Attrium meeting.

Floor stuff

To-do

take carpet tile to CHI.

Order carpet tiles.

Clouds

White stairs. Red lifts.

Higher up more , lower down less.

each little motor changes slightly random

Ideal - individual movement of lights.

short cut - frame with balls hanging down.

Sheep to email drawing of idea to Richie

Sussana to make some animations of carpet patterns + cloud patterns.

some carpet tiles with LEDs in nice.

http://picocool.com/architecture/lama-concepts-cell--led-carpet-1/

My first iPhone App!

I've worked my way through the complex process and I have managed to build my first iPhone app and got it going on my Mac. 

Wow ! 

Papers for me to read.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=sv_Q6yZNPvcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA17&dq=rogers+honey+pot+effect&ots=EIONaI8yLD&sig=Z2efPeefo5OQmu49hxvAulnfVB0#PPA17,M1

this is the one about honey pot effects.

igiGht -

Company callled Immersion are making a nice table - caught my eye due to boxy nature. 

http://www.ilight-3i.com/

No sense of how much.

http://www.crayonphysics.com/ the immersion guys go this going on a table nice.

Yvonne Chat

With Paul and Jeff away I was treated to a some uninterrupted time with Y. Its always good to talk to her it lends me more clarity. 

Things I've go to remember. 

• Start writing up the atrium stuff now don't wait for stats. This gives time to get some review. This is much larger pond I'm in and the bar is that much higher. 
• Need to get some lite demos working for the table for DANA
• Need to think carefully about the work for the touch table. 
• Looks like the big atrium test will be interesting. 
• Have to time manage the library tests too. ( Chi is coming soon). 

Chatted about i-steam. We both like the way that at the moment you can develop a small interesting app and make a money from it with out the huge team of people working on it. I found it interesting the way that people have found interesting uses for the phone sensors ( shaking, touch, orientation, blowing on the microphone). Less complete than the early Xerox inspired mouse/keyboard/Graphic UI more open to appropriation some how. 

OK back to 801 Marking. 

BBC Says surface is the future.

Nice link here

What I think is interesting is that they have the surface working in an well lit space (quite an achievement). 

'Social computing' is the real claim they make with the surface. 

zoomable is back

Zoomorama is a wonderful flash implementation of my Amazon code I wrote a few years ago. Go flash. I'm glad they came up with a way of exploiting a zoom able interface. Nice. 

Big Du

I've written before about audio interfaces now. Apple have produced the new shuffle with an audio interface ( primitive but its prime time). At first I wonderd that they had done speach syntetis on the pod its self ( nice ). Looking at the advert and I realise that the magic is all done on ITunes ( smart) but this does mean that Apple have released the first really big upgrade to the voices on the mac for a long time.

I'll try running Alex on some text to see what its like.

Lets see what this will lead to. I like the idea that we will see more audio interfaces on the other Ipods.

Attrium insperation

I liked the sound code. Amazing what you can do with simple white noise

Quite coool :-)

Signage and wayfinding

An interesting few links off to people interested in the design of signs now moving into the animated realm.

The Sign Design Society.

nternational Institute for Information Design Might be worth joining just to check out references.

Yes and as pointed out by the comment sedg.org

Grand project idea

I've decided what I could do with is a Year planner which I could print out at A3, which would come from my Google Calander. 

Strange it does not exists yet.

Some table designs.

I found some table designs to talk about. 

Open source one mentioned [here] small and uses mini projector.

Don't forget the nice table [here] 

from [here]

Another ball and string diagram but this time nicely designed.

All done in Flex from here. Nice design here 

DANA table the ember of an idear

Something Yvonne said to me when today struck a cord. I can't quite think what it was but it was on the lines of what we want to do is to get people to share and interact with each other.

This stuck with me and having had a chance to think about it. I've come up with some vague implementations.

Imagine a sandwich table. People pull out bread ( bread symbols) and then drag their sandwich on to a 'dispenser' for each 'filling' ( Cheddar dispenser, Brie dispenser , Ham dispenser.) but then you can drag over adjectives (lots, little ). People experiment with making a Sandwich this becomes quite personal ( perhaps you can see some of the results on another large display). To make a sandwich you have to pass your bread through a number of stations( the dispensers are mobile perhaps the bread is not). So while people use it they talk ( 'Can you pass the Salad dispenser' 'has anyone got the LOTS dispenser').

Perhaps more dispensers appear the more bread is in use ( the more people the more activity). Untouched bread fades. Perhaps dispensers self disperse around the table ( they all repel each other).

Variants

Philosophy dispenser (Make your own philosophical statement/flower arrangement by joining together other philosophical idears ) ' can someone pass the logical positivism?' Each philosophcan dispensor gets a micro-zoom to unfold and describe the concept ( steal description from WIki). Each philosophcal train of thought is a flower

Flower arrangement - as above but with out the philosophy.

Intelligent designer - assortment of body parts which you put together to make your own creature. Same dispenser issue.

Ultimate Band - make your own ultimate band by pulling your band through different band dispensers.

All of the above are the revese of the desktop Xerx metaphor ( drag documents to services becomes drag services to documents).

Filters

Limited number of filters, by combing filters you can see different things. Challenge is to look for something - a needle in a haystack hiden on table. Fiters are like the Jeff Han ones but cannot be created or destroyed'. Pass the zoom in filter please.

Textual filters - table full of words, people combine filters to find words.

Numerical filters - table full of tiny numbers- combine filters to look for interesting numbers and sequences)

Notes on sketchy rendering

Best outline is here

Some nice images Paul did at http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/fractals/

I like this

"The approach used here is to modify the geometry of a 3D model itself. Both of the effects mentioned above are quite easy to simulate by computer using random and fractal methods. Non-intersecting lines are achieved by extending both ends of line segments by a random distance. The distance should be related to the line length, the application I developed allowed a range of overshoots from between zero and a user chosen maximum. The wiggly line effect was generated by a well known technique from fractal geometry called "random midpoint displacement". It takes a straight line segment and generates a fractal curve by repeatedly splitting lines and perturbing their midpoint, the degree of wiggle is easily controlled by the user.....

Another noticeable effect of hand drawings is that the intensity is not constant along a line and also varies within a drawing. Typically a line is darker at the beginning and lighter near the end, lines also tend to be darker for foreground items or parts of the drawing of particular interest"

more info here

Iphone idears Digital jitney

Having had the iphone for a few days now I have had a few more idears about what you could do with it.
The gps is they good and I realised that you could implement a great eco transport tool. To make it work you would need two iPhone apps and a web server.

App 1.

If you want to go from a to b you press the summon button on your specially down loaded iPhone app.
Your origin and destination are compared to a list of shared Taxis running in the city.
If some part of your route matches a near by taxi it is redirected to you. If not fresh one is dispatched.
Your phone gets a Ok response a time a price and expected journey time.
You enter your credit details on the iPhone app and effectively pay over the web.
The journey time is in a range the taxi your getting may or may not change route according to who calls it.
The taxi arrives - its larger than normal and can take 4-6 people.
You share the taxi for part of the route which means you share the cost.
The taxi driver has a Iphone/Tomtom app which is dynamically updated from the central server. It gives directions which it the driver uses to wave through the city to the next pickup./drop off (these can change dynamically).
Taxi drops you off at near your destination.

So what do you get for this.
1. You get taxi like service (origin/destination travel)
2. The taxi may take longer than a pure taxi. - It might stop for others.
3. You get 1/N (where N is the number of passengers ) cost.
So if you imagine that you manage to share the taxi with 4 other people you get 1/4 cost. So an £8 ride becomes a £2 ride - not bad.

The city gets something between a taxi service and a bus service. The taxi doesn't move until someone wants to go some where so you avoid empty bus syndrome. The taxi is fuller than a taxi or car so you get more efficent movement with out sacrificing safety or door to door movement.

Reactorvision table

Jeff looks to be keen to build reactrvision table so we can do the tourist information office. I'm not to sure why. Had a nice chat about stuff. He thinks the Microsoft demos are hot air. I regard them as purely inspirational only, I don't care if they are rubish but I do like things that get me thinking. I don't think he understands me when I say that.

Jeff is doing a nice Job of getting on getting the hirez projector working on the table with out a stand and recycling the school projector for something else.

Meeting wall - an experiment

I'm looking at this interface and thinking well I like the video conferencing bit face to face meeting bit. I saw the augmented meeting stuff at an old door of perception conference and liked it there too. The best part is you augment your conversation with digital screen stuff - you can both write.

I realised I could simulate the video conference by using the silvered observation window in the big lab. I wonder what would happen if you did a wizard of oz study projecting a touch interface on top of the window (pretending to video conference). Assumes some window capable touch screen i guess - or an IR pen ( can I see IR through the window?).

Perhaps I need to put IR laser on a spinning motor or something.

Mean while you could also do the grab the screen by pointing on an iphone using some kind of barcode stuff. Possible to encode info in pixel values that can be read by a digital camera ? Perhaps you have lots of IR barcodes on screen to identify it then share the info.


<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:5bea2f16-b173-41ee-ba2e-5ab3484b4cbb&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Manufacturing Future Vision">Video: Manufacturing Future Vision</a>

Microsoft inspiration

Nice inspiration -

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

Goal

Well I spoke to Yvonne and said I could have functioned with 15 and prefered 20. Paul said he would like 30 so I put up 4 posters and sent out another begging email.

As of this afternoon we have 31 responses (yes!).
I'll keep posters up and process all the data for Monday next week.

ON the bad news front the floor pads have not been delivered and I need to reorder them ( DHL failed to deliver they had the wrong number ).