The Longest Photographic Exposures in History.

Olars is an electronic interactive toy inspired by Karl Sims’ evolved virtual creatures. Having thousands of varieties in movement and behaviour by attaching different geometrical limbs, modifying the angle of these, twisting the body itself, and by adjusting the deflection of the motorised joints, results in both familiar and strange motion patterns.

Sumedecina and Graphical data fiction.

By Frank Gilbreth (1912)

Via lecture 4: traces at light matters.

Still from the film xXx from Mark Coleran’s portfolio.

In Movie OS, visual storytelling is used to make the system’s important, critical reaction to a user’s action abundantly clear. In Movie OS, you know if you’re logging into Facebook.

I’d argue that visual storytelling doesn’t exist – if it does, it hardly exists at all – in computer or consumer eletronics user interfaces. The entire palette of visual storytelling in terms of interface, through accident of history, is purely engineering and control-led.

This is where, I’d say, Apple is grasping when it says that interfaces should sometimes look toward real-life objects. Real-life physical objects have affordances that are used in effective visual storytelling – and animation – that can be used well to make clear the consequences of actions. It’s more complicated than that, though, and it can go horribly wrong as well as right.

Sun’s path June to December Via Tom Armitage.

Designers see the world not simply as it is, but rather as it could be. In this perspective, the world is a laboratory to explore the contingency of the existing and the thinking in options. Imaginations of the contra factual are a key source for the creation of alternative political, technological, social, or economic constellations of artefacts, interfaces, signs, actors, and spaces. At the same time, strategies of materialization are pivotal to shift the boundary between the fictional and the real and to finally bring possible new realities into being. The conference addresses the questions of how fictions are designed and how the multiplicity of possible new futures is negotiated and realized.

Design Fiction, Negotiating Futures October 28-30, 2010.

YouTube – The new PayPal iPhone app seems to use the Bump API to match up two physical gestures and make a payment. (I even like their tacky faux-anthropology video).

And Square has just announced their payment app for the iPad.

I’ve concluded that the promise of RFID was eclipsed by another technology out there that’s poised to become more and more disruptive, not only to RFID, but to a host of technologies, and that’s the CCD.

from CCD by Joe Gregorio. Via BERG.

Cameras might allow a photographer to record a scene and then alter the lighting or shift the point of view, or even insert fictitious objects.

from Computational Photography, American Scientist

The camera as a device you carry has completely disappeared. Image sensors have become part of the literal fabric of everyday life.

from What Photography Will Look Like By 2060

“Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation” a PhD by Sam Kinsley.

via Anne

“While Charles & Ray were frequently contracted by corporations like Polaroid, Westinghouse, and IBM, they never made films on demand. Nearly all their films represent a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the client, and they only made films when there was genuine interest. Witness Westinghouse ABC (1965), which is essentially a montage of the Westinghouse product line (note that the Westinghouse logo was designed by Paul Rand). Even here there is a spirited interest in the subject. In the film, Charles & Ray focus on the technology and typography at a break-neck tempo and transform what would otherwise be an incredibly dry subject into something rich and lively. Also, in SX-70 (1972), intended as a promotional film for the newly released Polaroid SX-70 camera, the Eames’ take advantage of the opportunity to discuss optics, transistors and to display their own polaroid photographs.

A good overview via The Films of Charles & Ray Eames.

Beautiful new exploratory game for the Nintendo DS, that uses the front-facing camera and face tracking to calculate a perspective that renders like a window on a new world.

DSi「立体かくし絵　アッタコレダ. Via BERG

Curious Displays by Julia Yu Tsao

Denisa Kera & Jimmy Loizeau: 18:46 in The Futurity Long Conversation.

Augmented (hyper)Reality by Keiichi Matsuda

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

A competent visualisation of an undesirable future.

New Google ad: Parisian Love.

Below are some clippings of bits that seem particularly insightful:

It puts own embodiment at risk. And whomsoever can mitigate that risk while providing reward will probably do well. I believe that organizations such as Apple and Google see this and are pursuing not merely real-time, or hyper-local or crowd-sourced apps but ownership of the “view”.

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Everybody wants a part of the lens of reality, the zero-click base layer beneath the beneath. As Gene Becker puts it “The World is the Platform”. And an ecosystem is starting to emerge.

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Suddenly game developers are arguing with GIS experts and having to unify their very different ways of describing mirror worlds.

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[I]nterfaces move from being heavy and solid with big heavy buttons and knobs and rotary dials to becoming liquid and effortless like the dynamic UI of the iPhone to becoming like air itself.

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By making hidden things visible, and visible things cheap, it will make other things possible that we don’t entirely realize yet.

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There will be user interface interaction issues. What will be the conventions for hand-swipes, grabs, drags, pulls and other operations to manipulate objects in our field of view.

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[AR] is not simply “memory” – it isn’t just a mnemonic that helps bring understanding closer to the surface of consciousness. Clearly we are surrounded by our own memories, signage, advertising, radio, friends voices and an already rich complicated teeming natural landscape loaded with signifiers and cues. But it is another bridge between personal lived experience and the experience of others. It seems to lower costs of knowing, and it seems to provide stronger subjective filters.

...

Augmented Reality seems to at least offer the possibility that we can punch some holes in the boxes. It seems to offer a bridge between structure and chaos rather than just structure.

Lovely new exploratory homepage at Thinglink.

There is clearly a very well curated user-base at SVPPLY creating a continuous navigation of want.

Related: Social networks for things, Thingd, Allconsuming.

A visualization of private spaces in public photography. A design probe on digital mannerism by choy ka fai

Via BERG.

via Telling stories with interfaces « Snarkmarket.

17 January.

09 January, 11.44

AR in unknown scenes is always going to be difficult without a remote expert to annotate the map. Here, we restrict ourselves to finding a dominant plane in the scene, and then running simple VR/AR games on this plane: essentially, you can have little AR critters running around on your tabletop. At present, no attempt is made to exploit the map to e.g. find occluding geometry; this is an area of future work. (From Georg Klein).

I love how it goes in and out of register, and how it ‘picks up’ the registration from an initial set of objects. People will end up intuiting that AR works in certain ways “not around trees” for instance, or only in “static scenes”.

YouTube – Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces (PTAM) – extra.