Love the Bolts-and-wrench crown. A play off the well-known British “Stay Calm and Carry On” poster, this poster is an homage to tinkerers, digital or analog, everywhere. Spotted a Microsoft Social Computing Symposium attendee wearing one and immediately went to Google to see what I could find out. Find the shirt here or print out the poster for yourself from moleitau’s Flickr page(it’s under Creative Commons!).
How to get people to game in public spaces seamlessly and turn it into public entertainment? Try MegaPhone. MegaPhone inspires interactive gameplay between digital billboards and people by turning their cellphones as game controllers. MegaPhone makes gaming fun and easy: remove the stereotypical gamer stigma, cut away unnecessary hardware, and make the game accessible to the common public. Who doesn’t have a cellphone in America? It is the brainchild of two NYU ITP graduate students: Jury Hahn and Dan Albritton. After graduation, they decided to take their thesis idea and spin it off as a digital marketing concept for companies (Adidas, LG, Palm, Gamestop, are among their clients). The games inspired by this concept are quite fun: voice-control and button-play from a multi-player perspective.
Tech Wow! video of the day via Gizmodo. Obscura Digital is the interactive firm that pulled off the technological feat of projecting those images on to a downtown San Francisco building. What is stunning is how their projection software takes into account the building’s surface and surroundings to make the projected images interact with it. According to their website, their projection software “compensates for geometry and provides corrections in real-time, resulting in a seamless image on virtually any surface.” Peering into the company’s projects, I see that Obscura Digital is also working on many interactive video projects where the projections can become navigable user interfaces, etc. It’s listed as one of the Top 10 most innovative ad/marketing firms by Fast Company.
Twitter — despite its navelgazing reputation to outsiders — is quite an interesting tool for developers and inventors to play with. Unlike other social media that adopted a “closed garden” approach to developers, Twitter has been friendlier then its peers from the get-go. As a result, there’s been a ton of Twitter mashups but none have pushed the boundaries on physical computing quite as memorably as Corey Menschler, an NYU ITP graduate student. An expectant father, Corey wanted to share the joys of fatherhood and getting a sense of connection with his unborn kid. Why should his wife have all the fun? Meet his invention, Kickbee: a wearable maternity belt for moms that sends out tweets every time her baby kicks.
The tweets, themselves, read hilariously: “”Wow I’m being very active! I kicked Mommy 84 times at 03:44AM on Thu, Dec 11!” 12:46 AM Dec 11th from web. The belt is made of sensors that are powered by an Arduino Mini microcontroller, a Java application that translates the sensory information, and Bluetooth which helps upload the data to Twitter. Nice!
Sure, it may seem like fun-n-games but you think about how useful this could be to health, fitness, and other useful applications.
Can someone nominate this guy, Geek Dad of the Year?
Open source. Startup environment. Rapid prototyping. I got real dirty in the work process but I’m proud of the work I did with my fellow classmates. Introducing: Media Space , UW’s MCDM program’s answer for how businesses and communities can collaborate on social media, online and offline. The site is still in beta development, however, there is a blog and wiki documenting the process.
Conducted in a 10-week period, our beta site saw me as the lead designer in conceptualizing and developing Media Space’s visual identity and website interface. From site maps, wire frames, logo concepts, website prototypes, utilizing cloud computing apps, to documenting the entire design/implementation process, this experience was a trip for a (traditional) print designer.
Stanford offers free online 10-wk course for developing iPhone software!?! via Stanford News Service. Is this savvy collegiate marketing or what? All hail open-source education on the Internets.
The 10-week course, iPhone Application Programming, is a hot ticket. It begins today and videos of the classes will be posted at Stanford on iTunes U two days after each class meeting (http://itunes.stanford.edu). Copies of the slides shown in class will be available there as well.
The proliferation of third-party applications for Apple’s iPhone has changed the device from a popular cell phone to a miniature computer. The Apple App Store offers more than 25,000 titles, dealing with everything from maps to business tools, games, photography, fishing and restaurant recommendations based on your location. ”There’s a lot of interest in the iPhone,” said Brent Izutsu, Stanford’s project manager for Stanford on iTunes U. “This course provides an excellent opportunity for us to show the breadth and depth of our curriculum and the innovation of our students.”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=908674814285543652Pirate Babys Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006: This viral video is a masterpiece animation lovingly inspired by 1980s-era side-scroller video games. A crazy mashup of anime character cuteness meets zombie horror meets fighting game. Like one reviewer commented, “A kind of machinima recursion; where animations inspired by games have inspired animations.”
