A couple months ago, while in Paris, I saw a fascinating exhibition of work by Yayoi Kusama. Much of her work has a hallucinatory quality — of obliteration and making things (especially herself) disappear. And it was her dot-room and light installations that I thought were particularly beautiful and amazing. She recently completed an installation at the Queensland Art Gallery entitled The Obliterated Room. It’s a a very simple interaction (and without any technology —…
 
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I recently posted a link about research leading to creating a real-world holodeck. So it was interesting to discover these three films, created for Sony, which showed another technique for creating immersive experiences. Sony’s “trick” is to use projection mapping — which normally looks best from just a single static view point. They made the environment more flexible by attaching a PlayStation Move to the camera, so that as the camera moved, the projection adjusted…
 
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I love the idea of annotation. To be able to add layers of history and interpretations and notes and all sorts of other layers onto a text (or image, or video, or whatever). It’s a great way show sources to ideas, or links to other thoughts. The challenge, always, is giving access to these annotations in a way that’s natural, doesn’t let you loose your place in the original core, and helps you understand the…
 
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I’ve heard the term digital native a lot, and the idea of them — kids that have grown up with digital technology and for whom it’s a natural part of the world. But there’s a even stronger implication: that they understand it so deeply that they view the world fundamentally different than non-natives. This video (linked in a post full of great links by Chris O’Shea) really brought that idea to life. Fascinating and terrifying….
 
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How do you search for something if you don’t have the words to describe it? What are alternate ways to search besides the ubiquitous text box? There are a variety of tools that let you search based on an image. Google Googles lets you use the camera on your mobile phone to do a search for the object it recognizes in the image. Amazon provides similar search functionality to search through its product inventory. Google…
 
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Two interesting wall-sized interactive experiences… one charming, one kinda terrifying. Night Bright is a new installation by Design I/O. The experience, designed for children, let users explore a nighttime forest, as if moving through it. The system adapts to their movements, and creatures in the forrest hide or come forward in response. It’s charming and engaging — and looks like a great way to help kids understand the unique rhythms of the natural forrest. Boo!…
 
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A couple recent discoveries about teaching programming. First, an [older but still] interesting post on Learning to Think Like A Programmer and why it’s important. Next is Codecademy, a really simple, but engaging site, that introduces basic programming concepts in a step-by-step interactive manner. It’s like having a tutor sit with you as you go through the foundational exercises. And lastly, the nuts, but maybe-it-really-is-important, book HTML for Babies !

Almost five years ago, Stefan Bucher started his Daily Monster project. It was a simple beginning — every day he’d post a video in which he would create a monster based on an ink splot. Since then he’s built a mini-empire out of it (in addition to all the amazing stuff he does). His most recent creation is an iPad and iPhone app that lets users create their own monsters. Stefan started his design career…
 
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Greg Tran’s recent thesis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, entitled Mediating Mediums, is a fascinating study looking at the cross section between augmented reality and architecture. Specifically he’s interested in moving augmented reality from the digital to the material — so that the augmentation is, essentially, “real.” That’s probably way too much of a simplification, so I asked him to talk a bit about what he’s doing. Architecture has historically been a medium…
 
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I love thinking about ways to make recorded music more engaging — more interactive. And I’ve posted before about ways to make music interactive — including modern sites like 3 Dreams of Black, more fluid experiences which border on synaesthesia, playful conducting for kids, and old-school music cd-roms. So it was really cool to stumble across Motiv, Russ Maschmeyer’s recent thesis project at SVA. It looks full of potential to change how we experience music….
 
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