I just discovered (via LSD) the metaLAB at Harvard — and it looks fascinating. The lab is “dedicated to exploring the frontiers and overlooked histories of networked culture in the arts and humanities.” And their six research themes are super-cool: the animation of archives, artifactual knowledge, augmented exhibitions, cultural genomics, documentary arts + media innovation, and thick mapping. I’m only just starting to go through the site and all the places it links to. For example,…
 
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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 had a really interesting day today as a guest critic at Art Center’s graduate Media Design Program 2011 thesis review. It was a collection of projects divided into three categories: mediated experiences, exploratory futures, and critical accounts. I’m always fascinated by graduate design projects and the idea of design research. It can be a challenge sometimes, to see the application of the work, but the questions that are raised, and the discussions that happen,…
 
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Here’s a charming Augmented Reality vision piece, “Medley,” created by Mattias Wozniak and Björn Svensson as part of their Masters Thesis at Lund University in Sweden. It’s full of great, beautifully delicate, examples how AR could be incorporated into everyday life. A nice contrast to some of the alternative nightmarish advertising or boring corporate scenarios. Medley is based around the notion of “augmented reality visor seamlessly integrated into your world.” With this visor as a…
 
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Distance Lab was a Scottish creative research organization, created with the goal of “bringing together digital media technology, design and the arts to redefine and overcome the disadvantages of distance in learning, health care, relationships, culture and other domains.” Unfortunately, the BBC reports that they have recently closed down. Two of their most publicized projects were Mutsugoto, first shown in 2007, and Remote Impact, first shown in 2008. Mutsugoto was a surprisingly intimate project, intended…
 
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ImageFlow is a recently published project from Microsoft Research which aims to re-think the nature of image search. Rather than displaying search results in a grid or flat page-like layout, ImageFlow uses a 3D space in which the searcher can explore the content. The project is built upon some fascinating prior research. Specifically, that user intent can be quite different when they’re searching for images rather than text. For example, image search… Can be ‘exploratory’…
 
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In 1993 Jef Raskin wrote the article Down With GUIs! in which he decried the state of user interfaces. He started with a bang: “Bluntly: Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are not human-compatible. As long as we hang on to interfaces as we now know them, computers will remain inherently frustrating, upsetting, and stressful.” And his conclusion was just as strong: “Some of the deepest GUI features conflict with our wiring. So they can’t be fixed….
 
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Today, the MIT Media Lab starts its big 25th anniversary bash. And I’m sad that I’m missing the event. But the next best thing to being there is reminiscing, right? Twenty years ago, when I was a student there, the Lab was celebrating its 5th anniversary. As part of the schwag for the party, the Lab printed a book. It wasn’t big, just 6×6 inches and 32 pages, but it perfectly captured the mood and…
 
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This week, here in LA, was SIGRRAPH 2010 — the annual conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies. The two parts of the event I find most interesting are the emerging technologies and art gallery exhibitions — and there was a lot of thought-provoking stuff being shown. Most was a bit rough around the edges, or research without a clear purpose yet, but it was inspirational. And it’s great to see designers, researchers and technologists…
 
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The tangibility of tabletop/object interfaces can make them much more approachable and informal than screen-based applications. That, plus you’re focused on the experience — not distracted by all the other apps or toolbars fighting for your attention. So it was cool to discover these two recent explorations. The first, Augmented Shadow, is by Joon Moon, a grad student at Parsons. By moving an object designated as the light-source, the other objects’ shadows are updated. The…
 
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