3D Everywhere!

Barneys Co-op

Yesterday I received a Barneys Co-op catalog in the mail — in which all of the photos were shot in 3D. Because they used the red-blue anaglyph method, they also included a pair of glasses. It may be an old-fashioned technology for 3D, but it’s still pretty fun. (You can also see the 3D catalog on their website.) So, I figured it was a sign for me to post some of the 3D links I’ve been collecting lately.

A couple months ago Robyn released a 3D music video online for her song Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do. What’s cool is that the video takes real-time twitter feeds and incorporates the text into the video. It’s a pretty low-touch interactivity, but nicely done. This piece was created by Blip Boutique and Stopp Web, with typography by Jakob Nylund.

Robyn, Killing Me

Robyn, Killing Me

Insane, and of pretty dubious utility, is this 3D bookmarklet. (By Yusuke Kawasaki.) It turns a regular web page into a 3D version of it. Sorry, no real interactivity here, but it’s crazy enough to be very cool.

Did you know that Google Street View can display in 3D? Just right-click within a view and select “3d mode on.”

Google Street View in 3D

I think my favorite 3D site, so far, is Snowdin. Made by Cole + McVoy as a holiday site in 2008, it’s got all sorts of cute games and surprises. And, the 3D is interactive! So, for example, if you jump in the ski game, the character rises up. Very charming.

Snowdin

Snowdin

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Inkling

Just released for the iPad, Inkling looks fantastic. It’s designed as an e-textbook reader — and has beautiful layout and typography. It’s also got support for a wide range of multimedia content such as movies, 3D, and quizzes. But I think its real killer-feature is the way it can integrate your social network into the reading experience. You can embed notes within the pages, share them with others, even follow them as streams. It makes books feel social and alive.

My gripe with Inkling is that it’s a closed ecosystem — you can only read books that you purchase through the Inkling store. Wouldn’t it be way-cooler if Inkling was a wrapper that you could use to read e-books purchased from Amazon and the Apple iBookstore, too? That way you could use all the social features in, for example, a cookbook or travel guide.

Inkling is a free app and comes with a demo version of The Elements of Style. Give it a try.

Link via Daring Fireball.

Interesting scroll bar detail.

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How Big Really?

Apollo 11 baseball comparison

One of my favorite strange-but-fascinating infographics is the overlay of the Apollo 11 moon walks onto a baseball diamond. It presents something that’s so otherworldly and distant (a moon walk) into a super-familiar environment (a baseball diamond) to make the information immediately relevant and understandable. The image, created in 2009 by Thomas Schwagmeier is part of NASA’s Apollo 11 Image Library, where there are loads of other interesting overlays — such as this view of the Apollo 17 traverses over Paris.

Just today the BBC launched Dimensions, at howbigreally.com. The site gives users the ability to overlay a wide range of “important places, events and things” items onto Google maps. Finally, you can see how the moon walks compare to your backyard! Created by BERG, there’s a great description of the project’s development.

It’s a simple and charming idea — both educational and addictive. Take a look…

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Small Experiences

Creating a rich experience, with as little code as possible, is challenging. But the results can be marvels of creative programming.

Remember, when back in 1996, using just 12k of code, Red Sky created HP Pong — the first interactive banner ad.

HP Pong

There are two contests currently running to find the best small-sized web applications. The first, 10K Apart, is open through August 25. The challenge is to build a web app in less than 10k of code (not including the code libraries that they’ve approved for use).

Take a look through the gallery of entries to see some great examples of designer inginuity. I thought that LED Scroller and Sinuous (by Hakim El Hattab, who has a great page full of similar experiments.) were really cool. And 10K Tennis follows in the tradition of small pong games.

LED Scroller

Sinuous

10K Tennis

For an even more hardcore challenge, visit JS1k. Here, the file size must be under 1k, and cannot use any external libraries. Maybe constraints really are what designers need, because the results are pretty amazing. Entries are due by September 10 — so start coding!

Entry #311

Entry #292

Entry #365

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Chrome Experiments

I love Processing – but are its days numbered? What about Flash? A year ago, nobody would’ve seriously asked these questions — but times are changing fast. For years, Flash, and then Processing, were the tools-of-choice that designers used to explore and experiment with interactive media. But now, as the web’s focus moves to open standards, the most vibrant communities are those building around standards such as HTML5 and JavaScript. Take a look at jsdo.it — it’s a great example of a community where people are working together developing code and discussing their approaches.

Last year Google launched Chrome Experiments — a site for people to post experiments with JavaScript and the browser, and a showcase of the best of that work. And in the 18 months since it’s launched, a lot of amazing stuff has been posted. They may sometimes be a little rough around the edges, or not work with every browser, but some of the things that people have created really are jaw-dropping. Here are a couple of my favorites…

Keylight

Apophis 2029

Browser Ball

Browser Pong

Sketchpad

Swirling Tentacles

Links for the above experiments: Keylight, Apophis 2029, Browser Ball, Browser Pong, Sketchpad, and Swirling Tentacles.

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Music Notation and Play

Eye magazine published a fascinating article in 1997, Sound, Code, Image, on how graphic scores can “liberate” music from the five-line grid of traditional music notation. It looked at the work of composers from the 50′s to the 70′s, and their experiments at making musical scores more graphic and expressive. (And just today the Eye Blog did a post on John Cage’s watercolors and drawings.) The range of expressions that emerged from that era were both beautiful and thought provoking.

Score for "Ambient #1 Music for Airports," 1978. Brian Eno.

10 Stones, 1989. John Cage.

It’s great to see this experimentation continuing today with a wide range of available apps that allow people to compose and play music. Developers/Designers are using interactivity and visualization in all sorts of new and unexpected ways. And since many of these apps run on the iPhone or iPad, they encourage an even broader range of users to get involved in innovative musical creativity.

Below are a couple of the most recent apps I’ve found. They’re a mix between composition/looping, and performance/play. Some are a bit crazy — but that’s what makes them interesting.  There are tons more out there…  they’ll have to wait for another post.

Flourish — from Create and Explore, Ltd.

Sonic Wire Sculptor 2010 — by Amit Pitaru. (And here’s a preview of the upcoming iPad version.)

DJ’s Multi Touch Light Table — (prototype project) by Gerg Kaufman. Take a look at his site and you can see sketches and paper-prototypes from the development of the project.

Rain — by Rainer Kohlberger. Simple but beautiful.

I found many of these on MOMA’s updated list of sound tools on their Talk to Me site. CreativeApplications.net has lots more (I just discovered the site – and it looks great!). The Multi Touch Light table was via Engadget

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