“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.

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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.

The purpose of publishing this concept video is first and foremost to spark a discussion around the digital reading experience in general, and digital reading platforms in particular.

Mag+

web services covers therapy overview (via Rétrofuturs (Hulk4598) / Stéphane Massa-Bidal)

The future is low-production value

The Dictionary of Visual Language (via Joe Kral)

crunchy, crispy pop metaphysics

This is the first time we have instructed students to use stop motion, so the project was partly an experiment in itself. In addition we wanted to find out more about the potentials and challenges of using stop motion for prototyping navimation.

“This weblog will serve as a collaborative receptacle for material, ideas, research questions, literature references, and whatever else comes along regarding the sketching of interactive systems.” (some video and comic related stuff)

Digital video for user-centred co-design is an emerging field of design, gaining increasing interest in both industry and academia. It merges the traditions of design ethnography, participatory design, interaction analysis, scenario-based design, and usability studies into an integrated approach, which values the designer’s capacity to study and change the world creatively.

A significant challenge in interaction design practice is to express, shape and communicate the behavior of an intended design. Time-based media such as video can be a good choice for that purpose. This compendium presents a number of approaches to video as an expressive medium for interaction design.

Explaining privacy in Google Street View (via googlejapan)

There are good reasons why science fiction ideas percolate through culture like background radiation, instead of being baldly trotted out front and center. Archigram’s sci-fi flavored architecture-fiction was never commercially practical, it wasn’t meant to be, but it was usefully provocative: while pretending to be all zap-pow, pop-art and spacey, Archigram was chopping the future’s wood and hauling its water. That’s why their battlesuit ideas have survived for forty years.