Inventing Interactive
There’s no reason I can’t talk about my own projects on this blog, right? Just keep in mind that this story starts in 1999, when the web was mostly just html pages, some Director/Shockwave, a little Flash, and mostly dial-up modems. The social web didn’t yet exist. Napster was being sued by everyone. And the […]
Jodi.org may be best known for their web-based artworks, but I recently found these images and thought they’d be interesting to share. They’re from a Mac-based project done some time between 1998 and 1999. Much like how full-bleed photos on early Quokka websites caused a kind of freak-out when people saw them, Jodi.org’s early work […]
Take a look at these photographs by Rosemarie Fiore. Each one takes a video game and captures one gameplay as a single exposure. It’s a fascinating way of looking at the overall mood of an interactive experience. Plus, they’re beautiful! The photos are all from 80’s games — played on Atari, Centuri, and Taito platforms. It’s interesting […]
Back in 1998, when I first saw The Lair of the Marrow Monkey I was totally taken in. In an era of CD-ROMs which sequenced the user through mostly static screens, or of experimental works with seemingly random or chaotic interactions, Lair‘s merger of storytelling with focused interactivity was really special. And then, three years […]
With the fashion for full Flash websites slowly fading into history (or is it just that websites load faster now?), I was excited to discover Pretty Loaded. Launched in January 2009, the site is an archive, or museum, of one of the artifacts of those big Flash sites… the preloader, or “loading” screen. Once upon […]
I remember a CD-ROM project from the 90s that was unlike almost else appearing at the time. An ambient fluid flow of images and film, mixed with a unusual collection of audio, it created the feeling of moving through an urban environment. You had only the vaguest feeling of control of it all — almost […]
Today, the source code to MacPaint was officially donated to the Computer History Museum and made available to the public. MacPaint was declared as “the best program ever written” at an event celebrating the Macintosh’s 20th anniversary, by Stanford University computer science professor Don Knuth. Written by Bill Atkinson, MacPaint was beautifully simple, like much […]
Wow that was fast. Yesterday marked the end of a remarkable Old Spice viral Internet campaign. Over the course of just two days, July 13 and 14, Wieden+Kennedy created about 185 YouTube videos as responses to queries and posts on Twitter for the Old Spice man. It was a fascinating take on interactivity. The team […]
Way back in 2006, at the Wired NextFest, Saturn sponsored a “green” exhibit, highlighting their hybrid technology. It was a 4,000 square-foot installation featuring a life-sized, interactive holographic people, CAD projections onto vehicles, and a interactive/reactive wall with user-generated content. I first learned of the project when I was judging the Communication Arts 2007 Interactive […]
All of John Maeda‘s work is amazing and inspiring, but I find his series of Reactive Books to be among the most engaging and thought-provoking. Created between 1994 and 1999, each book explored the use of a different input: microphone, mouse, time, keyboard, and video. At a time when interactive media was trying to be […]
This is interesting… Intel Labs’ Oasis Project uses your kitchen countertop to recognize the foods that you place on it, and projects a variety of interactive content. It’s still early research, and so the sorts of interactions possible, as well as the content that’s projected, are pretty basic. But the video suggests a variety of ways people […]
Way back in 2008, when Modernista! launched a new version of their website, I was blown away. It was such a simple idea, but it was daring and revolutionary. And it generated a ton of buzz. The site was super-simple, just a navigation layer that connected live Modernista-related pages from sites including Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube […]
TED.com just posted a talk from this year’s TED2010 by John Underkoffler on his research into gesture interfaces. John is best known for his work on the interfaces in the film Minority Report but has since founded Oblong Industries. The talk demonstrates Oblong’s point-and-touch interface called g-speak. I have to admit, having never actually used the […]
Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s, Quokka Sports was doing some pretty groundbreaking design. Their sites were unlike anything I’d seen online before. An amazing mix of raw data, bold images, and real-time data that really connected you to the events. Quokka was founded to cover the 1997-1998 Whitbread Round the World yacht […]
Over the past couple days, everywhere I turn it seems I’m finding stuff that has, for me, a nostalgic feel. So here’s my digital ramble… It first started with a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) at Rhizome on the demoscene. (Demos are computer-based audio-visual presentations that run in real-time with […]
Information Aesthetics has a nice interview with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. After working for years at the IBM Visual Communication Lab, they’ve gone out on their own and founded a new data visualization firm, Flowing Media. Their work is a inspiring mix of smart thinking and clever communication about the data being presented, allowing people […]
Is it embarrassing to admit that when I was driving recently, my radio tuned to the Broadway channel, I was listening to “I Want The Good Times Back” from The Little Mermaid? Maybe. But it’s not totally irrelevant. From this recent post on PSFK: Top 10 Luxury Brands’ Sites Fail To Work On iPad… Out […]
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 […]
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 […]
After seeing this fantastic fan-created re-imagined trailer for Tron (source: Gizmodo), along with being excited about the upcoming Tron Legacy, I thought it could be interesting to take a look at the interfaces in Tron (1982) — a film I have a crazy nostalgic love for. The world envisioned in Tron is distinctive and stylized — […]