exchange for insights on the concept of the dynamic knowledge repository, audience members watched a speech delivered by a gray-haired, suit-and-tie clad avatar bearing a more than passable resemblance to the man best known for inventing the computer mouse. The talk, held at a virtual locale known as Democracy Island in the multiplayer online world Second Life, drew a less realistic audience. Some in the crowd weren't even human, sporting features like antennae, fur and wings."
Wired News
Better QR Codes
Color Barcodes in TV commercials and DVD contents?. "ColorCodes can be read by camera phones from farther away (than QR codes.) So, the company intends to leverage this feature to promote the use of ColorCodes in television and commercials and DVDs. "Viewers will be able to simply point their camera phones at the screen to capture the codes and get directed to Internet sites where they can purchase goods or learn more about the programs they are watching.""
RFID in Japan
February 14, 2006
Transparent displays
Researchers developing transparent OLEDs. "esearchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on the next generation of OLED technology, including the ability to create displays that can become completely transparent and be turned on and off at will. Uses envisioned for the displays include OLED overlays on top of LCDs that could be used to display specific information without interfering with the main picture and automobile windshields with built-in displays that can display information as needed and turn off when not in use. Of course, what we really want is a transparent window that turns into an HD display when we flick a switch, but that may just be a little too much to ask for at this point."
Engadget
Smart magnets
Fridge magnets tinker with poetry. "Each fridge magnet consists of 16-character liquid crystal display, rather than a magnetic strip with a printed word, Proske says. The magnets can randomly generate a word, categorise that word (as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb) and transmit the category to any words they are placed next to. As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using. Once they are 'trained', the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don't fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function. "
ABC
Sharing running routes
Exersize routes at WalkJogRun. "WalkJogRun is a site where you can plan and share your walking, jogging or running routes. It uses Google Earth to plan routes and calculate distance, but what really makes WalkJogRun cool is its community features. You can save your maps by clicking on any of your markers and hit “Save Your Route” to add it to the database. Next time you or anyone else looking in your neighborhood is looking for a route, they will see your pin."
Lifehacker
Browser thumbnails
Download of the Day: Reveal. "Firefox extension Reveal creates thumbnails of your tabbed pages, allowing you to select, reorder, or even sort through pages in the session history. Pressing F2 will bring up your thumbs, at which point you can even search through them with a Find feature. Beyond that, Reveal shows thumbnails of your page history if you rest your mouse over the Back and Forward buttons, and allows you to zoom in on the page you’re visiting with a triple click."
Lifehacker
Replacing knobs with tasks
Your goals control home electronics. "Instead of knobs and menu items for each function, the software presents the user with a list of goals -- for example, record a movie on a DVD -- and either automatically carries out the steps required to accomplish the task or guides the user through them."
we make money not art
Radar of your friends
NJIT implements SmartCampus people-tracking program. "Limited initially to only 100 participants, the ultimate goal of the SmartCampus project is to eventually allow everyone to see exactly where everyone else is at any given time (hmm, can't really forsee any socially awkward situations arising out of this omniscience). The NJIT system [...] requires users to carry around tracking devices, as opposed to a similar system at MIT which seems to rely on users' laptops for locating them (but maybe not- can anyone from these two schools clear this up?). Luckily the SmartCampus gear allows users to turn "invisible" whenever they want, so would-be stalkers will have to leave their notebooks at home and continue trailing their victims the old-fashioned way."
Engadget
February 13, 2006
More powerful GPS
Government turns up volume on GPS. "The US government flicked the switch today on a new GPS signal, known as L2C. The signal, according to the government, is transmitted at a higher effective power, allowing it to "work better in urban areas and indoors." The new signal, being transmitted by the IIR satellite launched in September, can also be received using less power, potentially allowing better GPS reception by smaller devices such as cellphones. However, most current devices may not be able to make use of the new signals without upgrades."
Engadget
Visualizing nature
Computers show how plants grow. "Computer scientists in Canada have worked with botanists in Switzerland to build a 3D computer model which simulates how plants grow and develop beautiful shapes. Their model was able to accurately show how plants achieve phyllotaxis, this regular arrangement of lateral organs around a central axis. According to the researchers, this model will be used by botanists to complement and interpret laboratory experiments. But it also could be used as a basis for models of how other organisms, including animals, develop from primordial stem cells."
Primidi
Mapping trash
GarbageScout. "If you like to snoop around garbage and dig up something good, snap a picture of it with your camera phone, add a description location and email it to GarbageScout. It will be added on a Yahoo Maps for others to go and fetch it (treasures include so far: a rowing machine, a mirror, candy canes an electric heater, etc)."
we make money not art
Playing with music
Otoizm: Yo-Yo, Pet and Music Player in One. "Want a new pet that listens to your favorite music and dances with you? Meet Otoizmu (or Otoizm) from Konami. You connect this 2.2-inch yo-yo-like device to your music player and a character inside will start growing according to the genre of music you listen to. Not only does it grow by listening to your music, but it memorizes phrases and composes tunes that you can listen to. Meet up with a friend who also owns an Otoizm and the two will have a dancing session. Or, you can record your friend’s voice and a new character—Kotobaizm—appears to play with you."
Gizmodo
Terrestrial TV on a phone
Hitachi TV Phone. "One-segment broadcasting is a service that allows you to watch terrestrial digital broadcasts from mobile phones and other devices. It will be available in Japan starting April 1. And Hitachi has produced a mobile phone to capitalize on this, it’s the W41H, and will be supplied by au. It has a 2.7-inch LCD display that can be twisted around and folded over. This is called "view style" and when it is placed on the charging stand, the one-segment TV tuner starts automatically."
Gizmodo
Chameleon devices
E-Ink Cellphone Concept. "This is a concept phone that uses E-Ink. The idea is that the user can customize the front face, phone pad, turn it into a QWERTY keyboard, MP3 player or whatever. I think the thinness of this device is a bit much to expect given the proposed functionality, but not outside the realm of the one-day possible."
Gizmodo
3D screengrab
Michael Frumin's screen grab for 3D data. "My friend Michael Frumin is a researcher director at tech/art gallery Eyebeam's OpenLab. His latest project is the OpenGLExtractor (OGLE), essentially a "screen grab" application for 3D data. For example, Frumin used his software to capture a World of Warcraft character from within the game and physically rendered it using a 3D printer. He also mashed up characters from SecondLife and Google Earth, and imported chunks of Google Earth data into Maya."
Boing Boing
February 10, 2006
Things to do with cellphone bandwidth
Phones Above and Beyond the Call. "The latest mobile devices aren't just conversation pieces. Check out the high-tech multimedia and communications functions they offer. Wireless carriers have spent billions of dollars upgrading networks so customers can use cell phones for a variety of services beyond phoning home and shooting text messages to friends. The payback has been slow in coming, and most people still use their handsets mainly for making calls. In the U.S., data accounts for only about 6% of overall wireless-service sales. Service providers, equipment vendors, and other companies are eager to change that. "
Business Week
Printed codes that can "store" megabytes
New 3D Barcode able to Store Videos for Mobile Devices. "Content Idea of Asia Co. has developed a printable 3D code that can store between 0.6 to 1.8 MB, enough for watching short video commercials on mobile phones. The 3D code is based on the 2D QR Code [...]. Content Idea of Asia Co. calls it PM Code. The PM code consists of up to 24 layers using different colors. A usage example is for instance to watch a commercial on a mobile phone scanned from a perfume ad in a magazine. "
I4U News
February 09, 2006
Extreme pedestrian safety
Cars saving pedestrians' lives?. "The project, which officially ended in August, set out to develop an innovative pre-impact sensing platform that operates three different technologies of sensors simultaneously, and then fuses their data to protect cyclists and pedestrians under different weather and light conditions. The system comprises a radar network composed of several 24 GHz sensors working in parallel and an imaging system composed of passive infrared and colour video cameras."
ZDNet.com
Tracking IOUs
BillMonk - Social Money. "BillMonk is a new service that allows people to easily keep track of financial debts among friends. It’s a simple idea and they’ve executed well. The idea is a user who wants to report a debt owed to him or her (such as a shared bill), or an IOU to another person, simply enters it on BillMonk. This is very easy to do on BillMonk, even for more complicated transactions like a bill shared among a lot of people. You simply input the amount of the bill and the email addresses for those who participated. There is also an SMS feature to allow users to text in bills on the phone."
TechCrunch
February 08, 2006
Stickies on websites
Bookmarking with sticky notes. "To put it simply, Mystickies allows you to place little yellow squares of digital paper anywhere and everywhere you feel like in the whole wide web. Along with the ability to put sticky notes on webpages mystickies offers a powerfull interface to browse, search, sort, edit and generally have a wonderfull time with your sticky notes from any computer that has internet access."
Lifehacker
Remembering where you were
Download of the Day: Page Bookmarks. "Firefox extension Page Bookmarks adds an entry to the right-click context menu that allows you to save your place on a long text document so that next time you open that page, you can pick up reading right where you left off."
Lifehacker
QR Code popularity in Japan
Half i-Mode Users Use QR Codes. "7,905 users of DoCoMo's i-Mode cell phones responded to the servey that was conducted last month. The gist: (1) more than 50% use the barcode (QR code) function. (2) more than 80% use alarm, still camera, and ringtone functions."RFID in Japan
3D avatars on phones
Meet the New Breed of Avatars. "Ring tones, shmingtones. The next wave in cool applications for mobile phones promises to be 3-D animated avatars that serve as your alter-ego during a conversation. Think beyond the cartoony stand-ins available now in Asian markets, like those in Japan known as Chara-den, which users control via handset keypads."
Business Week
February 07, 2006
Overview of digital television
Digital Television, Part I: Making Sense of it all. "First, prepare yourself for a pig’s breakfast of acronyms son, there’s just no way around it: DAB, T-DMB, DVB-T, DVB-H, ATSC, and ISDB-T. At least these are the tastiest of the morsels under global mastication. Come on, don’t sweat it, you managed PCMCIA didn’t you, and that’s six whole letters! Besides, you really only need to learn the couple selected by the country you call home to effectively talk down to your local hi tech sales goon, mkay? So do join us as we take an extensive, in-depth look at what's really going on with the world of digital television."
Engadget
Cheap color calibration
Pantone hopes to make calibration mainstream with $89 huey. "Pantone hopes to bring the calibration experience to mainstream consumers, with the huey, an $89 device that the company says is targeted at "digital photo enthusiasts, gamers and any computer user wanting absolute color and clarity.""
Engadget
"Listening" to conversation
Conversation table. "As two people converse, LEDs, embedded along the center of the table, are activated by the pattern of the exchange. Microphones pick up the duration and the volume of the conversation at regular intervals, and trigger light animation from the end where one speaks toward the other. If both people speak simultaneously, the lights start animating from both ends."
we make money not art
February 06, 2006
Making snap judgements online
In less than 500 milliseconds. "Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal.Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds,roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage,their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.In the crowded and competitive world of the web,companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice, the researchers say."Unless the first impression is favourable,visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,"Lindgaard warns".Smart Mobs
Games in the classroom
Computer games 'motivate pupils'. "A third of teachers are using computer games in the classroom and a majority believe they improve pupils' skills and knowledge, a survey suggests. The survey of 1,000 teachers in England and Wales suggests a quarter also personally use them in their free time. Over half of the 1000 teachers questioned by Nesta Futurelab said they would use them in future and believed they were a "good motivational tool". But two thirds expressed concerns they could lead to anti-social behaviour. "
BBC NEWS
HUGE, interactive screens
Panasonic Digital Wall (Total Recall Pt. 1). "In the special presentation room is a wall-size, huge screen (twice the size of a 110-inch display), and it’s a touchscreen. The images on the screen change as you touch them (it’s online, of course), and you can choose from an extensive menu of options and tools. It functions not only as a TV and PC, but also as interior decoration by changing the image from a bookshelf for the living room to a graffiti space for the kids’ room. It is supposed to appear on the market around 2010 and the price will be horrendous."
Gizmodo
February 02, 2006
Adding charts to your blog
Chart your progress with Bellygraph. "Web site Bellygraph creates line charts that track your progress on a goal or task and lets you publish them to your web site."
Lifehacker
Mapping sounds
NYSoundmap. "What kinds of sounds can you find in New York City? With sound-seeker, you can zoom, pan and search for sounds with interactive satellite photos or detailed maps. Click on hot spots to listen to the recorded sounds of a location pin-pointed by GPS. Sound-seeker was created using GoogleMaps and isn't viewable in all browsers."
networked_performance
E-Ink displays in consumer devices
Weather Wizard e-ink forecaster. "Ambient Devices and E Ink have teamed up to deliver a weather forecaster, called the Weather Wizard, which displays info from Ambient's nationwide network on a low-power electronic ink display. You may remember Ambient as the company that manufactures devices like the Orb, which glow with different colors correlated to predetermined metrics (stock market, national terror level, our stress levels at CES). The Weather Wizard reportedly lasts for an impressive two years with just a pair of AAA batteries, although the E Ink display seems capable of only lackluster graphics."
Engadget
Shared museum tours
Marking Your Way for Ubiquitous Gaming. "Marking Your Way, by Idumi Sakuma, is a visual information display for museums and exhibition spaces, which allows users to view personal as well as collective trajectories of visitors. [...] Visitors use a personal device called wall stone that automatically detects its location by receiving beacons from hundreds of infrared devices mounted on the ceiling. [...] On its small LED display is a virtual creature "digi-mon" that asks questions to visitors when they are in front of certain exhibition items. Visitors then answer questions by tilting and shaking it. If their answers are right, the device glows. The rewards are digi-mon cards - cool. "
we make money not art
February 01, 2006
Unique visualizations
Weather controlled video. "The video is affected by the weather and local time of the viewer's localisation. Every little change in their environment ensures that they will never see the same video twice. The look of the video might slightly change within an hour, but will have a whole new character in a few months."
we make money not art
Iconography for touchless interactions
Graphic language for touch. "There is also a growing collection of existing iconography in contactless payment systems, with a number of interesting graphic treatments in a technology-led, vernacular form. In Japan there are also instances of touch-based interactions being represented by characters, colours and iconography that are abstracted from the action itself."
elastic space
Blogs as a shopping resource
Toshiba to Push Blog Reviews to Mobile Shoppers. "There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related service and quickly receive back information related to the product. The data the service returns? From blogs. Yep, Toshiba will send back summary information on how many blogs gave the product positive and negative reviews. Related product information will also be displayed."
TechCrunch
Cheap VR
In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually. ""V.R.'s original promise, to construct a ghostly realm where consciousness could roam free of the constraints of flesh, became socially obsolete." But there was a bigger, more concrete problem: while cellphones with all the whistles cost as little as $99, virtual reality environments, like medium-priced New York condos, could set you back about $1.5 million. Until now. Virtual reality is now available to artists for about $3,000. This is the kind of watershed moment that video art enjoyed in 1965, when portable video recording equipment became available at mass-market prices."
New York Times
January 31, 2006
Sharing barcodes visually
Ringtone garments. "Industrial designer Christopher Glaister and fashion designer Michelle Shakallis's barcode textiles are decorated by a pattern that translates a piece of music (When the Saints Go Marching In) into a barcode. The pattern can be turned back into real music or a ring tone by scanning it with a modified camera phone. The tune can then be used as the ringtone for that mobile phone."
we make money not art
Driver tracking
new breed GPS vehicle tracking system provides detailed analysis of driving behaviour. "Because the information is tracked off-line, DriveSync eliminates the high monthly service fees associated with other GPS vehicle tracking systems. Results can be viewed by detaching the data key from the receiver unit and inserting it into a computer USB port. The vehicle tracking results are uploaded to a DriveSync server where the data is interpreted and consolidated into customized reports. These reports, including trip logs, route maps and usage alerts, are viewed via a secure, password-protected website. The results provide a detailed analysis of vehicle use and driver behavior."
gizmag
Displays in everything
A-Data SD cards with capacity display. "The LC display uses power from a host while inserted and indicates the remaining capacity on the card. Pop the card out and the display retains the information until you reinsert it, so you can manage your data needs."
Engadget
Game ads better then TV ads to get to teens
Study: Best place to advertise to teens is in-game. "Two main avenues are open for advertising through games: in-game advertising and advergaming. The former is an extension of the product placement common in movies and television, and can range from graphical representation of a product in a game to wholesale sponsorship of a gaming title. With the increase in open-ended gaming that allows a player to wander around a virtual world (such as the Sims or Grand Theft Auto), opportunities for product placement are numerous. Advergaming refers to a game, usually online, that is wholly intended as a promotional device."Boing Boing
Digital board games
Video games meet board games with the Entertaible. "While we all love video games, sometimes there are moments when you want to get a little more analogue. Philips are clearly banking on our secret board game urges with a new product called the Entertaible, an electronic tabletop device which will apparently let you enjoy both the interactivity of electronic games and the social aspects of board games."
Joystiq
January 30, 2006
It looks like this
The Retrievr Flickr Tool. "Retrievr has a Flash sketch pad built into the site. Draw something - anything - and it will fetch Flickr images that are similar. My very rough drawing of a black line intersecting with a red blog brought up some nice results (see image)."
TechCrunch
Cameras with multiple lenses
Kodak's Latest CES Goodies. "Kodak will be debuting the world’s first dual-lens digital still camera, the EasyShare V570. Why two lenses? The real question is, why not? One lens is a 23mm ultra wide angle lens and the other is a traditional 3x optical lens."
Gizmodo
Non-invasive autopsies
? Virtual autopsies. "Traditional autopsies are considered as invasive procedures by many faiths and even violate religious laws, such as is the case for Muslims and Jews. This is why the concept of virtual autopsy, which relies on computer tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies, has been developed in the last two years."
ZDNet.com
January 27, 2006
Cameraphone --> Scan, copy, fax
Turn Your Camera Phone Into A Mobile Scanner. "scanR is simple to use: • Take a picture of a document or whiteboard. • Send the picture to scanR. • Receive the scanned image in email or fax."
scanR
GPS for bikes
Yamaha Motorcycle Navigation System. "The product is basically a Garmin, but with some tweaks by Yamaha. It has a sound guidance system that wirelessly transmits (via FM) to a receiver inside the helmet (“turn left in 100 feet… and do a wheelie”). "
Gizmodo
Pushing scrolling
The Mile Wall. "Travis aims to build the internet’s longest page. The page will stretch for 1 mile ( 1.6 km ) horizontally and be made entirely of public posted material. It will be the first, or at least one of the first, pages to go entirely horizontal for such an incredible distance."
Smart Mobs
Website summaries
Revamp of Gawker RSS reader Kinja launched. "Gawker quietly released a new version of their RSS reader Kinja last week, with some handy new features -- most notably, site results returned as "cards." "
Boing Boing
Virtual diagnosis
Virtual reality helps diagnose heart defects. "Dutch doctors are using a virtual reality system to visualize the heart in three dimensions and detect if it is healthy or not. In a pilot study, ten doctors were able to move around virtual three-dimensional animated images or 'holograms' of the heart and to make correct diagnosis after a ten-minute training."
ZDNet.com
Civilian GPS
Europe’s satellite navigation venture launches. "The first test satellite of Europe’s €3.8 billion Galileo navigation system was launched on Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The system will rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and Russia’s GLONASS system. Galileo is a civilian project and promises the permanent provision of a navigation system – the US and Russia systems are both run by the military and could in theory be turned off at any time"
New Scientist
Cartography in a truck
Explorers Map World's Offramps. "From the outside, save for a global positioning system antenna that resembles a police siren on top, the Escape looks like any other SUV. But in the back is a bolted cabinet containing a GPS receiver attached to the antenna, a laptop docking station, power supply and cables snaking through the vehicle's interior to connect with the computer display and video camera up front. The GPS setup feeds latitude and longitude information several times a second, plotted on the display as green arrows that connect to form digital roads. The camera captures three frames a second, enough to reconstruct road signs and other details. In the databases, roads are broken into line segments, each carrying as many as 160 attributes -- such things as road quality (ranging from 1 for major arteries to 5 for local streets), presence of a divider or center turn lanes, speed limits and addresses of buildings along each side."Wired News
January 26, 2006
Digital dashboard
New Mercedes S-Class dashboard goes LCD. "AutoSpies caught a glimpse of a new Mercedes S-Class where all the regular analog gauges have been replaced with a configurable LCD dashboard that can display different gauges, data, or even video. Not sure how much it'll cost as an option, but the dudes over at AutoSpies seem pretty floored by what they saw."
Engadget
January 25, 2006
Magazines everywhere
On-product magazines could change the media landscape. "The media mix is about to have a new and very viable form of print publishing – on-product magazines will hit the market for the first time in early 2006 and we suspect this innovation is capable of changing the world of print media as we know it."
gizmag
Organizing your home - sort of
PDA for your pet. "Enter your pets schedule (vet appointments, medication schedule, playdates in the park) , phone contacts (vet, groomer, the shitzu with the cute owner), even their picture - and you'll be the most organised pet owner at the dog park. And if you've got a globe-trotting pet, Pet Master will help you locate pet-clinics and pet-friendly motels while you travel."
The Register
Mapping out free wi-fi
Free ride data acquisition vehicle. "Frida V. is a computer-enabled bicycle that allows riders to map open WIFI nodes in urban spaces. It carries a small computer, GPS device, 802.11 wireless network transciever and a basic audiovisual recording unit. The system enables automated mapping of stumbled wireless networks, easy creation of location-tagged media and opportunistic synchronization with a server resource on the internet. "
we make money not art
Interactive maps for showing local reports
New York Transit Strike - Readers' Commuting Reports . "A collection of reports from readers about their commutes during the strike. Click on the map below to browse by ZIP code. Click and drag to move to a different area."New York Times
Visualizing your heartbeat
Heart beat bracelets. "In something of a Helmut Lang meets Rammstein moment, we bring you three prototype heart-beat bracelets. On top we have the "continuum" which displays the beating hearts tempo via white light pulses. Next we have the "alteration" which changes from red (fast) to green (slow) based on the heart's intensity. And finally, the er, "finality" which reminds your azz to carpe diem by displaying the number of beats remaining in your pawn shoppe heart."
Engadget
January 24, 2006
eReader tied to content
Tomorrow's paper will be digital. "Belgian daily De Tijd is to be distributed electronically in what is claimed to be the first complete solution for portable electronic reading and writing. Available from April 2006, the Iliad platform allows for customised versions of an electronic reader that can be created for special markets."
The Register
Dynamic music making
TransPose. "Computer vision technology captures the performer's physical actions captured and translates them to audio in real time. The performer sits in front of a camera, and his or her silhouette is projected in front of them in relation to a number of predefined trigger areas called "noteboxes." Using his/her silhouette to overlap the noteboxes, the performer triggers various tones. "
we make money not art
Computer-controlled flight in 3D
New Airline Navigation System Is Displayed. "Until now, an autopilot could only fly a plane in a straight line or around a gentle curve. But the one shown off Tuesday by the Federal Aviation Administration was following a path as sinuous as the river beneath, a route that planes use to control noise when they approach the airport from the north. "
New York Times (may require free subscription)
New PC form factors
Microsoft/IDSA Design Competition highlights. "Contestants were asked to “envision how form factor influences the digital lifestyle” in four categories: personal productivity, entertainment, communication & mobility, and living & lifestyle."
Engadget
January 23, 2006
Photoshop-like effects on 3D objects
Morphovision - Hacking Photon. "In front of a physical 3D miniature house (placed in a glass box) is a touch screen that allows a user to select different visual effects. According to the user's selection, the house may become soft or even break apart. This all happens between your naked eyes and the miniature house - no special goggles or screens needed. I can't help saying that we are a step closer to "photoshopping the real world.""
we make money not art
Ways of visualizing networks
A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. "VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web."
visualcomplexity.com
Sharing sounds
Silence of the Lands. "Silence of the Lands enables participants to collect ambient sounds, then to create and share individual and collective cartographies. These sounds represent subjective interpretations of the soundscape of the urban or natural settings that affect the everyday life of the community, and act as conversation pieces about natural quiet."
we make money not art
January 20, 2006
Portable HDTV
Pixela's HDTV On the Go. "Apparently, the Japanese just can’t stop watching their awesome HDTVs, so much that they need to do it on the go. So in comes the H.264 Pocket TV by Pixela, released only in Japan. Yes, now you will be able to enjoy stunning HDTV-quality programming on the go in the form of a long candybar-esque pocket TV. The device not only does television, but also FM radio and music playback. You can enjoy your tunes with digital 5.1 as well, since this little TV offers it all."
Gizmodo
More glasses with displays built in
Orange France touts video spectacles. "Fed up with having to squint at movies, photos, emails and text messages on your mobile's microscopic display? Then Orange France is offering the full heads-up experience, courtesy of its "video glasses". The slimline shades hook up to Samsung's D600E mobile phone by cable to display whatever's on the screen. The glasses also sport a pair of integrated earphones. Orange premiered the goggles at a French Sci-Fi channel event earlier this month, presumably hoping to attract all those Star Trek nerds who'd like a visor like Geordi LaForge's. Except, of course, he doesn't wear one any more."
The Register
Windows as displays
zaZen shows new ways to automotive enlightenment. "The entire roof dome from the belt line up is made of a single sheet of transparent Bayer polycarbonate which can be switched from transparent to opaque at the press of a button. This property also enables any superfluous knobs and displays on the dashboard to be “faded out” so the driver can concentrate on what is most important."
gizmag
Flexibile displays for mundane tasks
Citizen's flexible e-ink wall clock nears release. "Citizen's upcoming flexible digital wall clock, which measures 21-inches high by 52-inches wide and can wrap around corners, so you'll always know either the hour or the minute depending on where you sit."
Engadget
Cheap e-paper
E-Paper's Killer App: Packaging. "Electronics maker Siemens is readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging, from milk cartons to boxes of Cheerios."
Wired News
January 18, 2006
Monitoring the earth
Eyeing Earth from cloud top to seabed. "Earth scientists are beginning to live what they once considered an impossible dream. They are establishing systems to monitor our entire planet continuously, from the outer fringes of the atmosphere to the deepest seabed. They even are beginning to track the grinding of rock upon rock that generates earthquakes. They are linking communications systems to shunt these data to whomever can work them into useful knowledge. Often this now can be done in minutes instead of hours, days, or weeks. An unprecedented cooperation is developing among nations so that earth scientists will no longer look at our planet in the old, fragmented way."
csmonitor.com
Cultural communication differences
Japanese Facemarks(smileys) |||. "The difference between Western Smileys(Emoticons)(1 byte) and Japanese ones(2 bytes): Apparently, Japanese Smileys(Emoticons) are read vertically while eastern Smileys(Emoticons) are read hosizontally. And Japanese Smileys have more variation than eastern ons. I think the reason is that while American(alphabet) letters in computer are 1 byte, Japanese letters in computer are 2 bytes, so Japanese letters can have more characters. And also, Japanese sentences contain Chinese characters which are phonograms, so it is easier to express and recognize something graphic with letters for Japanese people."
Hiroette.com
January 16, 2006
The illusion of being in the same room
Videoconference system creates boardroom illusion. "A videoconferencing system that gives meeting participants in different locations the illusion that they are just across the table from each other has been developed by US company HP (Hewlett Packard). Each Halo Studio contains three large plasma screens fitted into the wall opposite a large conference table. A fourth screen hangs above these and can be used to display presentations to everyone simultaneously."
New Scientist
RFID museum interaction
Museum with Many Tags. "Okayama City Digital Museum is introducing RFID based services for visitors. 7,000 tags are embedded under the floor of an exhibition room (a large birds-eye photo of the city is printed on the floor.) Visitors walks around on the floor, pushing an information display device called Korotto . The device displays historical/cultural information related to the user's current postion on the photo."
RFID in Japan
Hacking a search engine
Roll Your Own Google. "Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that is best known for its traffic rankings, on Monday unveiled Alexa Web Search Platform, a set of online tools for searching, indexing, computing, storing and publishing vast quantities of net data. [...] To illustrate the new service's potential, Alexa developed a photo search engine that allows users to query photo metadata normally hidden from standard keyword searches, such as the date the photo was taken or the camera used. Musipedia, another Alexa prototype, provides users with the ability to search the web by melody. Give the engine a keyword or melodic contour, and it returns similar music. Musipedia allows users to input their own whistling as a query."Wired News
Cool future tech
A Peek at Tomorrow's Coolest Tech. "Among those that offer a glimpse into what's way beyond the next generation of gotta-have gizmos are devices ranging from a magic wand that serves as a remote control to a bracelet that translates your body movements into text messages. Take a peek at some playful concepts that are being cooked up in labs and brainstorming sessions around the world."
Business Week
December 15, 2005
Books that can be "read" by mobile phone cameras
High Tech Phone Books, Finally (maybe). "Upcodes of the smart phone book can be read with a mobile phone camera. The user is automatically directed to the Internet pages indicated by the Upcodes."
Gizmodo
Album covers
CoverFlow. "CoverFlow aims to bring that aesthetic appeal to your mp3 collection. It allows you to browse your albums complete with beautiful artwork pulled from any sources it can find, whether that’s buried in your song tags, collected via Synergy, or looked up on Amazon."
Lifehacker
December 14, 2005
More and more interactive homepages
Create a personalized homepage with Protopage. "Protopage is an Ajax-built web app designed to bring your RSS feeds, sticky notes, and bookmarks into one pretty package."
Lifehacker
Finding things
Finding a needle in a haystack of data. "Finding useful information in oceans of data is an increasingly complex problem in many scientific areas. This is why researchers from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) have created new statistical techniques to isolate useful signals buried in large datasets coming from particle physics experiments, such as the ones run in a particle collider. But their method could also be applied to a broad range of applications, like discovering a new galaxy, monitoring transactions for fraud or identifying the carrier of a virulent disease among millions of people."
ZDNet.com
Enabling features through scripting engines
Y!Q context search meets Greasemonkey. "After installing the script, all you have to do is highlight text, then click on the little Y!Q icon that pops up, and… tada! Contextual search results!"
Lifehacker
December 13, 2005
Chameleon clothing
New Scarf. "According to Nikkei, a group of researchers at Keio University has made a scarf that changes color to match that of the wearer's clothing by using 100 optical fibers, light-emitting diodes and a color sensor."
we make money not art
Executive toys
Tyco designer track for bored execs. "Showing how far executive toys have come from Newton’s swinging balls (what?), we bring you the $1,500 Designer Tyco Track for bored-rooms everywhere."
Engadget
December 09, 2005
Cellphones for pets
Fido's First Cell Phone. "The ability to track a lost pet has most dog lovers excited. The PetCell has a "call owner" button in case Rover strays. It also includes assisted GPS, or A-GPS, which works indoors, allowing dog owners to map their pup's coordinates from any web-enabled device or by dialing a voice-enabled call center."
Wired News
Satellite map sensitivity
Al-Qaeda probes enemy on Google Earth. "Amid all the kerfuffle of late regarding Google Earth and its possible threat to the national security of several jittery nations comes an interesting snippet from an email purporting to be from a US Marine who served in Iraq. In it, he suggests that al-Qaeda is using Google Earth as a intelligence tool in its fight against the US military."
The Register
Cameras that print?
Shake it like a Polaroid cameraphone picture. "Images of a “Polaroid Camera Phone” have surfaced on Mobile Korea, and the device looks more like a “hey, wouldn’t this be cool?” type concept than anything, so we’re not expecting to be popping a SIM card into one anytime soon."
Engadget
Bigger flexibile displays
Plastic Active-Matrix SVGA flexible e-paper Display. "Plastic electronics developer Plastic Logic has developed the world's largest flexible organic active matrix display. The display consists of a flexible, high resolution, printed active-matrix backplane driving an electronic paper frontplane from E Ink Corporation. The display will be publicly shown at the 12th International Displays Workshop in Takamatsu, Japan tomorrow. The displays are 10" diagonal SVGA (600 by 800) with 100ppi resolution and 4 levels of greyscale. The thickness of the display when laminated with E Ink Imaging Film is less than 0.4mm."
gizmag
Smart lights
RGBy, the One-Pixel Camera. "Shinya Matsuyama and Makoto Hirahara have designed a cube-shaped lamp that can sense color and then recreate that color. It is technically not a camera, but it is being described as a simple one-pixel camera anyway. "
Gizmodo
Visualizing data on maps
GAP - Global Attention Profiles. "The map above shows what countries CNN is paying the most attention to today. Countries in deep red are experiencing the most attention, yielding more than 3.2% of the stories detected by GAP scrapers. As the red fades and blues deepen, countries are experiencing less and less media attention."
Harvard
Background communication information
Girls Ambient Room. "data is gathered from different chat services, email & comment entries to their personal online journals. when the user (the Taiwan teenager) is in her room & receives a message on MSN chat, she hears audio signals that are in tune with one another, & sees bubble-like visual animations are created on the wall. Email traffic is represented by lines on the screen which start to animate & vibrate. the more email the more vigerous the animations."
networked_performance
December 08, 2005
Interactive TV on a phone
Ericsson, NRK launch interactive mobile TV. "Swedish telecoms supplier Ericsson and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) are conducting the world's first live trial of interactive mobile TV. The trial demonstrates a way of using mobile TV which allows mobile phone users to vote, chat and communicate with a television presenter while watching a TV show simultaneously on their handsets. "Digital Media Europe
Media spending vs. industry performance
Wired's page count as Nasdaq tracker. "You’ll note that the Nasdaq (red) lags Wired’s page count (blue) by a few months. I’m not suggesting you go an buy technology shares, but gee, I’m thinking the reports of money pumping back into technology companies might just be true given the big up-tick in this months page count (294)."
Boing Boing
December 07, 2005
Personal weather maps
Weather Underground and Google Maps. "Weather Underground has a neat use of Google Maps. They’ve got maps that show where their stations are and by clicking on them you can get all kinds of weather information about that local area."
Lifehacker
Re-representing a service
Pretty up del.icio.us with Delancey. "Delancey is an online bookmark manager that enhances the popular del.icio.us social bookmarking application. Delancey keeps track of how frequently you click on each of your bookmarks and presents them to you in order. The interface is nice, and content load-times (after an initial cache of your bookmarks) are decent. Also, sorting bookmarks by popularity is a cool idea. If you’re one of those people who loves del.icio.us but hates the way it looks, try making it all purdy with Delancey."
Lifehacker
Visualizing music albums
TuneBooks™ Digital Liner Notes and Interactive Booklets. "TuneBooks provide the visual content fans crave by bundling online albums with a collection of unique and innovative media highlighting the band and their visual sensibility. TuneBooks combines traditional visual elements - liner notes, cover art and band collateral - with custom-designed interactive art and media to create a new visual experience. And each TuneBook integrates artist discography and label catalog browsing, creating a natural means for fans to sample, explore, and buy new music."
TuneBooks
Energy monitoring
Energy diary helps correct bad habits. "BY OFFERING consumers instant feedback on the amount of energy they are using, a system trialled in Japan is helping people cut their fuel bills and carbon emissions. The Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Tokyo set up monitors in 10 houses in Kyoto and Osaka to gauge electric power use and check on room temperature every 30 minutes. Residents were able to monitor their overall consumption of electricity, gas and in some cases kerosene for heaters, via a linked PC. The computer also displayed the power consumption of individual appliances. "We wanted to see if the installation of such a system would have an influence on the energy saving awareness of the householders," says Ueno Tsuyoshi, who led the project. And as they had hoped, residents quickly became accustomed to checking on their consumption and regulating their energy use accordingly. "New Scientist
e-paper in general use
E-Paper Bendie Watch From Seiko. "The braclet-wristwatch features a thin, bendable e-paper trimmed in stainless steel which makes it a high-tech accessory without the geeky look. A black-and-white pattern of stripes on the watch changes every hour.”"
Gizmodo
Physical messaging
Cuckoo IP. "Cuckoo IP is a voice messaging system. The clock's answer phone can be dialled from mobile or landline. Leave a voice message, select a time for the delivery of it. At that time, the cuckoo will emerge from the clock and broadcast your message. "
we make money not art
Visual representations of energy use
Power-aware devices. "The Interactive Institute has unveiled new STATIC! prototypes that explore how everyday products might be designed to better express – and stimulate reflection on – energy use. Power-Aware Cord displays the energy consumption of the appliances that are connected to it. The blue light in the cord displays the intensity relative to the watts. In a primary stage, the cord can be used as an experimental tool to examine household products and in the long run it turns into an ambient display of everyday energy consumption. The cord has been patentent and they are now looking to take it into production."
we make money not art
December 05, 2005
Smart UI for small screens
Nokia defines The Mobile Web. " Nokia's new browser sets a high bar for the mobile web with an astonishingly smart use of the zoom and fish eye UIs. These screenshots demonstrate what Nokia accomplished through cooperation with Apple and using WebCore and JavascriptCore components which form the basis of Apple's Safari browser. First here's the zoom UI example."
mobile jones
Tagging and finding anything
Loc8tor lojacks your life. "Lost your keys or wallet again? Tag them to work with the Loc8tor, and the radar-like device will track them down in no time, within a 500-foot range. Tags can even be attached to children and pets, in case you’re too lazy to give a yell or check their known hiding places. "
Engadget
Huge, shaped displays
The 360 degree LED television. "The first time you see one of the screens you’ll understand what the fuss is about – the quality, colour, contrast and definition is extraordinary and the screen is absolutely huge – the third generation of the new LED screens is being introduced at present with the largest being a 2.5 metre high, 5.46 metre circumference screen and capable of being viewed clearly from 30 metres away. Interestingly, the screens can actually display one image around the full 360 degrees, so it would be possible to use them as output for a 360 degree camera."
gizmag
Self analysing car
Cars to predict their own breakdown. "The researchers' test car sat on top of an automatic shaker that simulates the bumps and jolts of a car ride. They attached sensors that measure vibrations to the bottom of the car's strut, steering knuckle-control arm connection, and at other places within the suspension. Then they introduced "damage" into the system by loosening a bolt that connects the steering knuckle to the control arm. The vibration data was analysed by a software that identified the damage and quantified it. The vibrations are almost like human heartbeats, in that a specialist can detect what sounds healthy or not. Any change can be used to determine which part is not working properly, as well as revealing the extent of the damage. In two to three years, Adams believes the technology could be integrated into a car's design."
we make money not art
Better mind control
Walking from Thoughts: Not the Muscles Are Crucial, but the Brain Waves!. "Researchers from Graz University of Technology in Austria, University College of London in England, Guger Technologies OEG in Austria and the University of Graz in Austria have expanded the amount of control available via external electrodes with a means of detecting changes in brain signals when users imagine moving their feet and translating the effect into walking motion within a virtual reality environment."
networked_performance
Tag management
Tags Sort Out Music Mess. "Tags that are complete and well-organized make it possible to find the perfect song to fit the mood of your intimate dinner party or Dionysian rager. Anything short of that and your guests will long have departed by the time you've located the tune. Soon enough, my hobby as a music collector morphed into one of a librarian. Fixing faulty tags requires what's known as a tag editor. One of my favorites is MP3 Tag Studio, a free program with many powerful features. The application allows you to select an unlimited number of MP3 files and manipulate them in any number of ways."Wired News
Blogging while travelling
Wishyouwerehere.com: Blogs From the Road. ""My friends and family would write e-mails back commenting on my adventures," said Mr. Watters, who was interviewed by e-mail from an Internet cafe in Koh Samui, Thailand. "Like two-way electronic postcards, but with as many images as I could post and no limit on the amount of words - plus no two-week wait." That was the beginning of TravelBlog.org, a site that is host to travel journals, allows users to post text and photos and even offers maps that show where users are writing from and where they have been. TravelBlog is one of numerous sites that offer - many at no charge - travelers the ability to share a journal of their journeys and allows readers to leave comments. "
New York Times
Encouraging remixing of content
Washington Post asks readers to remix it. "The Washington Post has created a blog for highlighting mash-ups of Post content. Current remixes include: a news keyword cloud viewer, a world map interface to Post stories, and a dynamic news quiz. Although a bit skimpy on implementation details (or implementations, for that matter), the idea's surprisingly hip."Boing Boing
Virtual phone pets
Trident: Tamagotchi meets Barcode Battler?"Earlier this month, Preamble Corp. released Trident, a virtual pet game for camera phones. . Players feed their virtual pets by scanning QR codes. Then, in "battle mode," the pets fight with each other. In order to win a battle, players should feed thier pets the right food (or QR code) and thereby raising/strenghening the pets and collecting key items. For example, if a fight can last long, you may want to feed lots of good food before the fight. "
RFID in Japan
November 30, 2005
Simple play
The sitting computer game. "Their midi-sofa allows you to interact with the game on the screen in front of you. You control the movement of your avatar by changing the seating position on the sofa, bouncing on it or pressing harder the back of the furniture. The more physical action used the faster the ball gets. Both, the "strategy of power" and the "strategy of minimal movement" lead to success. More images."
we make money not art
Digitizing everything
The automatic book scanner is here. "As the technology to automatically scan and digitize books is put to work it will multiply the speed at which libraries can put collections online. The vision of all the books ever written being accessible globally is made manifestly more realistic by the automatic scanner. Kirtas introduces its scanner here with an video of the process. Kirtas says the machine “automates the scanning of bound documents at a capture rate of 1200 pages per hour, while using a page turning process that is more gentle than the human hand.""
Smart Mobs
Ad exposure
Glasses track eye movement, ad exposure. "Analysis showed that during a 45-minute journey, the journalist had been exposed to more than 130 different advertising "elements" showcasing more than 80 brands. He was "looking" at adverts for 29 minutes but couldn't recall a single brand without prompting. When prompted, it emerged that just over half of the adverts had made an impression, those for products he was interested in and to which he was exposed for more than 10 seconds."
we make money not art
Videophone privacy
CCTVme. "CCTVme is an acessory that comes with 3 sets of cards. Whenever you feel the need of privacy, you can manipulate what the other person is seing during the video conference by attaching to your videophone the CCTV object and selecting a card to block the caller's view through your camera into your private space. "
we make money not art
Fashion and data
Readable. "The bracelets "Kontinuum" and "Ver䮤erung" (change) take the wearer's heartbeat as a reference and convert it into light that either pulsates or glows in different colors, thus displaying some information about the assumed state of the person. The bracelet "Endlichkeit" (finiteness) features a countdown to your last heartbeat, based on the calculation that an average male person's heart has beaten 2.3 billion times at the end of his life. Similar to Life Counter (Via Designboom) by Ippei Matsumoto, both projects having a certain memento mori notion of communication towards the user."
we make money not art
November 25, 2005
Small, powerful projectors
A movie projector in a cell phone?. "The reduction in size comes from a technique invented by Upstream for channeling the light from LEDs to a display in thousands of small beams. Light, whether from a candle or an LED, naturally shines in every direction. Upstream has built a complex micro-optical system that collects that light close to the source and sends a huge proportion of it to an intended target. The so-called "photon vacuum" optical system surrounds the LED like a shell. As a result, a tiny optical package can provide roughly the same level of illumination efficiency that larger systems can. "
CNET News.com
Blurring inappropriate images
PixAlert Foils Office Porn Surfing. "Using high-speed image analysis software to scan images, the most recent version of PixAlert Monitor will now blur any image it considers inappropriate or illegal, as it comes up on the screen. So, instead of just trying to block these images from your screen, PixAlert lets you get them, just pretty much unwatchable. And if you do try to get some of this stuff up (again we know YOU wouldn’t, but there are some pervs out there!), a thumbnail copy is made and sent to the central server, which is the brains of the system."
Gizmodo
Projecting on to real objects
Fishbowl Pixile. "A Pixile is a projection onto spherical objects suspended in space. The projection consists of a realtime 3D environment which mimics the shape and size of the objects it is projecting onto. The result is a holographic illusion. You can play with the pixile using a mouse, clicking and dragging objects as if they existed in real life. For the fishbowl Pixile, a fish bowl shape is projected onto 3 spheres, creating a virtual opening on the physical sphere. The user can rotate the individual bowls around in all directions. Small physics based cubes are placed inside the bowls and the user is able to pour the cubes from one bowl into the other. The cubes start off as primary colours once they are mixed with other coloured cubes they are averaged out to form a new mixed shade."
we make money not art
Customization on a smartcard
Smart card to open up computing. "The Special Needs Application Program Interface, or Snapi, puts a user's preferences on a smart card. The cards can be used in cash dispensers, ticket machines and public access computers. Once a Snapi card is removed, the machine automatically returns to its default settings. "
BBC NEWS
November 22, 2005
Sharing map information
Map your travels with Wayfaring. "We’d would like it to be a community of travelers who use our web-based tool to create, use, or share information about their travels and the places in their lives. We built Wayfaring because we thought it would be cool to see people share trip ideas and places with each other."
Lifehacker
Vector drawing on maps
VGMap. "VGMap is a new library created by Eyebeam R&D that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. It is called VGMap because it adds vector-drawing capability to the already-awesome GMap API. [...] This VGMap library is simply the glue between GMap and Flash, as well as a handful of Flash ActionScript libraries and sample code to simplify the process of drawing over the map correctly."
networked_performance
Maintstream tagging
Amazon Tags. "Amazon is integrating user tagging into product pages (see image below). Tags are public by default and can be managed under a “your tags” area that I am failing to find. You must first select a “Real Name” (odd choice of names given the old company called RealNames). Once you’ve signed up and started adding tags, you can delete them or make them private in the management area."
TechCrunch
Urban technology gaming
Shoot me if you can. "Replace a gun with fun, and shoot the opposing team with a cellular phone equipped with a digital camera. Participants; shooters are given a team color and phone number printed on the sticker. Shooters have to take a picture of the opposing team. If successful, she/he sends the picture to the opponent team member, via multimedia SMS system. Different rules exist for variations in game. Tactics are an important part as well as team work and understanding of the urban environment."
networked_performance
Better virtual reality
The VirtuSphere: full body immersion Virtual reality at last. "The VirtuSphere is a large hollow sphere that sits atop of a base of rollers enabling the sphere to rotate 360 degrees. Wearing a wireless, head-mounted display, users can walk, jump, roll, crawl and run in any direction over unlimited distances without encountering real-world physical obstacles. The Virtisphere is a fundamental step forward for the entire science as it offers six degrees of freedom. "
gizmag
Open source games
Dance Dance Revolution as free software/free culture. "Stepmania is a free, open source Dance Dance Revolution lookalike for Mac, Linux, and Windows. [...] Fans repackage all the official DDR songs as Stepmania files, so you can find these on your favorite p2p searcher (say, Limewire) with a search for "stepmania". Or use Dancing Monkeys, a student project that takes any mp3 and turns it into a Stepmania file, complete with appropriate dance steps (Windows only, unless you have Matlab). Another fun feature: you can run random .AVI movies in the background while you're playing...very surreal".jpg)
Boing Boing
Tracking the relationship between people and objects
Airport security keeps eye on left luggage. ""We [will] just track them while they are walking and track the relationship with these objects that they carry," Piccardi says. "And we will raise an alarm only if the object is being left and the original carrier has left the area nearby." Tracking people using surveillance cameras is a challenge and currently only works when the area under surveillance is not crowded. Piccardi also plans to catalogue certain objects that are likely to be safe, like abandoned courtesy wheelchairs and trolleys at airports. "But if someone is leaving a suitcase on a wheelchair then that suitcase can be as dangerous as a suitcase left on the floor," he says."
we make money not art
November 18, 2005
Smart cars and roads
Cars soon may 'talk' to roads, each other. "The demonstration at Honda's test center outside Tokyo previews what is shaping up as the next phase of automotive safety: vehicles that talk to each other and the highway system itself. They silently send or receive warnings from other cars in close proximity. Or they pass information back and forth to sensors along the roadway that become part of a real-time database. They tell of their approach to an intersection, warn about hazards ahead or keep an inattentive driver from running a red light, all with the goal of preventing accidents."
USATODAY.com
November 17, 2005
Barcodes built into photos
MIG - hidden barcodes. "Fuji Xerox developed the technology called MIG, which can embed barcode information or URLs in product labels. The technology slightly changes photos and illustrations printed on product labels. It's printable like barcode,s but it's "invisible" like RFID tags. MIG technology can embed typical barcode information within a 1cm^2 space. The MIG-encoded labels can be read by using mobile phones (like QR codes). "RFID in Japan
Trading on virtual land
Virtual property market booming. "A gamer who spent ?13,700 on an island that exists only in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers. The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year. The virtual Treasure Island he bought existed within the online role-playing game Project Entropia. He made money by selling land to build virtual homes as well as taxing other gamers to hunt or mine on the island. "
BBC NEWS
Tagging people
People Tagging with Tagalag. "Tagalag is a service that lets you tag people, via their email address. It’s not a “tribute” site like 43 people, because only people who know a person’s email address can add tags for that person. If you create a profile you can add personal and geographical information about yourself."
TechCrunch
Hacking games
Play Risk With Google Maps. "For some reason I decided a bit after the API for Google Maps came out that it would be awesome to be able to play Risk on it. About a month later it became apparent that everyone using the API was doing it for more useful things, such as gas price tracking and ::cough:: hotornot placement. I’ve always been a gamer and thought this was the perfect step."
Lifehacker
November 16, 2005
Social TV sharing
Tape It Off The Internet. "A global TV guide, Torrent tracking, your favourites and recommendations plus an innovative social layer to hang it off. You want it, we want it, let's build it."
November 15, 2005
Tracking people on the network
MIT maps wireless users across campus. "Red splotches on one map show the highest concentration of wireless users on campus. On another map, yellow dots with names written above them identify individual users, who pop up in different places depending where they're logged in. "With these maps, you can see down to the room on campus how many people are logged on," said Carlo Ratti, director of the school's SENSEable City Laboratory, which created the maps. "You can even watch someone go from room to room if they have a handheld device that's connected.""
CNN.com
Extremem portable computing
Fashionable Computer Not Too Stylish. "Featuring a Head Mounted Display (HMD), a wrist keyboard and VR glove, you’ll be able to do your computing just about anywhere by using a throwing motion to transfer and exchange music files, video clips or even word documents. "
Gizmodo
Finding relationships between metadata
View tag relations with browse.delicious. "browse.delicious is a visual browser that let[s] users explore and browse through a sample data-set of del.icio.us (social bookmarking system), to see and understand the connections and relations of its entities. The sample data-set consists of 150 persons, their tags, and bookmarks."
Lifehacker
Remote access by phone
GLOOLABS demonstrates the missing link. "Using GlooNet, consumers can access their home audio collection while at work, select pictures stored on their home PC from a print shop kiosk or share pictures and videos with friends and family without sending bulky email or waiting for lengthy uploads. Additionally, GlooNet includes features for enabling mobile phones to be used as wireless MP3 players without the need for significant local storage capacity."
gizmag
Tracking with RFID
Proximity Lab. "The 8-foot by 16-foot walkable surface is fitted with RFID technology. Participants wear shoes fitted with RFID tags, enabling the system to track and record their positions in real-time. Images projected directly onto the floor are accompanied by stereo sound as a continuous response to the actions and interactions of participants."
we make money not art
RFID in the home
TAGGED! Stolen Things. "The installation consists of a large shelf and tagged everyday objects in it. When one of the objects is placed in the central empty cubicle of the shelf, associated information (picture, movieclip, sound or music collages) are being displayed on the screen above."
we make money not art
Cheap displays
Siemens Develops Flexi-Screens. "Siemens has developed a flexible color display screen that can be printed on something as thin as paper, cardboard, foil, or even plastic. It’s also affordable enough — about $52 for 3.2 feet — to be included in everything from books and magazines to tickets and instructions on packaging labels. Apparently this flexi-tech uses “electrochromic substances that change color when an electrical charge is administered, absorbing other light wavelengths than in their original state.”"
Gizmodo
Conveying emotions
eMoto. "Emotional communication between people meeting physically in the "real world" make use of many different channels, such as facial expression, body posture, gestures, or tone of voice, little of this physicality of emotions is used in a similar digital context. In eMoto users therefore use affective gestures to convey the emotional content of their messages which are then translated and communicated in colors, shapes and animations. "
SICS
November 14, 2005
Online "exercise"
Marathon at a keystroke. "Virtual Marathon is a game designed to let the players gain a new perspective of the Internet. The players become ‘virtual runners’ and run through different game servers hosted physically around the world. Through the course of running, the players running speed changes with the different servers. The players feel their (physical) relationship with the different web servers. Location becomes apparent, instead of being flat and smooth, Internet becomes a textured space."
we make money not art
Laptop OLED screens
14-inch OLED displays through inkjet printing. "So Cambridge Display announced back in August that they’ve developed a technology to ”print” an OLED display using fairly traditional inkjet technology, well now they’ve successfully printed up some 14-inchers with the low-cost manufacturing process, at a 1280 x 768 WXGA resolution no less, so it seems as if the age of laptop OLED is almost upon us. Of course, we’ve been having OLED laptop displays hyped to us for quite a while now, along with their wonderful promise of lower energy consumption, thinner form factor, and of course, lower cost, so there’s no telling when these things will actually surface."
Engadget
November 11, 2005
Physical representations of other people
Phone-less phone calls. "To start a conversation, the user touches the panel(s) corresponding to the person(s) s/he wants to talk with. The panel starts blinking and the volume of that channel is amplified. To talk in private mode, the user picks the orb. This simple hand gesture mutes all the speakers and the public microphone. To switch the connection off, the user drops the ball and the system returns to the initial state. "
we make money not art
Virtual presenters
Meet the virtual weather presenter. "Televirtual, based in Norwich, launched Metman and Metgirl initially for stations who cannot afford to have their weather presented by 'real' broadcasters. But managing director Tim Child said the implications for the future of broadcasting and the media in general were endless. He said the reason weather forecasting was chosen for the prototype was because of its relatively small knowledge base and its formulaic nature. The speech engine used for the voice is the most complex part of the creation and requires up to 30 hours programming input by reading sample forecasts."
EDP24
Consumer analysis
The codification of humanity. "Utilising footage from a department store manipulated through motion tracking and screen overlays that graphically represent the goods bought, The Catalogue places the viewer into the position of a remote agency, observing humanity as a series of trackable units whose value is defined by their spending capacity and future needs. "
we make money not art
November 10, 2005
Buying books by the page
Amazon to sell chapters of books. "Online retailer Amazon.com has unveiled "two innovative programmes" to allow readers to access parts of books rather than buying the complete work. It says Amazon Pages will let customers purchase online "just the pages needed" be it a section or chapter, while still offering the whole book up for sale. And a second scheme, called Amazon Upgrade, will also allow online access to those buying a hard copy of a book. "
BBC NEWS
Subtle interfaces
Hot Lids a Very Cool Idea. "The "smart" lid alerts consumers that the contents are hot by changing from coffee brown to bright red in colour with the colour range designed to indicate the temperature, enabling regular customers to “read” the temperature of their coffee."
gizmag
Digital QR codes
QRick Card System. "DigiSonic developed a secure user authentication service using a credit card that is equipped with a display (they may use the e-paper technology). The display shows differnt QR codes with encrypted information (passwords, ID, server URLs) every 5 seconds or so. Users use their mobile phones to take a picture of the QR code and send it to a server."
RFID in Japan
November 08, 2005
Wireless toys
TileToy. "By arranging the electronic TileToy, users can play different games, ranging from fast-paced arcade style games to puzzle or learning games. Compared to traditional tile games, TileToy can avail itself of changing-state strategies, animations and games where the tiles can effect the state of adjoining tiles. The re-programmable and constantly updated graphical information on each tile is displayed with a LED matrix system. Each tile is controlled individually and transmit information on its own or in groups of several tiles, e.g. for scrolling text. The tiles snap onto each other magnetically and communicate wirelessly with the help of built-in transmitters and receivers. The assembled tiles are "aware" of their individual position in relation to each other."
we make money not art
Pet locating
GPS PRO Dog collar with SMS. "Simply strap the collar around your beloved’s neck, and as long as the built-in receiver can pull in both GPS and GSM signals, you can call the collar from anywhere in the world and get texted back with its exact location (or view a map on a smartphone)."
Engadget
November 03, 2005
Window management
Organize your open windows with Deskloops . "Deskloops does this by arranging windows along a virtual horizontal loop. At any one time, you’ll see window open on screen as usual, but in fact any number of other windows, set on that loop, can be rotated in from left or right. A strip of thumbnails on top of the screen maps the loop’s full content."
Lifehacker
Displays as building material
Plastic, solar-powered walls with OLED-based bitmaps. "SmartWrap is a thin plastic film that can be used as a building-material for walls and other construction contexts. SmartWrap comes with embedded OLEDs and/or solar panels; the solar cells power the OLEDs, which can be made to generate light or arbitrary bitmaps."
Boing Boing
Living off virtual worlds
Picturing online gaming's value. "One player he met in the virtual world, Second Life, earns $70,000 a year creating female avatar clothing, he says. Another player, Mark (aka Marcos Fonzarelli in Second Life) has turned himself into a "robot tailor", designing robot costumes that characters can wear. Admittedly, it is a niche market, says Mark, but he still earns $250 a month. "
BBC NEWS
Smart photo tagging
First Screen Shots of Riya. "That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 400 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are…it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy. Riya also recognizes text in photos, and lets you select any area of a photo and tag that as well. For instance, you could select just the Eiffel Tower in a photo and tag it as such. Within moments, everything of importance in all of my photos was tagged. And more importantly, it was searchable."
TechCrunch
November 01, 2005
Sharing travel plans
Plan a Trip in a Single Search with Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner. "Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more. When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community."
Yahoo! Search blog
Easy map-making
Microsoft Excel Yahoo! MapMaker. "Download his spreadsheet template, enter a set of addresses, click and voila! Using the Y! Maps API, a linkable, printable map like this one of the San Diego trolley system is yours to share. The MapMaker tool makes plotting several points on a map at once super-easy (and kind of fun and addictive.) Perfect for web publishers or just regular people trying to coordinate a bunch of locations at once."
Lifehacker
Wall-sized displays
UC Irvine’s monster HIPerWall monitor. "To save you a trip to the calculator, the HIPerWall (for Highly Interactive Parallelized display) measures 192-inches diagonally and sports a maximum resolution of 25,600 x 8000—so although this enormous setup was designed with medical, meteorological, and military uses in mind, all we can think about is the number of Dashboard widgets we could cram in."
Engadget
October 27, 2005
Playing with your food
Bingo Game For Shoppers. "A customer first need to sign up for the service, then she receives a QR code from a server. After shopping, she can display the QR code on her mobile phone and show it to a reader device. Then, she receives an SMS message that notifies her about the points she earned. Now she can open her home page on her phone to check the current status of her ongoing bingo game. Everytime she earns some points, she gets an additional symbol and when she gets three identical symbols in row, she is rewarded with coupons. "
RFID in Japan
October 26, 2005
Wireless hospitals
Digital Medical Records on the Go. "Global Care Quest is working in conjunction with the UCLA Medical Center to eliminate paper trail problems. The system they are installing is a patient retrieval system accessible wirelessly. There are two optional ways in which the hospital staff would be able to receive information; the first of which being through PDA’s and smartphones. It is done all real time to help eliminate room for updating error. For those staff who do not carry PDA’s or smartphones, there would be desktops, laptops, and wall-mounted machines scattered throughout the hospital for patient information access immediately and quickly."
Gizmodo
Leisure GPS
SureShotGPS brings GPS to golf course worldwide. "The SureShot has a 2.2-inch display, can hold data for 10 courses at once, and syncs with a PC via USB. The device will initially come preloaded with maps of a handful of Australian courses. The company aims to have all of Australia’s major courses added to a web site for free downloading within six months; international courses will follow"
Engadget
Big displays for complex information
Tomorrow's operating room to harness Net, RFID. "It's hard to do most jobs without talking to your peers, but in the operating room, poor communication can cost a life. In the operating room of the future, however, telling a doctor he or she is making a mistake could be as easy as pointing to a computer screen or "wall of knowledge"--a thoroughgoing summary of background data, vital signs and strategic information designed to prevent mistakes during surgery. "
CNET News.com
Collaborative map-making through GPS
London Poster. "OpenStreetMap has put together all the GPS data it has in London and made a stunning poster from it. [...] Data submitted to OpenStreetMap of people walking, driving and cycling around London. So the thicker the lines, the more people travelled them. "
OpenStreetMap
Bigger e-paper
Finally, electronic paper big enough to use. "Start-up E Ink and LG.Philips LCD have created an "electronic paper" display measuring 10.1 inches across, the biggest one ever made, and the latest step toward the dream of e-books and magazines, according to the companies. The prototype screen measures less than 300 microns thick, making it about as thin and flexible as construction paper. Letters and images that appear on it resemble characters and pictures printed with ordinary ink on paper, the companies said. The screen can also be rolled up."
CNET News.com
October 21, 2005
Non-US cellphone innovation
Samsung demos 3D camera, display for cellphones. "Samsung recently demonstrated a working concept that incoporates stereoscopic cameras and a 3D-capable display directly into a cellphone, allowing for a more lifelike rendition of the subject. The stereo cams work under the same principle as human eyesight, while a parallax barrier LCD display gives on-screen images more depth and robustness. The new camera setup and displays should start appearing on foreign handsets next year, by which time we’ll hopefully be seeing 3 megapixel phones with optical zooms here in the technologically-backwards US."
Engadget
Searching as you type
Inquisitor with Ajax: Not Your Father’s Search Engine. "Unlike your normal search engine like Google or Yahoo, Inquisitor has added some AJAX scripts to do your searching while you type, kind of like Google Suggest, but it gives you the actual search results not the search terms. According to the website Inquisitor is best used with FireFox, Safari, or Opera, so those of you who are still using Internet Explorer might miss out on some of the Ajaxian goodness."
Real Tech News
Connecting people through clothes
Empathy Vest. "The garment allowed for the transmission of data that was converted into sensory affect. Two touch sensors and one voice relay sensor, gave the wearer a sense of experiencing informational stimulus mapped onto the body through the output modes – 4 x light channels and 1 x fan. These sensory impacts on the body questioned whether the fact that the wearer can feel the physical stimulus could make him/her develop an empathic connection with the remote space or person(s) from which the signals were being received."
networked_performance
October 18, 2005
Location-based podcasts
Placing Voices. "Placing Voices, by Brian House, is a mobile-sound-blog software which uses the built-in sound recording feature of mobile phones (which is optimized for voice) and MMS messaging to place these fragments on a web-accessible map of the city as they occur. The objective is to express a map in terms of these experiences, to restore some claim to my memory of physical spaces over the transient voices heard within them."
networked_performance
Making and recycling physical objects on demand
Machine Makes Dishes on Demand. "MIT Media Lab's Counter Intelligence Group, which develops innovative kitchen designs, has created a machine that makes dishes on demand and recycles them after diners have finished a meal. The dishes are made from food-grade, nontoxic acrylic wafers, which are shaped into cups, bowls and plates when heated, then resume their original wafer shape when they are reheated and pressed."
Wired News
October 14, 2005
Emotive clothing
FlirtSkirt. "User A wears her skirt and turns it on and her skirt holds the colours that have been initialized. On reaching a particular distance from user B the outfits start communicating with each other. They recognize the initial colors, mix them and display the shared color on both outfits. In addition when in range the outfits dim. When user A and B have separated from each other and moved beyond the range of frequency, they leave with the shared color ready for interactions with new users."
networked_performance
October 11, 2005
Wireless lights
Dodgem Interactive Lighting. "The Dodgem Interactive Lighting, designed by Richard G Liddle, is a patented system that allow lighting to be physically manipulated and repositioned by hand, within a totally transparent screen."
we make money not art
Sharing locations
Share with Fallen Fruit. "West coast-based Fallenfruit.org provides maps that identify fruit trees that hang over public sidewalks. By law (depending on the town), these fruits are public property and you can harvest them freely. Although avocados are currently in season, the Beverly-to-Wiltshire map shows where you can find bananas, figs, grapes, lemons, loquats, peaches, oranges and more."
Lifehacker
October 10, 2005
Environmentally sensitive furniture
Intelligent Illumination. "This lamp shade, designed by Philips, changes to match any color you expose to it. How smart! The Chameleon has a built in camera that can copy the color of any object you show it, like this tie for example, just by approaching its sensors."
PSFK
October 07, 2005
Interactive business card
The rCard: Fully Interactive Business Card. "The rCard is a card that plays video and comes with a 1.875” x 1.875” full color flat screen, speakers, a navigational button, 1 gig of memory, and a USB port. The battery on it is as thin as a postage stamp and lasts about 4 hours of continuous use, but there’s a rechargeable battery option, and you can power it off and on. The whole thing only measures 2” x 3” and weighs a measly 2 ounces."
Gizmodo
Content providers as "virtual operators"
Airtime . "ESPN and other big brands don’t want to take a backseat to mobile operators, and they certainly don’t want to get into the business of buying spectrum and building out their own wireless networks. Their strengths are in content and marketing, not setting up and maintaining a cellular network. So they become a virtual operator—they buy airtime wholesale from a traditional carrier, then package it, market it and sell it however they want."
Gizmodo
Virtual overlay on video
Augmented Reality Navigation for bus drivers. "A camera installed behind the shuttle’s rearview mirror films the road from the driver’s perspective and projects this view of the road like a TV image onto the navigation display. On the basis of the cartographic information and the GPS signal the on-board computer calculates a route which appears as a transparent yellow band placed exactly over the camera live picture. The driver can thus take in the route with just a quick glance and thanks to the camera also has the road in view at all times on the display. "
we make money not art
Replacing keyboards with touchscreens
Touch screen everything! . "Mitsubishi, makers of all things, period, is working in conjunction with Japanese cell phone manufacturer NTT DoCoMo to develop a cell phone that has a touch screen rather than actual keypad buttons. The advantage of this design is to allow the phone to easily utilize even more features with the touch screen that can change display and usage on the fly. The three buttons below the keypad touch screen are quick reference buttons that will change the display immediately."
Gizmodo
Concepts not so far away
Nokia 888 communicator concept phone. "The bracelet-like 888 is envisioned to use a liquid battery, feature speech recognition, a flexible touch screen, and a touch sensitive body cover. A video showing off the device’s potential features shows off close to a dozen functions, including an alarm clock, PDA, GPS, phone, push email receiver, digital wallet and, of course, jewelry. And, other than the “liquid battery,” we can actually see this in the not-too-distant future. Just give us some full-color E-ink, flexible OLED displays and inkjet-printed circuit boards, and we’re almost there." "
Usability In The News
2 screens from one
Split-Screen DVD/TV Nav System. "Toyota has developed a dual-purpose navigation system that debuts on the Alphard minivan, making it possible for the driver to check a road map on the display while a passenger watches a TV program or a DVD."
we make money not art
Video search & browse
New Video Search Sites Offer Glimpse of Future TV. "The most recent version of this customized Internet TV idea comes from Blinkx, a San Francisco online search company that plans to activate MyBlinkx TV today at www.blinkxTV.com. The site is supposed to work much like a standard search engine, prompting users to type words or phrases into a search box. But when the user types in, say, "big wave surfing," instead of displaying links to Web pages, the site starts rolling a string of video clips most relevant to that topic. Users can fast-forward, rewind, pause the video and click a button to save the channel. When they return to it, the technology refreshes the channel with newer, more relevant clips."
New York Times
Ambient devices
Sharing memories. "Momento makes it easier to share video memories. The glass ball will "wake up" when approached and play its store of movie clips when a person reaches out to pick it up. To change from one clip to another, simply shake the glass ball and its sensors will detect the movement prompting the existing clip to dissolve and another one to appear in its place."
we make money not art
Building screens out of anything
Bubble screen. "The Bubble Screen, by Daniel Kupfer and Eyal Burstein, is made out of water bubbles. Using pumps, one can control the release of the bubbles over time. That control enables you to write texts, make drawings, etc. with bubbles that come from a row of holes at the bottom of the water tank."
we make money not art
October 06, 2005
Another 3D display
Pioneer develops 3D floating interface. "Using a 3D lens, the system creates a 3D image from an image that is displayed on a 15inch LCD. Spatial sensors are installed around the projected image. Users can see the 3D image with their naked eyes, no need of any special glasses.) Sensors detects positions of fingers and a specially developed software computes and renders images in real time. Users can thus draw in the air or manipulate windows."
we make money not art
October 04, 2005
Picture dialing
Picture-phone eliminates the need for dialing. "Warren Goodland (a British masters candidate in Design Research for Disability), has noticed the difficulty that seniors often have in operating a telephone, mostly due to a diminished capacity for abstract thinking. His solution: a system where photographs of the user’s regular contacts are placed in a special peripheral attached to the phone; touching either the photo or the holder dials the desired number."
Engadget
October 03, 2005
Things that live in the network
Network organism. "Nomen Nominandum, an organism that can live and grow for several years, floats around on the school network. If you call for it by voice or mouse movement it may come to your machine. If you play with it in the right way it will stay until it gets bored. At night, it sleeps curled up on its secluded plasma screen. It has real-time moods, sleeps in on Mondays and may decide to go away for a month in January. Its growth is very slow and as with living things you may never see it grow, but rather remember that it looked completely different some years ago."
we make money not art
Interactive 3D theater
Laptop illusions add extra dimension to live theatre. "3D technology currently used in the theatre is pre-recorded so every show is identical. Bogglevision, developed by Teesside company Amazing Interactives, allows the technology to adapt to whatever happens on the night. In Horrible Histories, as characters on stage search for a missing book, a member of the audience is asked their name and sees it appear instantly in a 3D book that suddenly floats, dancing in space, in front of them. "
we make money not art
Smart building skins
aperture. "Each single aperture and all the apertures as entity "see" what happens on the inside of the facade and react accordingly: like the human eye‘s iris and the iris diaphragm of the objective, they react to light, widening and contracting according to the intensity of incoming light. If no human activity is to be distinguished on the inside, a "memory" mode recalls images and abstract animations captured throughout the day and displays them."
we make money not art
Hi-fidelity projection
Like High-Def? Here Comes the Next Level. "The high-speed network will feed the data to a state-of-the-art Sony video projector that displays so-called 4K digital video, with images that are about 4,000 pixels across. When it is uncompressed at the receiving end, the video stream contains more than six billion bits per second. "New York Times
Drawing on digital photos
Memorylane and Okitegami. "morylane, by Ryo Sanpei, Sadamitsu Azuma, Akiyuki Kayama, Yumiko Yoshimoto, and Naohito Okude, is a picture frame for digital photos, which allows users to draw on digital photos and exchange them with friends. The demo video illustrates a cute episode of a boy and a girl making up using memorylane. "
we make money not art
GPS and phones
Roamin' Holiday. "Imagine leaving your car at home and networking with other GPS-phone users to form impromptu car pools, or receiving Web pages on your phone about Pickett's ill-fated charge as you amble up Seminary Ridge in Gettysburg. Geo-aware devices that trigger location-specific services will become as natural as the very idea of wirelessness, and the Web itself will cease to be a placeless cyberspace and will be pinned at millions of points to the physical world we inhabit. "
Tech Review
September 29, 2005
Under-skin displays
Dermal Display. "In his book Nanomedicine [...] Robert A. Freitas Jr. describes [...] a "programmable dermal display" in which a population of about 3 billion display pixel robots would be permanently implanted a fraction of a mm under the surface of the skin, covering a rectangle 6 cm x 5 cm on the back of the hand. Photons emitted by these pixel bots would produce an image on the surface of the skin. This pixelbot array could be programmed to form any of many thousands of displays."
Nanogirl
September 28, 2005
Ubiquitous messaging
WiFi plastic bunny waggles ears when you get mail. "Thanks to me, your friends and family will have a totally new way of keeping in touch: through the web, text messages, their phone or email… plenty of different ways to send you messages, music, MP3 files that I'll read out to you… or sing out, or even dance. Your friends will no longer be confined to the depths of your computer or phone: they'll come alive in your home, in the noble guise of a rabbit. "
Boing Boing
Tracking you in virtual space
VirtuSphere Immersive Virtual Reality. "The device consists of a large hollow sphere which is mounted on a specially designed platform that allows the sphere to rotate freely as the user walks in any direction. The user wears a head-mounted display, which provides the virtual environment. Sensors under the sphere provide subject speed and direction to the computer running the simulation. Users can even ineract with objects in virtual space using a special manipulator." "
Usability In The News
The return of journal view?
Onlife. "Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with sofware applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time."
Onlife
September 27, 2005
Better use of radar
Sensing the pedestrians. "A radar technology, developed by Cambridge Consultants, coupled with a vision processing system could enable cars to "sense" the presence of pedestrians and start automobile safety systems in advance of a collision."
we make money not art
Dedicated chips for intensive tasks
Can AISeek give games an add-on brain upgrade?. "Back in March, there was a burst of enthusiasm in the gaming community for Ageia's PhysX Physics Processing Unit (PPU), which promises to do for game physics what 3Dfx's Voodoo cards did for real-time 3D rendering. September brings news of a new accelerator chip in the works from a different company, this time for game AI."Ars Technica
Simple 3D drawing
"Magical Tools" for 3D Drawing and Painting. "Teddy is one of the most well-known works of his, which allows users to create 3D models just by drawing freeform strokes. Such a 3D authoring method could allow anyone to create 3D objects and effectively support creative processes of making 3D characters and objects. Look what kids made using Magical Sketch 2. "
we make money not art
Transmission from the brain
Message in an implant. "A micro-sensor that could be injected into the brain of those suffering from motor neurone disease and transmit data to a computer is being developed at Birmingham University. With the system, signals that would have previously controlled muscles could be harnessed to operate artificial speech programs, or an electronic wheelchair. Besides, the sensor package is small enough to be injected using a needle, removing the need for an operation."
we make money not art
September 26, 2005
Toys that support storytelling
The recording toy car. "The HotCam is a manual control toy car with an onboard video camera and microphone. The car enables children to record certain "scenes" in their own stories. They can then "play" the captured scenes through a TV, re-experience their stories and share them with parents, siblings and friends in a similar way to something as traditional and tangible as a painted picture or clay model. When the push button on top of the car is ON the headlights and rear lights come on and the car is recording. When the button is OFF the lights go off and the camera is not recording."
we make money not art
Big pixels on buildings
Light Emitting Roof Tiles. "Lambert Kamps's Light emitting roof tiles allows you to add huge texts, animations and logos on the roof of your building. The translucent polyester roof tiles are illuminated with LEDs and each tile can act as a pixel and be controlled by a PC. "
we make money not art
September 21, 2005
Public data visualization
Making Visible the Invisible. "Making Visible the Invisible” is an installation consisting of 6 large LCD screens located on a glass wall horizontally behind the librarians’ main information desk in the Mixing Chamber of the Seattle Central Library, a large open 19,500 sq ft space dedicated to information retrieval and public accessible computer research. The screens feature real-time calculated animation visualizations generated by custom designed statistical and algorithmic software using data received each hour. This data consists of a list of checked-out items organized in chronological order. The item may be a book, a DVD, a CD, a VHS tape, etc. and from the list we can collect and aggregate titles, checkout time, catalog descriptors such as keywords, Dewey classification code if they are non-fiction items."
UCSB
Mapping city activity through cellphone use
Cell phone map of Graz. "The researchers used three types of data-density of cellphone calls, origins and destinations of the calls, and position of users tracked at regular intervals-to create computer-generated images that can be overlayed with one another and with geographic and street maps of a city to show the peaks and valleys of the landscape as well as peaks in cellphone use."
Boing Boing
Multi-user interactive tables
DiamondTouch embeds a giant multi-user tablet into a table. "The MERL DiamondTouch is basically a ginormous touchscreen, embedded in a table, that supports multiple simultaneous inputs, so different users can be manipulating objects on the screen at the same time. This DiamondTouch is totally wasted on research and corporate meetings — all it needs is some cup holders and we’d ditch our coffee table in a second."
Engadget
Helmet heads up displays
Motorcycle helmet "heads up" display adds radar detection. "The creators of the world’s first personal Heads Up displays have just created a powerful new feature – radar detection display. The SportVue MC2 alerts motorcycle riders of the presence of radar in a personal helmet-mounted display."
gizmag
Physical and virtual social networks
Superstar Tokyo. "To play, place your own stickers (with a star on it to recognize participants) wherever you want and collect the stickers of other players by shooting them with your phonecam. Whenever a player snaps a Superstar sticker both players earn points. A link is then created between the two players. From this point on, any time either player earns points (by shooting a new sticker or by having their sticker shot) the other one will also earn points (though not as many)."
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Location awareness in the home
Nukunukukey. "The Peltier device produces 3 different levels of heat according to how many people are present in a house. The LED emits light differently according to people's locations in the house -- whether they are in a living room, a kitchen, or a dining room. An apron-shaped device was also conceptualized for sending yes/no questions (such as "Will you have dinner at home?" or "Are you coming back home today?") to a nukunukukey. "
we make money not art
Changing your photo after the event
Fail-Proof Focus. "Tired of blurry photographs? Ren Ng, a computer science graduate student at Stanford University, has developed a digital camera and software that allow photographers to refocus images after they have been taken."
Tech Review
Tagging real places virtually
Virtual post-its. "The Siemens system could do everything from helping highway department personnel label pothole locations for road crews to allowing a city's residents to craft personalized guides for visiting friends."
Tech Review
September 20, 2005
Smart objects (too smart?)
Weather-Predicting Clothes Pegs. "Oliver MacCarthy, a Product Design student from Brunel University in the UK, has designed an intelligent clothes peg, which predicts the weather and locks itself shut if it forecasts rain, preventing you from hanging clothes out if they are likely to get wet. Two symbols on the holder – ‘clear sky’ and ‘rain’ – indicate the outlook and are positioned so they can be distinguished from inside. "
gizmag
Digital music creation
Scrapple. "In Scrapple, object placed on the table become sound-producing elements that determine the score's rhythm and pitch. They are interpreted as sound-producing marks in an active score: flexible shape-holding curves allow for the creation of melodies, a group of small toys and other moving objects yield ever-changing rhythms. Video projections on the table turn the installation into a simple augmented reality, in which the objects are elaborated through colorful and explanatory graphics."
networked_performance
Contextual information
Dining Table That Shows Where Your Food Came From. "Yamakawa purchased fresh vegetables at farmers' market in the town of Kizu and provided them to the cafe restaurant. When a customer eats special dishes made from the vegetables at the table, it shows interview video clips of the farmers who sold the vegetables at the market. "
we make money not art
Shaped displays
large cylinder display device for browsing the Web. "The device connects to the Internet and fetches Flash, image and text files based on certain time-varying constraints as well as users' keyword search queries. It then shows the fetched information on the cylinder display and reads relevant text information with a synthesized voice. "
we make money not art
September 16, 2005
Video Jockeys
Radio 1 Superstar VJS - Creative Archive Licence trial. "For the first time in our history the BBC is opening its video archives to the UK public. Download nearly 100 clips especially chosen with VJ's in mind. We've scoured the archives for skylines, sunsets, seascapes, wildlife, time-lapse photography & retro gadgets. We will be adding new clips/programmes and launching a major VJ based competition over the next few months so keep coming back for the latest updates. "
BBC
Projectors augmenting reality
Augmented carnage. "The remote-controlled vehicles scurry around, while status circles and other data are projected on the surface. As the vehicle moves, cameras and photo-detectors relay the movement to tracking software. Images are projected to the areas corresponding to the actual positions and directions of the toys: virtual laser beams and missiles appear to fly out of the real vehicles; explosions are overlayed on the screen as they connect with their targets. "
we make money not art
Soft displays
An SMS glowing on your pillow. "The Electronic and Photonic Textiles prototypes include what Philips calls the "SMS pillow" (send a text message to it and words scroll across it) and a backpack that has the same LED substrate stitched onto the back. The LED substrates are also capable of displaying Windows Media Player-style visualisations and feature responsive sensors so that the patterns of diffused light displayed can change according to how they are handled. Philips sees the customisation potential here – just as kids personalise their phones with ring tones and wallpapers, so they’ll be able to wear T-Shirts with messages that scroll across them, or have a scarf that flashes ‘Liverpool FC rule!’"
we make money not art
Lights that transmit data
New Light at End of the Tunnel. "Of course, fiber-optic cables already transmit lots of data with light signals. But Schubert is talking about things like: brake lights that tell a closely following car to stop, even if the driver doesn't notice. headlights that tell a red stop light to turn green, if it's safe. road signs that communicate warnings to specific cars. room lights that link your computer to the Internet, avoiding Wi-Fi signals that can be pirated. room lights that transmit messages to devices worn by only certain people, like particular doctors or nurses in a hospital, rather than speakers that spew announcements for everybody to hear."Wired News
Virtual stuff in real space
Installation. "."Installation is a system created by Simon Greenwald,at the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT media lab,consisting of a viewing window and a stylus with which users can create virtual forms and install them permanently into a real space"."
MIT
August 30, 2005
RFID for testing architecture
U.K. family agrees to RFID monitoring. For science, of course.. "A British family has agreed to have their activities monitored via RFID tags while they occupy a new smart home, in order to provide data to the builder, which will use the info to make future home-building decisions. As family members move from room to room, 26 sensors will track their locations, giving the builder a better idea of whether, say, anyone is actually using the hot tub or playing table tennis in the garage."
Engadget
GPS in cellphones
Roamin' Holiday. "Imagine leaving your car at home and networking with other GPS-phone users to form impromptu car pools, or receiving Web pages on your phone about Pickett's ill-fated charge as you amble up Seminary Ridge in Gettysburg. Geo-aware devices that trigger location-specific services will become as natural as the very idea of wirelessness, and the Web itself will cease to be a placeless cyberspace and will be pinned at millions of points to the physical world we inhabit. "
Tech Review
Middleware game creation tools
Unity game engine adds Windows support. "Well, we support anything that makes developing games easier, because that’s going to ultimately mean more diverse games that break the stultifying parade of sequels that plague the industry. There are thousands of guys (and maybe dozens of girls) out there right now that have always dreamed of making a game but have been put off by the ever-escalating costs of doing so."
Joystiq
Cataloging everything
Daisy has all the digital answers to life on Earth. "Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution. Daisy will also give Britain's army of amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at."The Guardian
Display tags
Try Tacking This to a Wall. "Fuji Xerox plans to start selling these E-Paper Visual Index Cards sometime next year. The e-paper is ultra-thin and does not need electricity for its display, according to CNet."
Gizmodo
Technology that connects two peope
Embrace. "Embrace is a concept bracelet that enables the user to be seamlessly connected to their significant other over periods of separation. "
we make money not art
August 25, 2005
Massively multiplayer games through the phone
Artificial Life announces First Massive Multi Player 3G Game. "Players of the game can select a virtual persona for themselves and inhabit and live in a simulated virtual city. When navigating through the virtual city, users can contact and interact directly with other players in real time, have live real time chats with other human players or chatter bots, enter and explore virtual buildings, use interactive objects and co-operate with others to solve certain tasks or to avoid certain threats."
gizmag
August 24, 2005
More 3D browsing
NTT 3D SpaceBrowser. "Japanese NTT is works on a 3D information browser that is scheduled to be released in October. The NTT SpaceBrowser shows web pages arranged in 3D. This is not a new concept, and I am still not convinced it makes sense to navigate information in 3D without having solved the 3D navigation user interface in general. The SpaceBrowser is nice to look at, but in my opinion just a toy."
I4U News
Super security cameras
CCTV video mixes maps and images. "Smart software is taking CCTV into the domain of 3D gaming by combining graphics, map data, and different camera views in one composite image. The system automatically tracks and stitches 3D images with CCTV video, maps and other real-time information. It automatically alerts operators to intruders, unusual behaviour, left objects or anything it is told to spot."
BBC NEWS
Phones with sensors
Cellphone-based pollution sensor being developed at Berkeley. "The idea is to develop a standard for chip-based sensors that can integrate with GPS-equipped phones, allowing them to send location-specific data on anything from air pollution to radiation back to a central database. Eventually, they see the chips adding about $1 to the manufacturing cost of phones."
Engadget
Collaborative comics
Panel Junction. "Panel Junction combines the graphic novel with forms of shared authorship, merging spontaneous drawing with scripting and direction from online visitors. Participants from around the world can contribute dialog, graphics, caricatures, fonts, narrative ideas, internal monologues, jokes, backgrounds, puns, story-boards, coloring, anecdotes, and sketches."
we make money not art
Visualizing and predicting traffic conditions
Innovative new traffic visualisation tool to debut in Northern California. “Beat the Traffic” is cutting edge 3-D traffic displays that offer the viewer a look at traffic from a completely different angle. One of the most exciting things “Beat the Traffic” will provide is travel forecasting. The system computes historical traffic information and will predict how long it will take to arrive at a destination. Travel forecasting can tell you what time on a Friday before a major holiday that traffic will start backing up! This will help viewers save time when planning events and trips."
gizmag
Leaving notes in locations
System for Tagging Messages, Post-Inferential Semantics. "STAMPS is a little program that allows you to see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map."
Smart Mobs
Reformatting RSS
Convert RSS to PDF. "RSS 2 PDF is a free online service that lets you turn an RSS or OPML newsfeed into a PDF. It’s lightning fast and creates a very readable and nicely formated PDF for your offline reading pleasure. [...] I can think of a few reasons to dig this. For example, linking type blogs that don’t utilize permalinks could use this to create a nice permanent content archive."Lifehacker
Physical manipulation for organization
Interactions within a personal network of devices. "Exploring the Content Network, Thomas Stovicek's thesis project, is a a set of screen-based software and hardware interactions between devices that looks at new ways to access, view and filter this growing store of information. Devices are physically manipulated and keywords used to make a more intuitive way to access content- text, photos, videos etc."
we make money not art
Mixing up services
Koreans Find Secret Cybersauce. "There's more to online social networks than matchmaking, and South Korea's Cyworld is showing the way. The online service blends homepage building and social networking with a host of other online activities, including Sims-like role-playing."
Wired News
August 23, 2005
Helping with motion problems
Anti-Tremor Mouse Software. "MouseCage features a dual-cursor. The special guide cursor provides visual feedback by showing the user’s actual hand movements, while the normal Windows cursor takes an average of these movements and predicts where the user intends to click."
we make money not art
Smart toys
Heaven Seed. "Heaven Seed is a smart plastic ball that senses its movement and generates various sound effects in real time thereby enhances the game people play with it. The motion data sensed by the ball are wirelessly transmitted to a host computer to provide rich auditory experiences."
we make money not art
Tagging places that matter
Geominder. "Geominder allows you to create location-based reminders that stay attached to physical locations."
Ludimate
Messages in the furniture
SMS Controlled Spy-Mirror. "The messages appear as luminous text, running on the mirrors’ surface when one gets close to the mirror."
networked_performance
August 10, 2005
Visualizations of services
Del.icio.us Visualization with Vox Delicii. "Vox Delicii is a really cool Web application that lets you view a "heat mapped" visualization of the current week's popular content on Del.icio.us. As you can see in the small shot above, you can mouse over different nodes and it'll highlight and tell you the name of the post that node represents."
Lifehacker
Printers that cut
CraftRobo Pro. "The craftrobo pro is a new inkjet printer sporting a built in cutting head which can spit out pre-cut patterns that fold into 3d objects. The craftrobo site features a library of downloadable patterns with novelties like robots, and dinosaurs..."
Gizmodo
Remote medicine
Surgery Via the Interweb. "This thing, called the RoboLase, allows you to cut into human flesh from across the room or around the world. What you see in this image are a series of microscopic holes etched into a single cell by doctors a the University of Queensland. The cells were stored in Southern California."
Gizmodo
Dedicated, location-based handhelds
Node Explorer upgrades GPS tourism with WiFi, Linux. "The unit, a prototype Node Explorer from Bath-based Node, is billed as a location-aware media player. Using GPS to get location data, the Linux-based, ruggedized unit communicates over WiFi with a nearby Node Server to present info on a location in realtime."
Engadget
August 08, 2005
Collaborating with video
Video making for children. "In Shooting mode, the users insert a token in the camera and record a shot. They place the camera on the table and the video is transferred wirelessly to the computer. Once removed from the camera, the tokens can be used as a composition element on the table and the resulting video clips can later be combined by the group to achieve a common outcome."
we make money not art
Reading quickly on the phone
Tech by Design: Rapid-Fire Reading on Your Cell Phone. "There's a possible solution to the problem that doesn't require devices with bigger displays. In fact, the displays could be even smaller than they are now. It's called "rapid serial visual presentation" (RSVP for short), and it involves displaying text one word at a time on a phone or handheld screen."
Mobile Magazine
Animated barcodes
Animated Design 2D Barcode. "Traditionally, barcodes are printed on paper. But ,they are now displayed on various things including computers, PDAs, mobile phones, digital paper, tv, etc. So, why not animated barcodes? fyi, this QR code includes a link to a mobile website for a dance festival. So, I guess it's a dancer?"
RFID in Japan
Enticing projections
Forecasted rain of ads in Japan. "A projector on a tripod shows images of raindrops hitting the ground and making ripples, in hopes that people will enter the "rainy" area and hold out their palms. A camera tracks the entrants' movements and sends the data to computers. Then the projector shoots out a round-shaped advertisement -- which can post words such as "SALE" -- right onto their hands."
we make money not art
Collaborative world tagging
Tagging the planet. "Tagzania is about tags and places. If you register and log in, you can add places, points, to create and document your maps. When you add a point, you may tag it with keywords. That way, Tagzania is not only a place to build and keep your own maps, shared territories are created as well."
Tagzania
Weather by phone
Wireless Alarm Option For Hobo Weather Stations. "SolarStream is a new solar-powered, wireless transceiver designed for HOBO Weather Stations that provides alarm notification of weather conditions via cell phone text messaging or email."
gizmag
August 06, 2005
Wi-fi ePaper
Now Hitachi’s talking up their WiFi e-paper. "...while it's not color like some of those other, fancier guys', Hitachi's 13.1-inch sheets do have a leg up with it's 100dpi definition and WiFi connectivity. Are we going to be reading our newspapers on these things next year?"
Engadget
In-car convergence
Garmin GPSMAP 376c - GPS XM = Heaven. "Garmin has announced a new all-in-one GPS unit that uses standard global positioning, XMWX Satellite Weather and XM Satellite Radio. [...] Navigation, weather and uncensored satellite radio - what more could a gas-guzzling SUV driver ask for?"
Gizmodo
Mixing real and virtual
Augmented Maps. "Here is how this works: the printed maps are placed on a flat surface; an overhead camera linked to a PC tracks the map via the live video stream; and an overhead projector adds graphical information to the maps. This could be useful for many applications, and the researchers have applied it to a flood simulation of the Cambridge area."
Primidi
The smart everyday
Smart needles for distracted knitters. "Rebecca Spenders KnitWit are smart needles that keep track of the number of stitches you've already done. Movement sensors in the ends record the movement of the needles. This data is streamed via RF to a remote base station which decodes the signal, looking for a specific series of movements which correlate to the formation of a stitch. When a "stitch" is recognised, the LCD counter increments."
we make money not art
Night vision
BMW adds super-vision to night driving. "BMW claims that its new 7 Series is the first production car to feature a far infra-red night vision system, used in conjunction with the new high-beam "assist" function to make night driving safer."
Usability In The News
Physical interaction models
Book Radio. "Each page of the Book Radio represents a frequency. You flip pages to scan the frequency spectrum; open to a specific page to listen to a station; place the bookmark on a desired page to listen and store the station; and slide the bookmark up or down to control the volume. Besides you can scribble in it, place stickers or take notes while listening."
networked_performance
July 18, 2005
Tangible media
moo-pong. "...is a technology that allows people to capture, share and view video images using Tangible User Interface. When a camera captures video images, they are associated with physical tokens using RFID technology. "Users can edit and browse among moving images by dropping moo-balls into the moo-scope. Mirrors the in moo-scope produce visual effects like a kaleidoscope."
we make money not art
People-sims
Simulated society may generate virtual culture. "A society of virtual "agents" - each with a remarkably realistic personality and the ability to learn and communicate - is being crafted by scientists from five European research institutes who hope to gain insights into the way human societies evolve."
New Scientist
Displays built in to real buttons
Optimus OLED Keyboard. "The "Optimus" keyboard has tiny OLED screens embedded in each key, allowing it to display context information on the fly. In Photoshop? You've got Photoshop icons, complete with alt functions (at least in my head this is how it works)."
Gizmodo
Physical visualization
Glowing temperature-sensitive sink-fixtures. "These sink-fixtures from Germany's Hansa have temperature-sensors that light up different LEDs to indicate the water temp, and replace the traditional tube-shaped spout with a trough that exposes the water as it courses out."
Boing Boing
July 16, 2005
People finding
The location-aware watch that locates your friends. "The FLORA (Fluorescent Light Organizing Radio Accessory) is a location-aware watch that helps people locate others, a mixture of a compass and the game "Hot and Cold".
we make money not art
July 13, 2005
Getting "into" the display
An immersive existence simulator and telepresence apparatus. "Enter the Panoscope 360 to be fully immersed in a 3D world. A 3-axis joystick will let you and your friends (up to 8) fly through the space as in dreams. The immersive display uses a PC and a hemispheric projector to project in real time a rendering of your entire horizon onto the screen."
we make money not art
June 30, 2005
Traffic forecasting
Smart traffic forecast offers seven-day predictions. "Alongside the weather forecast, viewers of KXTV News 10 in Sacramento can now get 3D animations of their local road network, showing not only where the gridlock is but also where it is likely to be. The system, called Beat-the-Traffic, is the first public traffic forecasting system that combines real-time traffic density and speed with historical trends on major routes."New Scientist
Information from light
Kansai Airport tries delivering content using visible light. "Passengers will point the phones at the appropriate blinkenlights around the lounge to get information on departure times and shops and facilities, and to download music and video. Throughput is reckoned at 10Kbps from a fluorescent light and several Mbps from an LED."
Engadget
Visualizing sports
Wimbledon goes hi-tech with Shot Tracker. "Shot Tracker (or Hawkeye) provides a three-dimensional animated image of every rally not just to commentators, players or coaches but now to punters and yobs alike on the wimbledon.org site."
Engadget
Virtual globes
Download of the Day, part II: Google Earth. "Holy geography geek, Batgirl! Google's released Google Earth, a downloadable 3D mapping application that starts you out looking at a view of the entire planet, and lets you fly all over Earth to locations you specify, search, add bookmarks and annotations to places and get directions."
Lifehacker
All around views
The Nissan over-head view eliminates blind-spots. "Now they are testing a system which incorporates these and front-mounted cameras to project a bird's-eye-view of your auto and its surroundings right onto your dashboard display."
Engadget
June 29, 2005
Avatars on the phone
"1-millimeter' intimacy. "After signing up for the 1-millimeter service,subscribers can select a character image on their cell phone screen.The character is a new user interface,smart enough to talk to people via text messages.The character understands the correct use of Korean and can recognize most ungrammatical sentences as long as users type in the words correctly."If you are bored,you can chat with the character.Conversations will be by no means dull because it is very sophisticated.If you download the music files of a certain singer several times,the character remembers it and informs you when the singer has new songs".
Smart Mobs
June 27, 2005
New UI for existing services
del.icio.us on crack - Del.icio.us Direc.tor. "Newly-released bookmarklet Del.icio.us Direc.tor turns the Del.icio.us bookmark service into a gorgeous, lively, dynamic application that just about popped the eyeballs right out of my head."
Lifehacker
More google map hacking
Foundcity personal text and photo maps. "SMS a photo, tags, message and address to Foundcity from anywhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn in New York City and it appears on your map automatically. Check out a map of a particular tag (like "street art" or "gargoyles") or by user."
Lifehacker
Multi-sided displays
Magic cubic movie player. "You can receive video mails on the cube and this newly coming message can be shown on the bottom face to avoid getting in the way of your work. Even if you put Z-agon up side down the device would recognize it and automatically corrects itself by algoritm."
we make money not art
Games on the streets
Monopoly Live: London style. "...you're given (fake) 15m to invest in (real) London properties, and move around the "board" as 18 GPS transmitter-equipped cabbies pick up and drop off players accordingly. Chance and Community Chest bonuses are even sent via SMS."
Engadget
June 23, 2005
3D TV
Holographic movies show promise for medical, military applications. "UT Southwestern's Dr. Harold "Skip" Garner and his colleagues have developed the first true, three-dimensional holographic movies. The technology shows promise for medical visualization and heads-up displays for helmets and military aircraft."
utsouthwestern
Virtual overlays as you walk
Rixome, become a walker. "rixome is a network and a tool that turns mobile screens into windows that show the virtual and public dimensions of our point of view. A walker (a rixome user) can see on his/her mobile phone/PDA/laptop screen the virtual interventions that have been added to the location where s/he now stands. For example, a spoken message can be left on a given location for other "walkers" to hear through headphones whenever they pass by. The message can also be written, or it can be a 3D animation or image, a photography, a drawing, a video."
we make money not art
June 15, 2005
Real & virtual through the camera phone
CamBlaster. "Shoot at flying targets through the camera! Move the phone away and discover swarms of new targets to shoot! Come back, and see the previous targets still flying in the same zone!"
Realeyes3D
June 14, 2005
Devices as companionship
Philips' Smart Companion. "The device combines computer vision, speech and robotics to interact with users in a natural way, by understanding spoken requests, giving replies, recognizing faces and using body language such as facial expressions, head nodding and shaking or colored light. It even recognizes individual users and can turn its head to follow users as they move around in the room."
we make money not art
Visualizing social relationships
Your social world on a phone screen. "A series of avatars on your phone screen represent your friends, acquaintances or relatives. The frequency of all digital communications (they can include voice calls, voice Messages, SMS, MMS, e-mail, Instant Messaging, VoIP, etc.) between you and each person, which the system monitors, determines that avatar's posture: an alert stance indicates frequent recent contact, for example; a lethargic posture or turned back means neglect. You can also register non-digital contacts manually."
we make money not art
One display, two images
Social hardware: the shareable display. "Jeremy Newton's thesis project is an interactive multi-view screen that lets more than one viewer see and interact with a moving image or application on the same screen at the same time. Now little Annie can play Halo 2 while nerd child Danny does homework without infighting"
Engadget
June 13, 2005
Manipulating information
Sony's DataTiles. "Taken from what appears to be the inside of some sort of Sony laboratory, it shows a crazy yet intriguing table where transparent tiles are placed depending on content that wants to be interacted with. Want weather? Slap down the weather tile. Sports? Sports tile. And the tiles can interact with one another, too."
Gizmodo
June 10, 2005
Virtual/real overlap
Computer Scientists Develop Wireless Application For Ubiquitous Video. "Computer scientists at UCSD have taken the wraps off a new technique for mixing images and video feeds from mobile cameras in the field to provide remote viewers with a virtual window into a physical environment. Dubbed "RealityFlythrough", the application constructs a 3D virtual environment dynamically out of the live video streams."
UCS
Interactive whiteboards
Boards Get Brains, Chalk Vanishes. "All across the country, chalkboards are being ditched in favor of interactive, computer-driven whiteboards that allow students and teachers to share assignments, surf the web and edit video using their fingers as pens."
Wired News
June 08, 2005
3D views of the world around you
Airtrack Passenger GPS Display. "By using real GPS data and satellite photos, Airtrack supplies a realtime view of the ground and surrounding airspace. The roll-out is pretty slow - just Air Berlin and an unnamed Middle Eastern line - but the system can render 2D and 3D images of the flight path and holds 40 hours of monitoring video."
Gizmodo
June 03, 2005
More 3D displays
Perspecta: the 3D video goldfish bowl. "Perspecta is made of a circular white polymer screen 25 cm in diameter, mounted atop a 1 meter tall black box for eye-level viewing. Software inside the machine dissects generated 3D models into 198 slices, which get projected onto the screen in rapid succession by an optical system mounted below the screen. The result is a 3-dimensional image that appears to be floating in a white fishbowl."
Engadget
Simulations of complex events
Biggest ever cosmos simulation. "The simulation by an international team is the biggest ever attempted and shows how structures in the Universe changed and grew over billions of years."
BBC NEWS
3D from any angle
View-Dependent Stereoscopic Projection in Real Environments. "Imagine projecting a virtual corridor on a brick wall that maintains its illusion by removing any distortions caused by texture or color and by visualizing the depth of the corridor stereoscopically as the viewer changes position."
networked_performance
May 31, 2005
Virtual medical help
3DVR haptics help rehabilitate stroke patients. "Software environments are designed to challenge patients with "cyber tasks" - such as grasping, pinching, squeezing, throwing and pushing, depending on the impairment."
Engadget
May 20, 2005
Visual metaphors for social networks
GORI.Node Garden. "As a gardener, you decide which GORI from your mobile contact list you will plant and grow. It could be somebody from either your phone list or somewhere else. A flower planted at the edge of the garden, starts to grow when you exchange messages and it moves towards the centre. When it moves, it vibrates."
we make money not art
Innovative gaming
Japanese Games Go Wild. "Is it possible that military pinball and musical fish will supplant gun-toting mercenaries and tricked-out virtual Ferraris? Probably not. But that's not to say that today's wacky import won't be tomorrow's megahit franchise. Remember how weird Donkey Kong was in 1981?"
Wired News
May 18, 2005
Visualizations of communications
Locket for iChat. "locket is a Dashboard widget that provides an ambient monitor for a single iChat user on your buddy list. When s/he is available, the locket opens. Otherwise, it is closed. Clicking on the open locket will start a new IM chat."
we make money not art
May 16, 2005
Subtle forms of communication
Networked Nightlights. "John Schimmel's Fireflies are networked nightlights for a local environment, the jars can be placed in different bedrooms or other spots around a home so people can communicate with one another through simply tapping on the jars."
networked_performance
Technology providing social cues
Ambient social networking interface. "Before entering the Sparks environment, each user pre-selects a number of interests from a pool of keywords. Within the environment, Sparks projects the keywords in an aura on the floor around the user. The aura follows the user within the environment, and augments the visual cues people use to capture initial impressions about another person."
we make money not art
Quick ways of reading on the go
More About BuddyBuzz. "BuddyBuzz both a cell phone application that enables users to rapidly read custom delivered material and a content distribution system. BuddyBuzz users read using a modified form of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at whatever pace they desire."
BuddyBuzz
May 12, 2005
Medical imaging
Body Image. "The latest medical-imaging advances provide unprecedented speed, sharpness, and diagnostic power- and get high points for artistic merit."
Tech Review
Real to virtual interfaces
Natural Interfaces. "Real objects such as tree branches, leafs and sand, function as an interface between the visitors and the art piece. By moving and repositioning the physical objects in space, the visitors initiate the real-time transformation of a digital landscape, in which mountains emerge, clouds move in the sky and trees grow. Evolutionary processes are inter-connected with the interaction, making the visitors pro-active in the development of the virtual environment."
D-SRUPT
May 11, 2005
Self made visualizations
Music sampling's history, visualized. "This Java applet is a visualizer for the history of music sampling -- a timeline with colored dots represents some of the most widely circulated tracks; click to see all the tracks they spawned, click the tracks they spawned to see what other tracks they sampled."
Boing Boing
Proximity aware phones
See and be seen. "Nokia has launched Sensor, a software that uses Bluetooth to indicate and start proximity interactions - i.e. people within 10-30m of you. You create a folio - like a little web page - that others in your physical location can see. Then you can check out the folios of other Sensor users nearby, exchange messages, and share files."
Smart Mobs
Fun simulations of physics
Moovl. "When children draw pictures on a Tablet PC or an interactive whiteboard, the animating environment simulates gravity, collision, and tension so that the pictures move as if they were in the real world. The software is intended to allow children to make predictions and hypotheses about how things in the world work, to visualise their ideas, and to test them out in a trial-and-error approach."
we make money not art
Communication aware clothing
Aware Fashion. "This week's glimpse of whats to come, comes from Richard Etter, Diana Grathwohl, and Sigmund Homolya who give us "Aware Fashion" - clothes that detect invisible communication technologies like cellphones and wifi signals, and hence also enables the wearer to sense the presence of other people."
Sensory Impact
Higher resolution maps
Envisat making sharpest ever global Earth map. "The most detailed portrait ever of the Earth's land surface is being created with ESA's Envisat environmental satellite. The GLOBCOVER project aims at producing a global land cover map to a resolution three times sharper than any previous satellite map."
ESA
3D card games
Augmented card game. "TARBoard consists of a glass table, two cameras and a mirror. Markers are attached to the back side of the cards (the front side shows the creature). A first camera tracks the image of markers reflected in the mirror below the table. Another camera, the "augmenting" one provides a 3D model of a creature when the card is flipped. A player cannot see the card processed by the other player."
we make money not art
May 09, 2005
Physical representations of emotion
Web are you? - Networked emoticon device. "You set one up at home and plug it to your home network. Set the other one at your office location and plug it to your office LAN. Submit your mood state by pressing one of the icons and your home device will reflect and share it with your other significant. If there is only one home device, it can be accessed through a regular webpage or mobile phone."
we make money not art
Fast 3D city models
Fast 3D city model generation. "Virtualised reality scans the urban landscape using lasers and digital cameras mounted on a truck or plane. A laser measures distances to objects such as lamp posts and building facades, while the camera takes 2D photos. Another laser calculates the movement of the truck and checks its position against data collected from the aerial laser. [...] The researchers recently created a model of downtown Berkeley in just 4 hours - 26 minutes of driving plus 4 hours of data processing."
we make money not art
Virtual sign language
Virtual signer for deaf web users. "The virtual reality signer will help deaf people whose first language is British sign language and for whom written English is not easily accessible. "This technology means that they can access information a lot quicker."
BBC NEWS
Visualization overlays
MenuVista. "MenuVista, the thesis project of ITP student Chia-wei Chang, gives restaurant customers a preview of their orders by projecting photos of the meal on their empty plates. Besides, the system allows them to modify their orders by using a projected menu with a touch sensor interface which includes menu text and food images."
we make money not art
Cool ways to visualize your photos
Main >Comic life. "Comic Life for OS X makes digital comics a snap. Use Comic Life to create high quality comics for posting on the web, including in movies or printing out for friends."
plasq
Pairing up technology
loveJackets: Wearable Affinity Markers. "A pair of jackets emits, and polls for a particular signal. Once the pair finds each other, in at least 10 feet distance, facing each other, the two beep – emitting a sound akin to crickets mating, and a pattern of LEDs blinks (light emitting diodes; small, bright, energy efficient lights). Each jacket responds only to its unique pair."
Smart Mobs
Ticker overload
Multiple elements on TV screen are distracting. "We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don't have it on the screen," (journalism/mass comm. professor Tom) Grimes said. "Everything you see on the screen -- the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast -- are conflicting bits of information that don't hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message."Boing Boing
April 28, 2005
Mimicking nature
The Eco pods. "One pod represents the wind, another the sun's heat, a third one the light and the last one represents the rain. Each pod can be manipulated with a movement or action characteristic of the natural element it represents. If you blow on the "wind" pod, you'll see on the computer screen the effect wind can have on a flower, if you pour water onto the "rain" pod, the flower will be watered as well, etc."
we make money not art
April 26, 2005
3D displays for tables
Toshiba Introduces Still More 3D Display Technology. "This technology led to the display you see at the right, which is intended to be placed on a flat surface (think: playing chess using a 3D display)."
Gizmodo
Real objects driving UI
3D Magic Story Cube. "Each side of the magic cube is a different component of the story, represented by the illustration on that side. As you flip sides, you get a different part of the story that is played out as an animation on the computer screen."
we make money not art
April 25, 2005
Mixing up web services
Google Maps Meets Craigslist. "The cross pollination of two of the best resources available on the internet-- Google's new mapping service, and the classified listings page, Craigslist."
Cool Hunting
360-degree cameras
The Eye Ball R1 for a 360-degree view of the crime scene. "The Eye Ball R1, a wireless camera and microphone in a baseball-sized casing, can be tossed into a crime scene to give police watching a TV screen embedded in a handheld a 360-degree view of what the bad guys are up to."
we make money not art
Saving bandwidth
Watch live cartoon baseball on your cellphone - in Japan. "...we're guessing/hoping that it's the desire to shave a few yen off the monthly wireless data bill that is at the heart of the absurd brilliance that is Craftmax's new Digital Stadium service, which replaces the live video feed of a baseball game with a bandwidth-saving, digitally animated recreation that uses the game's play-by-play to trigger different actions which are then acted out by cartoon players."
Engadget
April 17, 2005
Enhancing sport
Virtual Spectator Squash Technology. "Watching live sport could take on new meanings in the future as new technologies put a virtual dashboard of information, infographics and overlays that enhance the experience in different ways for newbies and experts."
gizmag
April 12, 2005
Virtual city planning
Planning cities in cyberspace. "Instead of having to build and rebuild time-consuming physical models, architects would be able to immediately modify their models. Virtual, computer-generated models can be displayed using semi-transparent head-mounted displays, and appear to be right on the planning table."
we make money not art
April 11, 2005
Memory workout
Calisthenics for aging brains / S.F. firm develops software to improve mental agility. "Posit scientists created exercises to stimulate specific brain functions. Then its video game designers turned them into computer games, complete with a couple of animated coaches to give tips and rewards like amusing pictures when players complete tasks. The company says one key to brain rejuvenation is that the exercises become more difficult as players progress so they're always working at a threshold of intensity."
SF Gate
April 01, 2005
Quick body scanning
New machine scans the body and ensures a perfect fit for clothes in 10 seconds. "Intellifit is a body scanning solution that uses radio waves to safely and accurately capture consumer measurements directly through clothing within ten seconds and gives the consumer a print-out of their exact body measurements."
gizmag
March 22, 2005
Interactive hand shadows
Shadow monsters. "Philip Worthington made a fabulous application to frighten children or make them laugh. You move your hand and its shadow on the wall not only has spikes or a long tongue, but it also makes burps and other strange noises."
we make money not art
Color correction technology
Samsung Develops LCD for Color-Blind. "Samsung Electronics has announced that they are developing LCD monitors for people with dyschromatopsia (color-blindness for the lay-folk). The color correction technology will allow users to control red, green and blue output at 10 levels so that people can set the monitor to adjust the contrast of the colors giving them the most difficulty."
Gizmodo
Multiple represenations of the same game
PLX -parallax of the game. "PLX, by Kuwakubo Ryota, is a battle game for two people sitting across from one another at a table with a double-sided LED monitor, but while one might play a sci-fi shooting game, the other could have cupid shooting arrows into hearts that come fluttering down."
we make money not art
March 14, 2005
Visualizations of cummunication
The Sound Fountain. "You clap your hands, speak up or make any other noise and the sounds are captured as bubbles. Over time they pass from one screen to the other till they are gone."
we make money not art
March 10, 2005
GPS for bikes
New TomTom Rider navigation system for bikers. "A closely guarded secret indeed. As far as I know this will be the first Satellite Navigation system which is designed specifically for a bike with a Bluetooth audio system. I know other manufacturers make bike kits, but this is really a bike system not a dual purpose one."
PocketGPS.co.uk
March 09, 2005
Future mobile communications
rb.log. "The video you are about to see portrays the kind of technological advances that could transform our world over the next ten years. The events depicted are fictional, but the potential of NTT DoCoMo's cutting-edge technology is very real. Our third-generation (3G) FOMA service is already operational throughout Japan; and by 2010, we hope to have fully brought our vision of advanced mobile communications to fruition."
DoCoMo
March 07, 2005
Visualizations in healthcare
Parkinson's hope over 'glasses'. "A pair of glasses which use virtual imagery could help people with Parkinson's disease cope with walking problems, scientists say. The device uses light to project images in front of the user, helping them to focus and control their movement."
BBC NEWS
March 03, 2005
February 25, 2005
Displaying barcodes digitally
Mobi the Way Forward. "Mobi-tickets - a fairly new application that enables a barcode to be read from your phone via an standard bar code reader. The usage? There are a whole host of usages for this. Entrance to parties and accepting promotions at bars or events will never be the same. A simple text beforehand and a scan at the door - no paperwork involved. No tickets lost in the post."PSFK
Smart labels
Holograms Poised to Feed Bio Data. "Prototypes have already been made for contact lenses that monitor glucose levels, thin badges that detect alcohol levels, and sticks that can tell, instantly, if milk has spoiled or become contaminated. The technology promises to be quicker and cheaper than tests used today. It will also require less training, because the hologram itself can be designed to show results graphically."EWeek
February 21, 2005
Hi-res 3D maps of urban areas
A 3-D View of the City, Block by Block. "Both the vehicle and a plane that flew over the same area were taking authorized pictures of each building and its surroundings, at the behest of the downtown improvement district. Now the terabytes of imaging data are being used to build a three-dimensional model of central Philadelphia, down to the last cornice, mailbox and shrub."
The New York Times
Mirrors aiding the elderly
Smart Mirrors. "For the elderly or just plain forgetful types who can't remember if they've washed down their daily Vicodin, the Memory Mirror by Everyday Computing Lab keeps track of all drugs removed from its medicine cabinet. Visually represented with soothing lavender graphics, the mirror will record usage over a 24-hour period..."
Gizmodo
GPS + web services
Developer links GPS to Google Maps. "While this may never take the place of dedicated mapping software, the idea of getting your GPS to interface with the Web has its appeal; we'd like to be able to go a step further and be able to, say, run a search on Moviefone.com and have our GPS transparently plot a route to the theater without us having to punch in the adddress."
Engadget
Instant 3D scanning
Instant Scene Modeler. "Using a hand-held unit, a scene can be quickly imaged and a 3D model is generated for viewing from any perspective."
MD Robotics
Interactive learning
Mushroom sounds. "The Soundgarten [...] enables kids to create their own sound environment by manipulating toys. They can use predefined sound samples, record them and modify and arrange the different elements, choose volume pitch and apply sound effects."
we make money not art:
Audio-vision for the blind
Blind student 'hears in colour'. "A blind student has developed software that turns colours into musical notes so that he can read weather maps."
BBC NEWS
February 09, 2005
Shopping by scanning
Smart scanner helps elderly shop. "A barcode reader is used to scan items from a catalogue - or off tins - and then the order is sent to the supermarket via the phone line."
BBC NEWS
More augmented reality
Total Immersions D'Fusion Technology. "Total Immersion's D'Fusion software solution allows for real-time video capture and perfect merges between video streams and 3D objects. All you need is a camera, a few sensors, and a HUD. This turns your world into an immersive gaming experience, where you are IN the game...or where the game is all around you. Words cant really describe this, so just check out the video."
Gear Live
Visualizing quantities over time
The Baby Name Wizard. "Explore the sea of names, letter by letter...watch trends rise and fall, and dive in deeper to see your favorite name's place in the historical tides."
NameVoyager
Visualizing forces
Gravicells 2.0 "Walking freely in the site, visitors are able to feel gravity that they are seldom aware of, resistance to it, and the effects caused by other participants."
Gravity and Resistance project
February 07, 2005
Adding virtual objects to live video in real time
Augmented-reality machine works in real time. "Previously, it has been necessary to calibrate a computer using several markers added to a scene. The Oxford team's machine only requires an object of known size to be placed in its line of sight to perform a complete calibration. The system then automatically picks out its own visual markers from a scene. By measuring the way these markers move the computer can judge how far away each marker is."
New Scientist
Programming against web services
Flickr photo color picker. "Click on any hue in the color palette and images randomly chosen from photo-sharing service Flickr in which that color dominates magically appear. Darken or lighten the color wheel using the slider on the right."
Lifehacker
Interactive buildings
Playing mobile games with buildings. "Arcade which is part of Project Blinklights is an interactive light installation, allowing mobile users to play games such as Tetris, Pong or Pacman which are displayed on Buildings, by using their mobile phones."
we make money not art
February 05, 2005
Sports tracking software
Piero gives rugby new perspective. "Piero [...] creates a virtual stadium in which virtual players can be tracked from almost any angle. Viewers will be able to see precisely how the ball was thrown and by whom, giving a greater depth to the growing wealth of analysis available during sports broadcasts."
BBC NEWS
February 02, 2005
Virtual displays
User interface for virtual butterflies. "Moony [...] uses steam as both a screen and an interactive interface. If you touch one of the virtual butterflies projected into the vapor, it will fly away and disappear. But hold your hand into the steam for a while and butterflies will flock around and play."
we make money not art
Personalized message notification
cellphone ring notifier. "tom horsley got rid of his land line but didn't want to lug his cell everywhere with him when he was in the house. his solution was to hack together a light detection circuit, a wireless doorbell remote, and some paper mache into a giant incoming call noisemaker."
hack a day
Mapping photos to the globe
Escape Lab Travel Album. "It offers 3D, 2D, and plain flat interface navigation through dozens of destinations around the globe with high quality photos from each."
Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting
GPS gaming
GPS:: Tron. "The player's movements in real space, which are tracked by GPS and transmitted to the phone's display, influence his/her position in the game. Each player is represented by a line that gets longer and longer. But the player's own line is never allowed to cross itself or the opponent's line. Which makes the game harder as time passes."
we make money not art
February 01, 2005
Physical interaction
The Message Table. "When a message is left, a box representing that message slowly rises from the desk. The higher it rises, the longer the message. So when you return home, you know how many messages are waiting for you. To hear one, open the box's lid. Pushing that box back down into the desk deletes the message."
we make money not art
January 28, 2005
Information on you
The tale of the v-v-v-vibrating shoes"We're using the shoes as a bit of fun but also to show people that we can output information from a computer in other ways than through a screen," says Professor Peter Eades. The haptic shoes can be connected wirelessly to live Australian Stock Exchange information, although researchers also use old share price fluctuations for demonstrations."
ABC
Photos of places for search
For Local Searchers, Amazon Adds Photos to Yellow Pages. "In Manhattan, for example, a driver spent more than a week cruising down streets, capturing images and cataloging the location of each business using a global positioning system receiver."The New York Times (may require free subscription)
Electronic programme guide for radio
DAB EPG for Bug Launches - Radio TiVo. "Using the EPG, Bug users will be able to browse the programmes coming up over the next 7-days, read additional information about them and select them for recording. In the same vein as a Personal Video Recorder (DVR), does this make it a DRR - Digital Radio Recorder?"
Digital-Lifestyles.info
January 27, 2005
Location-based time travel
Mobile learning game/ "Waag Society is developing Frequency 1550, a "mobile learning game". The citygame, using mobile phones and GPS-technology, will transport 11 to 12 year-old students to the medieval Amsterdam of 1550."
we make money not art
Business visualization tools
ADVIZOR Updates Business Visualization Software. "There is a growing need to interact with data in a more visual manner, to improve the overall value of data analysis and exploration," said Kurt Schlegel of the META Group. "This coincides with the trend toward more intuitive, self-service business intelligence solutions."
EWeek
More and more data over FM
Mobiles get set for visual radio. "If you have a Visual Radio enabled handset, when you hear an artist you don't know, or there's a competition or vote that you'd like to participate in, you pull out your handset and with one click you turn on a visual channel parallel to the on-air broadcast you've just been listening to."
BBC NEWS
January 14, 2005
January 12, 2005
Gesture-based ringtones
Motorola's spray-on ringtone wall. "...this prototype system that enables you to spray a pattern onto a wall sensor, which plays a melody in response to the shape that you draw; you can then print out the pattern with a URL that takes you to a ringtone version of the melody that you can download to your cellphone."
Engadget
Data tables
Floating Numbers table. "On a 9-metre long table, numbers are flowing in a continuum. Digits appear randomly at the surface of this stream of numbers. Visitors could catch a number by tapping on it and it made the digits "explode" into an encyclopaedia entry for the number, featuring text and image or a movie."
we make money not art
January 11, 2005
Ambient displays
Activity Wallpaper. "The prototype analyzes audio from a caf setting, accounting for various characteristics of the current activity level, such as the number of people speaking or the amount of background noise. The more the color diverts from the background, the noisier the caf is. The number of "dots" in each row represents the crowd, so that the more dots, the bigger the crowd was at that point."
we make money not art
January 06, 2005
Visual representations of network activity
VisitorVille: Website Traffic Statistics Visualization Software. "'...instead of representing website visitors simply as numbers or graphs, it displays them as real people in a real environment. You can watch your site traffic as if you were people-watching in a big city."
networked_performance
December 17, 2004
Mapping photos to location
geo-location of tagged images on flickr.com. "Photos from flickr are often tagged with information that can be used to make educated guesses about their locations in the world. Mappr uses this data, which is provided by flickr users, to place their images on a map."
mappr
December 10, 2004
Facial identity
The New Face of Surveillance. "In Pinellas County, Fla., sheriff's deputies armed with Hewlett-Packard digital cameras and laptops connected to a wireless data network can use software from Viisage to check the identity of suspects in a minute or less. The software was credited in a September arrest of a woman who was wanted on two felony warrants."Baseline Mag
December 06, 2004
Home monitoring
Wireless Water Submeters: It's a ZigBee Thing.. "A self-forming, self-healing wireless mesh network of ZigBee-based Aqura submeters will provide real-time usage data - including the number of "flow events" (showers, toilet flushes, dishwasher cycles, etc.), flow-time in minutes, hot and cold water usage, domestic hot water energy, leak diagnostics and tamper detection - using a TV remote control-like meter reader. The readings will be automatically collected from the ZigBee network several times per day and uploaded to Wellspring's data and billing center; then made available to residents, apartment owners and third party billing services on the Web."
ExtremeTech
Made-to-fit car
Design your own car parts. "The 3D profile of the client would be scanned at a dealership equipped with the RM machines now being developed at Loughborough University. These machines will build up the components in a layering technique similar to the way inkjet printers make images."Ferret.com
Worldwide sensor networks
Argo, a Robotic Network System that Watches Our Oceans. "And in 2007, when the deployment is completed, 3,000 underwater robots will help us to better understand the changes in our climate."
Tech Trends
December 01, 2004
Interactive surfaces
Table inhabited by squiggly luminous worms. "People can pick up the electronic worms, pet them, then let them go where they would navigate to the closest glass --or whatever else people fish out of their pockets and plonk into the "terrarium"-- and spin colorful light streamers round its base."
we make money not art
Realtime geographic visualizations
"SAME" enables users to see any place on the planet in real time . "York University Prof. Vincent Tao has developed groundbreaking satellite mapping technology that enables users to visually zoom in on - or fly over - any place on the planet in real time. Called SAME (an acronym for "See Anywhere - Map Everywhere"), it is an Internet-based technology that provides 3-D imagery with ground resolution of a half-metre to one metre - close enough to identify automobile makes, for example, but not the human face.
PhysOrg
November 26, 2004
Walk-around displays
The SeeLinder: Make 3D holographic video calls, at least eventually. "SeeLinder uses a 360-degree digital camera and cyliderical tube to create real-time three-dimensional holograms that'll let you view the person you're talking to from almost any angle (i.e. you can walk around them and stare at the back of their head while their talking, etc.)."
Engadget
Home fabrication with 3D printers
Any product, any shape, any size - manufactured on your desktop!. "Set it up, turn it on, and you can crank out not only solid objects like eyeglass frames and action figures but, thanks to Gershenfeld's research, electronic devices like radios and computers, too."
Wired
November 17, 2004
Freeform Operating Systems
Croquet Project. "Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between large numbers of users. Croquet makes it possible to change and author virtual worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating."
Croquet Project
QR codes by radio
Japanese radio stations to test QR code broadcastingIn particular, they will test a system for broadcasting QR codes to mobile phones (that are equipped with digital radio receivers). [...] Business models still need to be developed if the companies want to put this technology into real uses. Ideas they talk about at this point are: to use QR code broadcasting to distribute tickets and coupons for events."RFID in Japan
November 10, 2004
Visualizing the news
10 x 10. "Jonathan Harris' 10 x 10 is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The grid is updated every hour with the 100 most relevant words and images based on the headlines and leading photos from the worlds primary on-line news sources."
Cool Hunting
November 05, 2004
3D surgery
Hospital uses cutting edge telemedicine. "Donning 3-D glasses, doctors at a medical conference in India resembled an audience at an IMAX movie Monday as they watched the live broadcast of a Henry Ford Hospital doctor performing prostate surgery."
Detroit News
November 04, 2004
Ambient walls
Not so White Walls interactive wallpaper. "...Dario Buzzini says that he's going to be commercializing his Not so White Walls interactive wallpaper that you can hook up to a PC and display low-resolution images and even use for reading emails and text messages."
Engadget
Ambient furniture
Domestic Environments: Drift Table. "The Drift Table allows people to float slowly over the British landscape from the comfort of their own home. The distribution of weight on the table controls the slow scroll of aerial photographs displayed on a central viewport. Progress is slow, but the Drift Table can be used to visit favorite places, look at geographical features, or simply watch the world go by."
Equator
November 03, 2004
Ambient devices
Wireless Weather Forecaster. "Operating on the same wireless network that gives the Orbs their information, the $100 device will show weather forecasts for five days at a time, updating about every 15 minutes."
Gizmodo
November 01, 2004
Virtual self
Citris Allows 3-d Interactions. "Bajcsy's technology takes pictures of a subject in her laboratory from 48 different cameras and combines them into a 3-D image. The image can then be placed into historical Sicily, one of the three cyberspace environments created so far."
The Daily Californian
Seeing how machines think
Thinking Machine 4. "A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine."
we make money not art
October 28, 2004
QR codes
QR Codes Getting Popular. "QR codes are 2D barcodes that are widely available in Japan. Consumers, for example, use their cell phones to take a picture of a QR code and automatically access a corresponding website. According to a recent research conducted by C-NEWS, more than 70% i-mode cell phone users knew QR codes and almost 60% people actually used QR codes."
RFID in Japan
October 25, 2004
Visualising data to aid information discovery
'Knowledge discovery' could speed creation of new products. ""If you were a chemist, you could walk right up to this display and move molecules and atoms around to see how the changes would affect a formulation or a material's properties," said James Caruthers, a professor of chemical engineering at Purdue."
Purdue
October 21, 2004
New research tools
Browser-Based Research Tools. "These are the new tools that allow information gatherers to search, collect, organize and often share/publish your "news bits" into unique comprehensive reports."RG News
October 14, 2004
Virtually "touching" products
Touch and Feel Web Pages for Fashion Retail. "Click 2 Touch produce unique web pages that allow consumers to see garments as 3D objects, enlarge important details and experience ten tactile sensations. A web page for each garment is created that is easily linked to from an existing e-commerce site."
Click 2 Touch Ltd
October 09, 2004
Mixing map visualizations
Transparent map over satellite photos of London. "This overlays a streetmap on an aerial photo of the Tower of London (and, presumably, with other cities as well). Move the mouse around to see the overlay move. Very cool hack."
Boing Boing
October 08, 2004
Discovering the environment through sensors
Reality Mining: Browsing Reality with Sensor Networks. "As sensors become inexpensive and easily deployed, individual measurements may become less significant than the sensor data relationships within the network. Sensors act as pixels, allowing us to construct views of the people, processes, and events we care about."
Sensors Mag
September 20, 2004
Personal information visualization
AutoFocus Personal. "Finds any piece of information on your local system, in mailboxes and on websites . Guided Exploration provides you with automatic suggestions for query refinement. Visualises query results using Cluster Maps, showing aspects you could not oversee before."
Aduna
August 26, 2004
Visualizing genetics
The Human Genome Interactive . "The Human Genome Interactive will introduce the visitor to the human genome, [...] and will reinforce the connections between understanding animals and understanding ourselves."
davidsmall.com
August 20, 2004
3D parts, made to order
Online Machine Shop. "Download our free software, draw your part, and click to order - it's that easy! Your part will be machined and delivered. Even better, your cost is low due to the Internet, software, and automated machines."
eMachineShop
August 19, 2004
Portraits that live
Watchful Portrait. "The portrait (Caroline) opens her eyes at dawn and tracks the sun. At dusk she closes her eyes. At this point the opposite portrait opens her eyes and tracks the moon all night."
Johngerrard.net
Codes that can be read by a cameraphone
QR Codes and Japanese Cellular Phones. "These codes are quite common in Japan and are often seen on flyers and magazine ads. Cellular phone users can scan the code with their built-in camera and immediately have all the contact info they need entered into their camera, sorted appropriately."
August 17, 2004
Visualization services
TouchGraph AmazonBrowser V1.01. "The TouchGraph AmazonBrowser allows one to examine the graph of similar items at Amazon.com. Items are linked together by directed edges, with an edge from item A to item B indicating that people who buy A also buy B."
TouchGraph
August 16, 2004
Visualizing conversations
V I S I P H O N E. "VisiPhone is a communication object that opens a graphical as well as an audio portal through space. It is designed to provide a continuous, ubiquitous connection between people in different places."
MIT
August 14, 2004
Augmented reality phones
Cell phone melds video and data. "The cell phone system inserts computer-generated three-dimensional models into real-time video shown on the cell phone's display and aligns the models with physical markers in the camera's field of view."
TRN
August 11, 2004
Tiny PCs
Candy Bar-Sized Bluetooth PC. "At just 8.3 by 3.6 centimeters, the 200ax-bt still manages to pack in USB, serial, sound, and LCD controller - now with AC adapter!"
Gizmodo
August 07, 2004
Visualizing people
Get your intern today. We will provide you with guaranteed top quality interns for your company.
crew9.net
August 06, 2004
Ambient indicators
Ambient Weather Forecast Beacon#2a. "The Beacon silently and elegantly communicates weather data using color and light. It glows more red when warmer weather is forecasted, and colder blue hues if cooler temperatures are on the way. The Beacon will also subtly pulse to show the chance of rain or snow."
ambient
July 27, 2004
Big, immersive screens
VisionStation. "Standard flat-screen applications can display a field of view (FOV) of no more than 60. The Elumens VisionStation allows for a fully immersive display of 160. The VisionStation's ultra-wide FOV creates an amazing sense of space and depth, without need for goggles or glasses. The large size of the VisionStation screen (1.5 meters) also helps promote an excellent sense of immersive 3D."
Elumens
July 26, 2004
Virtual design studios
Virtual Design: As clay fades, GM shifts toward digital imagery . "The studios allow designers and executives to view three-dimensional, full-sized representations of vehicle designs. Designers can rotate images, change lighting and see surfaces in detail. Design teams in different parts of the world will be able to review and revise projects together at the same time."AutoWeek
July 23, 2004
Architectural visualizations
Design Approaches to the High Line Master Plan . Some great examples of architectural boards that look like representations of data.
Friends of the High Line
July 22, 2004
Physical visualizations
Flight 404 | v.7. A series of interesting visualizations using a tool called Processing "built for the electronic arts and visual design communities."
Flight 404 | v.7
July 20, 2004
Visualizing audio
The Shape of Song. "The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see--literally--the shape of any composition available on the Web."
Turbulence.org
July 09, 2004
Recognizing objects
Mobileeye - camera based systems for automotive and ITS systems. "At the first level it identifies whether the obstacle is a car/truck or not. At the second level it classifies the obstacles according to their size, if it is a vehicle (Small - cars, Medium - SUVs and light vans, Large - trucks and buses)."
MobileEye
June 23, 2004
Virtual meeting rooms
This Is How We Will Meet: SmartMeeting. "People gather together in an actual three-dimensional space and can gather, discuss and hold effective meetings in front of a business table or while facing a panoramic giant projection screen."RG News
June 21, 2004
Monitoring the environment
'Wireless pebbles' track glaciers. "The low-powered pebble probes are placed near the bottom of the glaciers and move with the ice, recording temperature, pressure, speed and the makeup of the glacier's sediment."
BBC NEWS
June 19, 2004
Telling what a PC is "thinking"
Fractals Show Machine Intentions. "The interface represents a machine's internal state in a way that makes it possible for observers to interpret the machine's behavior."Technology Review
June 16, 2004
Rich, 3D based navigation
Video-Game Graphics Hit the Road"This navigation system can give you detailed 3-D visual images of the street and corner that you are going to," said Sony Japan spokesman Shinji Obana. "Compared to conventional GPS navigation systems, it's much easier to grasp where you are and (in) which direction you have to drive."
Wired News
Virtual sports replays
Virtual replay. "You can choose a favourite camera position or a player perspective from the menu bar. Hit the Play button to start the replay, or the rewind button to start again."BBC SPORT
June 14, 2004
Visualizing search
Visual View of Global Searching. "It's an animation showing the relative numbers of queries to the Google site in various parts of the world. Very cool, and revealing."
Dan Gillmor's eJournal
Powerful maps
A SuperMap for Soldiers - Or Business Travelers. "HeraclesMaps can instantly solve life-and-death tactical questions like, "Help us find a route from point A to B where we cannot be observed (or shot at) by someone at point C."
Information Sciences Institute
Visualizing flight patterns
Air Traffic Ant Farm. "The Aviation Systems Division of the NASA Ames Research Center has published an animation of a day in the life of air traffic over the continental US. We all know there are lots of planes in the air at once, but you don't really understand until you see something like this."
Cool Hunting
June 11, 2004
Mapping of government information
Local elections map. "This year 166 councils across England and Wales are holding elections. No council elections are taking place in Scotland, Northern Ireland and London."BBC News
June 08, 2004
Virtual fences
Virtual fences to herd Wi-Fi cattle. "Virtual, moving fences controlled from a laptop could one day herd cattle to fresh fields for grazing..."New Scientist
June 07, 2004
Virtually annotating the city
urban tapestries. "The Urban Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city."
SoMa
June 01, 2004
Huge-screen displays for command centers
Big Screen for NYPD. "The New York City Police Dept. is awash in data. Every year, it's flooded with 12 million emergency calls and hundreds of thousands of arrest records. Over the last 10 years, it has mined that data to help reduce crime by a stunning 70%."
Technology Trends
May 28, 2004
Crime prediction
Prospective hot-spot maps show where criminals are going to be active "It is a clich to say that crime spreads like a disease, but previous work by Dr Bowers and her colleagues found that this is exactly how crime does spread."The Economist
May 26, 2004
Wireless pill camera
Wireless Pill Camera"...the world's only swallowable camera capsule for diagnosis of disease of the gastrointestinal tract, is now using an ultra low-power transmitter chip from Zarlink Semiconductor in its M2A capsule endoscope."
Daily Wireless
May 25, 2004
Increasing use of 3D graphics
The Virtual Tectonics of Renascent. "Joost Korngold is an independant dutch graphic/motion graphic artist."
Archinect
3D in the operating system
Sun to share 3-D stash with developers. "At the JavaOne conference next month, Sun will release a developer kit for its Project Looking Glass 3-D software. This will be the first time Sun has let anyone outside of the company fiddle with the dadaist code, and the move confirms that Project Looking Glass is heading toward a general release on Linux and Solaris."
The Register
Books augmented with digital content
Books get interactive makeover. "The 3D images are seen via a handheld viewer that watches where a reader is looking. With a flick of a switch the viewer can also plunge readers into an immersive virtual world that lets them explore the book's subject in more depth."
BBC NEWS
Heads-up display overlaying the real world
Nomad Expert Technician System. "By superimposing test and repair data into the technicians' vision, the Nomad Expert Technician System allows them to stay focused on the task itself."
Microvision
May 24, 2004
Rich medical imaging
An intimate look at me. "I have been having weird, persistent chest pains for about a month. I figured I had best have them checked out so my doctor sent me to Inner Imaging for a some electron beam tomography of my heart, lungs, and chest to see what was up. It took 5 minutes to do these scans."
gould.weblogsinc.com
Visualizing human motion
Biological Visualization: Motion Synthesizer. "This interactive Flash dataset allows you to manipulate three essential variables of a human walking: Weight, Sex, Rleaxed/Tense, Happy/Sad while visualizing 14 light points outlining its body movement and expressivity."
BioMotionLabs
May 20, 2004
Drive for simplicity
A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple. "Despite the lip service paid to "ease of use," "plug and play," and "one-click shopping," simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, he adds, and it is time to break free from technology's intimidating complexity."
The New York Times
May 13, 2004
Online worship
3D online church. "Welcome to Church of Fools, the UK's first web-based, 3D church, which opened this week on May 11th. Please read our house rules, and then click here to enter the church. Created by Ship of Fools and digital media agency specialmoves as a three-month experiment, Church of Fools promises to be one of the most ambitious attempts yet to do church on the internet. Click and read below for news and info."
Church of Fools
May 07, 2004
Cinema-quality 3D games
What will it take to boost computer games to cinematic levels?. "Today's game systems expend around 10 GPU cycles per vertex on average; the next generation will be able to expend 100 or more. This amount of processing per pixel will allow shading effects as complex as those we see in special-effects-rich feature films or animated films such as those produced by Pixar Studios."ACM
May 06, 2004
3D on handhelds
Net lets hand-helds view 3D data. "The scheme offloads the compute-heavy modeling and graphics processing required by three-dimensional models to specialized network graphics servers. This type of processing is far beyond the relatively low compute power of mobile devices like hand-held computers."trnmag.com
April 20, 2004
Changing public space by text message
Text message can change artwork's colour. "A 10-metre high beacon of light that can change colour by having a text message sent to it, is going on display in Middlesbrough."
Ananova
April 08, 2004
Mapping digital data
Here there be data: Mapping the landscape of science. "Representing the computer, information and cognitive sciences, mathematics, geography, psychology and other fields, these researchers present attempts to create maps of science from the ever-growing and constantly evolving ocean of digital data."
eurekalert.org
April 05, 2004
Location based mobile gaming #2
Mogi: Second Generation Location-Based Gaming. "Mogi is a collecting game - "item hunt". The game provides a data-layer over the city of Tokyo. As you move through the city, if you check a map on your mobile phone screen, you'll see nearby items you can pick up and nearby players you can meet or trade with."
TheFeature
April 02, 2004
Spherical Windows environment
The SphereXP. "The SphereXP is a 3D desktop replacement for Microsoft Windows XP. Taking the known concept of three-dimensional desktops to its own level. It offers a new way to organize objects on the desktop such a icons and applications."
hamar.sk
March 31, 2004
Treemap of Google news
newsmap. "Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator."
marumushi.com
March 22, 2004
Visual search
Sketchy Information "Where the newer approaches differ is in complexity, because they can show intricate relationships among items."Tech Review
March 11, 2004
Timeline of your mobile phone items
Log your life via your phone. "The Lifeblog software automatically arranges all the messages, images, videos and sound clips people capture with their phones."BBC News
March 10, 2004
Deeper web searching
In search of the deep Web "The "deep Web" is the great lode of databases, flight schedules, library catalogs, classified ads, patent filings, genetic research data and another 90-odd terabytes of data that never find their way onto a typical search results page."Salon.com
March 04, 2004
Dynamo: multi-user, large screen shared workspace
Dynamo: a communal, multi-user surface that supports cooperative sharing & exchange of digital media. "Dynamo is a situated display system, normally configured to use two large, publicly visible wall displays. Dynamo is multi-user. This means that each user has their own pointer on the communal display. This may be via their own laptop, tablet PC, or via wireless mice & keyboards provided."
Dynamo Interactive
February 09, 2004
January 30, 2004
January 28, 2004
Blog searchers
BlogPulse and DayPop are both tools that mine blogs for key phrases, sites and people of the day. BlogPulse describes itself as "automated trend discovery for weblogs".GlogPulse.com & DayPop.com
January 27, 2004
3D virtual models for you
Toshiba is developing a system that create a 3D model for you to "try" on clothes. It takes snapshots of the shopper, then combines them with clothes and accessories in a 3D view.
BBC NEWS
January 13, 2004
December 15, 2003
Sun - Project Looking glass
A 3d desktop demo, from Sun, showing some interseting animated stuff, and fairly unoriginal perspective windows.Sun.com
November 18, 2003
October 22, 2003
Album thumbnails on the desktop
Clutter allows you to navigate your music collection entirely through thumbnails, which you can scatter around on your desktop, or pile up.Sprote Rsrch
August 14, 2003
Rich data visualizations
We keep at it, and one day we will come up with some highly useful visualizations of data for everyday applications. Until then.p l u m b d e s i g n | T h ! n k m a p
August 11, 2003
Collaborative weather tracking
Haven't quite figured out how to get this online, realtime weather tracking site working, but it looks cool.geoTracker
Fog screen
Literally, a screen made by projecting onto fog. I like that you can walk through it. Makes it quite transient or at least more subtle then a huge plasma screen in the corner of a room.Tampere University, Finland