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  Read the rest…

How adorable is this… with Drawdio you can turn almost anything into a musical instrument. (Unlike most posts on this blog, this isn’t screen-based — but creating interactive drawings in addition to designing interactivity with physical objects seems pretty cool.) Developed by Jay Silver at the MIT Media Lab (I promise to try and stop  Read the rest…

It looks like we’re one step closer to the Luminous Room. Take a look at this demo of LiminAR. It’s a project by Natan Linder, a student of Pattie Maes in her Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. LiminAR is made up of two components, the Bulb and the Lamp: The LuminAR Bulb  Read the rest…

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  Read the rest…

Small Design Firm‘s recent Pledge Wall for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a beautiful interactive installation with a unique pen interaction. David Small, the firm’s founder, is a friend back from when we were both students at the MIT Media Lab. I’m a little jealous, as his firm has gone on to create some remarkable  Read the rest…

Check out this recent interview with Nicholas Negroponte on The Engadget Show. A little background: Nicholas founded the Architecture Machine Group (or ArcMac) at MIT in 1967. His aim, partly inspired by Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad was to create an “architecture machine” — an active partner to help architects design buildings. The group also was responsible  Read the rest…