Timo Arnall

The future is Movie OS

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

The idea that Apple is grasping at real-life objects because they support effective visual storytelling is very interesting:

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.

From Dan Hon at Extenuating Circumstances – The future is Movie OS.

Posted in Research1 Comment

Sun visualisation using pinhole cameras

Sun’s path June to December Via Tom Armitage.

Posted in Photography1 Comment

Negotiating futures. Design fiction

Swiss Design Network Conference 2010:

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.

Posted in Conferences, Film, Interaction design, Media, mediation,Tagged conference, design fiction, design research1 Comment

Proximity payments

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.

Posted in videoTagged gesture, gestures, mobile, payment, proximity

CCD and computational photography

A few links on imaging and computation:

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

Posted in Media, Photography, Technology, Ubicomp

Practising tomorrows

It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages.

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

via Anne

Posted in UbicompTagged design, future, Technology

The Films of Charles & Ray Eames

“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.

Posted in Research

3D secret – hidden pictures

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??????????????. Via BERG

Posted in Graphic design, Interaction design, Play, videoTagged face tracking, game, nintendo, perspective