Check out this crazy augmented reality scenario by Keiichi Matsuda. Done as part of his masters in architecture, he describes the film: 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  Read the rest…

The recent SyFy series Battlestar Galactica series was incredible. A captivating vision of our pre-history. I’ve tried watching the follow-on series Caprica, which takes place sixty years earlier, but haven’t yet been drawn in. The show, however, has an interesting technology… When a character in Caprica wants to “go online” (or whatever it’s called in  Read the rest…

Watching this video demo of Wired magazine’s prototype tablet app, I was struck by how ordinary it felt. Yes, it was nice to see multiple pages from the magazine, to move fluidly among them, and for those pages to have some embedded interactivity. But overall it felt like a traditional solution. Are publishers ready to  Read the rest…

One of my very favorite early interactive projects was Lovedisk. I first saw it on a CD-ROM of winners from (I think) the 1997 Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual. Every semester, for a couple years after that, I’d show it to my students who would shrug. I think they thought it wasn’t up to Art  Read the rest…

The announcement this week of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series has been getting a lot of attention. And, the reviews have been generally positive. It’s funny how, as designers, we’re so often skeptical about Microsoft. My friend Eric Brown saw the announcement and emailed me, asking, “Am I crazy for liking this?” I feel the  Read the rest…

Take a look at this “reactive wall” in Montreal in front of La Vitrine. It was created by Moment Factory and Photonic Dreams. Created in August 2009 it was originally intended to be a temporary installation, it’s since been made a permanent part of the club’s facade. Sensors (it looks like they’re in an overhang  Read the rest…

This morning, looking at the Flickr blog, I read this cool post about Flickr Everywhere. — a collection of new ways Flickr is being integrated into offerings from Apple, Google and Microsoft. The item that really caught my attention was the way that Microsoft is integrating Flickr content into Bing Maps. A type of spatial-search,  Read the rest…

With TED happening this week, it’s been interesting to follow the buzz of activity around it. Watching Jamie Oliver’s powerful talk, an “all-out assault” on the need to change how we teach children about food, got me thinking… What role can we play, as interactive media designers, to make change and support responsible behavior in  Read the rest…

In a short but interesting piece in the Harvard Business Review, John Maeda & Becky Bermont provoke with Why Business Leaders Should Act More like Artists. Their three big “ahas” around breaking stereotypes and working like artists are 1) artists constantly collaborate, 2) artists are talented communicators, and 3) artists learn how to learn together.  Read the rest…

When I first saw Peter Greenaway’s film “Prospero’s Books” I was drawn to the innovative use of layering and multiple images to visualize the 24 books that made up the film’s arc. I was inspired. I wanted to explore ways to create interactive books with the richness and complexity as the books in the film…  Read the rest…

In 1996 I saw the Mediascape exhibition at the Guggenheim SoHo. A collection of digital art, some interactive, it was bold show from a major museum. It received mixed reviews — but one of the pieces there left a lasting impression on me. It was “Piano – As Media Image” by Toshio Iwai. From the  Read the rest…

  It’s a beautiful day here in Los Angeles. So going to rainy London doesn’t seem like that much fun. But I think I might change my mind if I could go see the recently opened exhibit Decode: Digital Design Sensations at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The exhibition: “…showcases the latest developments in digital  Read the rest…

Ever since last week’s iPad launch, the image of an iPad’s web browser with the missing-plugin Lego-brick has been generating a lot of discussion. Is Apple at war with Adobe? Is Adobe’s Flash critical to the web experience? Is Apple’s restriction going to doom the iPad? It’s not only bloggers talking, even the New York  Read the rest…

In 1994 Muriel Cooper presented work at the TED5 conference in Monterey, CA that changed the way designers thought of the possibilities of electronic media. The work, from her group at the MIT Media Lab‘s Visible Language Workshop (or VLW), took typography, literally, into three dimensions — and gave it dynamics and interactivity that had  Read the rest…