I just discovered Glowing Pathfinder Bugs and think it’s super-charming. Created by Squidsoup, and originally shown in 2008, the piece was commissioned by Folly Gallery for Portable Pixel Playground. Glowing Pathfinder Bugs, an interactive art project primarily aimed at children, uses projection to visualize virtual bugs on a real sandpit. The bugs are aware of their surroundings and respond to its form in their vicinity. By altering the topography of the sand, participants affect the…
 
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I’ve been thinking a lot about giving, charity and philanthropy lately. Maybe it was realizing that the time I was spending playing We Rule wasn’t really helping anyone. I know there are plenty of great websites for all sorts of great causes – but was there a way that I could help others when I was out and about? Was there something I could do, periodically via my phone, that could help others? So, I…
 
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Last week Rhizome hosted Seven on Seven at the New Museum in New York. The event paired seven artists with seven technologists in teams of two, and challenged them to create something new — whether it be an application, artwork, social media, or whatever. Rhizome hasn’t yet posted videos or too much detail on the individual projects created, they have posted photos from the event. And the NY Times has a review and some descriptions of the…
 
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  I’m sure you’ve seen it a million times, but here it is again… Line Rider! Created by Boštjan Čadež in 2006, Line Rider was a simple physics toy. Its line-art graphics weren’t anything new. If anything, they were almost nostalgic for old, primitive, black-and-white bitmap paint programs. And its sketchy  illustration style had been used on plenty of older projects. But the combination of physics with the ability to draw the world itself was…
 
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Who would have expected another post with graffiti-related content? Well, here it is… take a look at Evan Roth’s open-source project: Graffiti Analysis 2.0 (via QBN): Graffiti Analysis is an extensive ongoing study in the motion of graffiti. Custom software designed for graffiti writers creates visualizations of the often unseen motion involved in the creation of a tag. Motion data is recorded, analyzed and archived in a free and open database, 000000book.com, where writers can…
 
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Putting together my recent post on Interative Alices I searched and searched to find an screenshot of the Voyager Expanded Book The Annotated Alice. Well — I never found one. But, I did come across this great article from Smackerel: When Multimedia was Black & White. They tell the story of how interactive media evolved on the early Macintosh. I particularly like their discussion of HyperCard (released in 1987), and how it ushered in a wealth…
 
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Check out this interesting video from Microsoft Research on using a pen and touch together in an interface. It’s part of Microsoft Research’s Manual Deskterity project. Running on Microsoft Surface, the demo has some really cool examples of how a specific pointing device can be combined with the more general input of touch. Using the pen to write, to peel copies, as an exacto knife, a straight edge, and lots more. At some point the…
 
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Immediately after I saw the above video (via Daring Fireball) of Alice for the iPad, I downloaded the app. It looked like a great interactive interpretation of the book. Unfortunately, once I tried it for myself, I was less impressed. While it’s fun, the interactivity is fairly limited — not very different from page to page — and not integrated into the story itself. Instead, it feels like interactive illustrations accompanying the text, rather than…
 
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From now through July 2011 you should make Talk to Me a regular part of your websurfing routine. The site is set up for an upcoming show at MoMA: Talk to Me is an exhibition on the communication between people and objects that will open at The Museum of Modern Art on July 24th 2011, and will feature design products and concepts from all over the world. It will feature a wide range of objects,…
 
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Well, the iPad’s been out for a couple days and already there’s a batch of newspaper and magazine apps available. So… are they the future of journalism? Engadget reviews nine of them and finds plenty to gripe about. They find many with gestures that are “totally alien” to the iPad, or are otherwise slow, buggy, and lacking basic features. Of the batch, their favorites are Thomson Reuters News Pro, Associated Press, and BBC News. On…
 
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