An Absurd, Real-World Reinterpretation Of Your Facebook Feed. Adding a friend. Joining a group. Becoming a fan. They’re all mundane, digital actions we take of no real consequence. But what if someone took all of these Facebook activities very seriously--as if the weight of these clicks and mouse overs were worthy of our deepest artistic contemplation? That’s pretty much exactly what artist Nicolas Ritter has done with his photography series, The Social Network, which reinterprets Facebook as some sort of experimental theater collective. “I do use Facebook myself and it just amused me to read what is on my ‘wall’ sometimes,” Ritter tells Co.Design.
Imagine if your grandma invited you to join the mafia in real life, vs Mafia Wars on Facebook. But when you look a bit closer at Ritter’s work, you’ll notice another pattern. Indeed--we’re all looking at one another on Facebook, but not a single one of us is making eye contact. [Hat tip: the creators project] Pointer Pointer Becomes An Internet Sensation By Having People Point At Your Pointer.
As if the Internet doesn’t provide enough distractions to keep us from doing what we should be doing between Words With Friends and viral cat videos, now there is Pointer Pointer. The site simply requires you to move your cursor--aka pointer—to a point on your computer screen. Once your cursor is still, a photo of a person pointing at your pointer appears. Move your cursor, and up pops another photo of a person pointing at your pointer.
Slide your curser to another location on the screen, and, well, you get it. The photos are pretty random. A lot of the images are of young people pointing while partying. There is also a guy on a boat holding a beer and pointing, a Baltimore Oriole walking onto the field pointing and a toddler sitting in his car seat pointing. Puckey and his associates were thrilled, of course. But you’ll notice Pointer Pointer doesn’t move so fast. And why are so many people used to instant gratification when clicking compelled to sit and wait for something to happen? MIT students' invention turns bananas into keyboard. 7 June 2012Last updated at 09:49 ET By Naveena Kottoor BBC News Banana piano, Play-Doh touchpad and paper Pacman controls - footage courtesy of MakeyMakey Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have managed to develop a banana piano.
Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, both 32, were looking for a way of turning everyday objects into touchpads. They have developed a kit called MakeyMakey, that can turn fruit, animals and even humans into keyboards. Mr Rosenbaum told the BBC the idea behind the kit was to enable people to "see the world around them as a construction kit. " The basic kit contains a USB cable and a bespoke circuit board with alligator clips attached to it. The basic kit contains alligator clips, a USB cable and the so-called Makey board. Once the board has been connected to a PC or laptop via USB, the alligator clips can be linked to any object that conducts electricity.
He said fuses had been incorporated into the board as well as the USB port to ensure safety. Google's Project Glass: Inside The Problem Solving And Prototyping. At Google X, the company’s now-not-so-top-secret R&D lab, engineers and neuroscientists and artificial-intelligence experts dream up a future without the pressure of market deadlines: driverless cars, robots, space elevators. But for lead product manager Steve Lee, his X pursuits are anything but an exercise in the fantastical: Project Glass, the futuristic eyeware he’s developing with an interactive heads-up display, might just hit market in the near future alongside products like Gmail and Android.
For Lee, it’s a matter of wrangling a sci-fi idea into a practical product. Whereas Apple and Microsoft have grounded their mobile future in the belief that the Post-PC World will revolve around the pillars of smartphones and tablets, Google is adding a late, left-field entry into the mobile space that’s as much of a technical feat as it is a fashion statement. The Problem: How Do You Keep People Connected, But Still Present In Meatspace?
Lee calls much modern-day technology a distraction. The Taxi Composer on Devour. iPhone App Tries To Make You Feel The Weather, Via Color. Both iOS and Android have weather widgets built right in, but weather apps have carved out a huge chunk of the app market all the same. So what’s missing in core weather apps? Detailed forecasts? Probably. But what about something a touch more visceral? Brisk, by TwoSolid, is an iPhone app with simple style. On one hand, it’s a no-frills experience. But on the other hand, Brisk cuts through the excess to focus on the core, answering the question “what is the weather like at this very moment?” Brisk’s UI features a warm-to-cool color gradient that’s more than just pretty. All the same, Brisk seems worth checking out when it’s available in the coming weeks.
Sign up here. An E-Book UI That Lets You Flip Digital Pages, Just Like A Real Book. If a book is good, you should be so immersed in it that you don’t care how far you’ve read or how much further there is to go. Does that sound like a good rationalization for the generally terrible navigation schemes that we put up with in our e-books? I love my Kindle, but using percentages instead of page numbers makes me feel like I’m reading a calculator instead of a book. And god forbid if I want to casually flip around in a short-but-sweet book like this one, looking for interesting passages to blog about--no, I have to query it like a database using search terms. E-books are great in many ways, but serendipitous they ain’t. What if there were a way to tactilely navigate through an e-book in the same intuitive way we do with paper pages? Some folks at the KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence cooked one up: This won’t help me with my Kindle issues, but iPad and tablet users, rejoice and flip to your heart’s content!
Or will they? And that’s the trouble. Can We Please Move Past Apple's Silly, Faux-Real UIs? In recent years, the aesthetic of UIs has followed a dominant ideology that attempts to replicate the physical world. With a handful of software/product updates and new releases in the last few months, we’ve begun to see how it might be time to find a new balance (see Clive Thompson’s article in Wired and Sam Biddle’s on Gizmodo. As both Thompson’s and Biddle’s articles describe, the philosophy that drives the majority of contemporary UIs is called skeuomorphism.
Derived from the Greek words Skeuos, meaning vessel or tool, and morph, meaning shape, a skeuomorph is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a “derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.” The term can apply to either a physical or digital creation. There is validity to a skeuomorphic approach. To create any good interface, it is essential for the designer to understand the cognitive models that a user brings to any new product. Really, iCal? [Image: J. MIT Creates Amazing UI From Levitating Orbs. Anyone else see The Avengers? Just like in Iron Man 1 and 2, Tony Stark has the coolest interactive 3-D displays. He can pull a digital wire frame out of a set of blueprints or wrap an exoskeleton around his arm. Those moments aren’t just sci-fi fun; they’re full of visionary ideas to explore and manipulate objects in 3-D space. Except for one thing: How would Stark feel all of these objects to move them around?
In reality, he’d be touching nothing but air. Jinha Lee, from the Tangible Media Group of the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with Rehmi Post and Hiroshi Ishii, has been playing with the idea of manipulating real floating objects in 3-D space to create a truly tactile user interface. It’s essentially a small field in which gravity doesn’t overcome an object. “There is something fundamental behind motivations to liberate physical matter from gravity and enable control. Interviewing Lee, I realized he’s one-part scientist, one-part philosopher. [Hat tip: designboom] Google – The first Google image for every word in the dictionary. If a picture says more than a thousand words – and current internet dynamics tend to agree – what would a visual guide to the English vocabulary, contemporary and ‘webresentative’, look like? Ben West and Felix Heyes, two artists and designers from London (UK), found out when they replaced the 21,000 words found in your everyday dictionary with whatever shows up first for each word in Google’s image search.
Behold Google – a 1240 page behemoth of JPGs, GIFs and PNGs in alphabetical order. “We used two PHP scripts my brother Sam wrote for us,” says Ben about the process in an email. “The first one takes a text list of dictionary words and downloads each image in sequence, and the second lays them out into columns and outputs a PDF.” The PDF was then printed into a beautiful book – handbound, thumb indexed pages held together in a marbled paper hardcover, the golden Google logo clearly indifferent to whatever internet horrors it may contain. via Crap = Good. This Gizmo Lets You Draw A UI On Paper, Then Turns It Into A Touch Screen.
You know those huge multichannel mixers--the massive boards that audio engineers manage during concerts to control everything from sound to lights? It’s the sort of highly specialized hardware that the average person would never come into contact with, because why would they? But what if you could just draw it? That’s the idea behind the SketchSynth, by Carnegie Mellon student Billy Keyes. It allows you to draw your own specialized piece of sound hardware--in this case, a MIDI board--on any random piece of paper. “Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by control panels,” Keyes explains on his blog. “In elementary school, my neighbor and I would spend our bus rides pretending to operate incredible imaginary machines with cardboard controllers we drew, cut, and taped the night before. Even now, I pause when I see desks covered in gauges, switches, knobs, and buttons, wondering what they all do.” [Hat tip: Creative Applications]
Smart Shirt Syncs To Your iPhone, Trains You In Pilates. As the weather warms and we all realize that we’ll be removing clothing in public for another summer, pilates seems like a better and better idea. But how do you--what’s the verb I’m looking for--pilate? Pilatorize? Pilatiocize? Move, by ElectricFoxy, is a prototype tank top that uses four stretch sensors to feel the postures of your shoulders through your back and recognize the poses of exercises like yoga, pilates and even sports like baseball and golf. But what makes Move a bit different is that it actually syncs with an iOS app in real time, not so differently from what we see in Nike+ products.
I don’t envy the development team, but the idea has extreme potential. Indeed, maybe the best part of Move isn’t that it will prepare your body for the beach, but that it will be an excuse to cover it. [Hat tip: ecouterre] Paper Note - A Tangible Paper Waveform with #Processing. This project, made at CIID (Copenhagen Institut of Interaction Design), was part of their Generative Design class ran by Joshua Noble. Paper Note creates a tangible waveform from laser cut disks of paper.
The user records a message, a sound or loads up music, and the system analyses the sound to map each moment to a corresponding slice. The circles are laid on a sheet, lasercut and put together to form a unified shape, representing the original sound wave. The team programmed it using Processing. Each Paper Note is made up of around 450 stacked disks of paper. The louder the volume at a specific moment, the bigger the disk.
Credits: Andrew Spitz and Andrew Nip with help from David Gauthier, Joshua Noble and Marcin Ignac for their help with the code. A Mind-Blowing UI That Could Finally Make Group Work Intuitive. We’ve seen "magic-window" augmented reality interfaces, Minority Report-style gestural interfaces, and computer-vision-powered collaborative display interfaces. But what about an iPad app that combines all three? That would be T(ether), an experimental design from the MIT Media Lab. Creators Matthew Blackshaw, Dávid Lakatos, Hiroshi Ishii, and Ken Perlin call T(ether) "a tool for spatial expression" that "acts as a window affording users a perspective view of three-dimensional data through tracking of head position and orientation.
" In English, that means you can hold the iPad up with one hand to reveal a shared virtual space that you can manipulate with the other hand using a special glove. T(ether) opens up mind-boggling possibilities for creating interactive digital art or exploring novel scientific visualizations. But how effectively can you really interact with a virtual world when you have one hand tied behind your back (that iPad may get awfully heavy after a few minutes)?
Weird But Genius: Feel Me App Turns Texting Into Touching. It’s never been easier to contact someone. Technology hasn’t only enabled us to reach anyone on the globe instantly, but to reach them casually. A text is the ultimate in casual conversation--read it now or later, whatever. The same can be said for tweets and photos. In 2012, we don’t have flying cars just yet, but sharing media any time, any place, has been figured out. “It is easy to transmit words and content, while there is limited space for the nuances that characterize daily face-to-face interactions. In particular, technology provides many ways to communicate … but often neglects the need for people to connect nonverbally,” designer Marco Triverio tells Co.Design. So to bridge these words and images into a more intrinsic level of communication, Triverio built a messaging app prototype called Feel Me. Is Feel Me a gimmick?
Imagine an iPhone that you could kiss, and the screen would be warm and supple, matching the texture and temperature of a lover’s lips.