“What exactly is The Leap?
The Leap is a small iPod sized USB peripheral that creates a 3D interaction space of 8 cubic feet to precisely interact with and control software on your laptop or desktop computer. It’s like being able to reach into the computer and pull out information as easily as reaching into a cookie jar.”
Very cool tech.
Learn more - http://www.leapmotion.com/
Source: leapmotion.com
Disney Research demonstrates an incredible advancement in touch-based control with Touché, a system capable of detecting touch and gestures on everyday objects, in liquids, and even on skin.
Computers are prisons for pixels. LuminAR frees your pixels.
Love the idea of a “bulb” you can plug in anywhere.
Curtain.js
This plugin allows you to create a web page with multiple fixed panels that unroll with an amusing effect. Exactly like a curtain rises.
Really beautiful js library. Easily create effects like those seen on the gorgeous editsquarterly.com
How To Prototype And Influence People
Great talk and preso from @azaaza:
Via Aza Raskin
One of the points I make in So You Want To Be A Designer is that the hardest part of software isn’t the process of creating software, it’s changing culture and influencing organizations. One of the strongest tools we have our repertoire in convincing others is prototyping and video: turning ideas into high-bandwidth communication artifacts. The goal of a prototype is to sketch an idea and to inspire participation: you are creating a narrative.
To put it another way, the value of an idea is zero unless it can be communicated. Below is the video of my talk on How To Prototype And Influence People. Not only that, but the video also includes a demonstration of live rapid prototyping! Now is your chance to see me code and debug in front of seventy-five people. It’s like pair programming with an entire room.
For those who do not want to sit through the 30-minutes romp and my rapid prototyping, here are the principals of prototyping that I explain fully in talk:
- Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.
- Aim to finish a usable artifact in a day. This helps you focus and scope.
- You are making a touchable sketch. Do not fill in all the lines.
- You are iterating your solution as well as your understanding of the problem.
- Treat your code as throw-away, but be ready to refactor.
- Borrow liberally
- Tell a story with your prototype. It isn’t just a set of features.
The Rapid Prototype: A Zooming Twitter Streamer
Forms By Memo, Akten & Quayola
“An ongoing collaboration between visuals artists Memo Akten and Quayola.
Forms is a series of studies on human motion, and its reverberations through space and time. It is inspired by the works of Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton, Étienne-Jules Marey as well as similarly inspired modernist cubist works such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No.2″. Rather than focusing on observable trajectories, it explores techniques of extrapolation to sculpt abstract forms, visualizing unseen relationships – power, balance, grace and conflict – between the body and its surroundings.
The project investigates athletes; pushing their bodies to their extreme capabilities, their movements shaped by an evolutionary process targeting a winning performance. Traditionally a form of entertainment in todays society with an overpowering competitive edge, the disciplines are deconstructed and interrogated from an exclusively mechanical and aesthetic point of view; concentrating on the invisible forces generated by and influencing the movement.
The source for the study is footage from the Commonwealth Games. The process of transformation from live footage to abstract forms is exposed as part of the interactive multi-screen artwork, to provide insight into the evolution of the specially crafted world in which the athletes were placed.”
More info and interview on Creators Project
Hopes or dreams?
From google:
“We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.
A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.
Follow along with us at http://g.co/projectglass as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?”
Synapse for Kinect
Been doing a lot of work lately with XBox Kinects and recently stumbled upon this really fantastic app/plugin.
Basically allows you bring in data points of a persons skeleton, as captured by Kinect, into Quartz Composer. This allows for some really amazing fast rapid prototyping of ideas.
Great work that’s gotta be commended, check out the opensource awesomeness here: http://synapsekinect.tumblr.com/
