Stories in Digital Media » Technology

Mouse Interaction 2.0

Andre — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:00:33 +0000

Kristian Gohlke and Michael Haltky from the University of Applied
Sciences Bremen presented a set of slick controllers for quick and
easy multipoint interaction with any audio software at TEI Conference
2010 at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA. Seems like the good old
mouse is not quite dead yet.

Will Wright makes toys that make worlds

derjan — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:19:36 +0000

Just another Ted-talk. This time by Will Wright. The New Statesman describes him in these words :

“Will Wright – a legend among gamers, the nerd’s nerd, undisputed king of the simulation.“

He developed Sim City, The Sims and finally Spore. In this talk from 2007 he presented Spore as a preview.

A trail version of the Spore Creature Creator could be downloaded for Mac and PC for free, just check the link.

Embodied Interaction – Pong Prom

derjan — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:57:08 +0000

Pong Prom from Ed Keeble on Vimeo.

I will not comment on this, this will get out of hands. But I have to commit that I´m amused. A little. Or a bit more.

Information Visualization & Accessbility – Digg 365

derjan — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:42:48 +0000

As Andre wrote the list of official relevance for the 00´s, I just stumbeled upon a nice new addition to the digg labs website. Some of you might heard about digg, which is more or less a social bookmarking service. Just another Web 2.0 traffic generating service, promoting non-sense as well as important headlines around the web. Based on the diggers votes. It follows the simple principle – dig it, share it. Increment its count. Thats it.

I never understood digg at all, but those digg labs prototypes for alternative, interactive frontends instead of the common website, catched my attention to it. It just about news retrieval of importance, for example via the last 100 diggs, which are highlighted in quantity. This is the principle of the digg stack. Another list-based visualization approach is the digg big spy. At least – the quantity of diggs is not a really a good sign for quality. Cartoons or stupid images could also appear in the digg network.

Anyway, Digg is more or less a memory of the web. And to sum up in short : The new digg 365 addition is based on a clock-like interaction interface, not a time-related display of the latest diggs as in the both examples mentioned before. The year, month or even a single day is selectable. Also the category of news. The result is a selection of the most popular diggs in the time period. So, all dates since the 1st of january 2005 are accessible and those results are visualized finally with a simple depth of field blurrienes, related to the digg count. Also it scaled in size. So a little 2 1/2D in the final result. Nice approach.

Maybe usable for other non-sense networks like twitter, or our own facebook newsfeed. Or something useable ? Need to elaborate that. Maybe tomorrow or the day after, or …

Processing is coming to Android

Andre — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:53:48 +0000

There had been some hard work done to make Processing run on Android. Read some details here or here:

android.processing.org

Connoc.de – bachelor report by Stephan Scholdra (HfK).

derjan — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:13:22 +0000

I just stumpled upon Stephan Scholdra´s documentation of his bachelor report which he submitted recently to retrieve his bachelor degree. And I must commit that I´m really impressed so far!

Just check the related website connoc.de for an teaser, the thesis download (in german) and even an simulator of the game (adobe flash 10 required) which combines an multi-touch interface with further physical interaction, balancing on a see-saw.

Seems to be a lot of more fun than I had with my theo-practical research thesis. Where can I play it ?

Internet: 40 years of history

Andre — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:43:49 +0000

In October 1969, a student typed ‘LO’ on a computer – and the internet was born

Unless you are 15 years old or younger, you have lived through the dotcom bubble and bust, the birth of Friends Reunited and Craigslist and eBay and Facebook and Twitter, blogging, the browser wars, Google Earth, filesharing controversies, the transformation of the record industry, political campaigning, activism and campaigning, the media, publishing, consumer banking, the pornography industry, travel agencies, dating and retail; and unless you’re a specialist, you’ve probably only been following the most attention-grabbing developments. Here’s one of countless statistics that are liable to induce feelings akin to vertigo: on New Year’s Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites. In total. On the whole internet. “This isn’t a matter of ego or crowing,” says Steve Crocker, who was present that day at UCLA in 1969, “but there has not been, in the entire history of mankind, anything that has changed so dramatically as computer communications, in terms of the rate of change.”

Voice synthesis with a piano

Andre — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:49:51 +0000

This analysis analog additive re-synthesis project absolutely blew my mind. Imagine approximating every sound with the sublime timbre of a piano. I wonder what that would sound like on an electric organ with multiple keyboards or the likes.

Structural Image Editing

Andre — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:24:48 +0000

This technology, aka PatchMatch will be made available in CS5.

Processing: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Andre — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:46:23 +0000

Check out this recent rhizome interview with Processing founders Ben Fry and Casey Reas. They talk about the roots, the development since 2001 so far and they let us have a little glimpse for the future.

I don’t remember if I started with Basic or Logo, but I learned a little with both. I hit a wall and I wasn’t motivated to learn more. (I love playing video games on the computer more than writing my own small programs.) (Casey Reas)

[...]

We’re only looking as far into the future as 2.0. We’re planning a 1.5 release before that, which will have two additional components.

The outcomes of the Tiny Sketch competition mentioned in the interview are very nice. The goal was to implement a processing sketch with only 200 characters length.