The Moving Games Display

Here’s a groovy display for people looking to add that extra dimension to their viewing material…

Gemotion is a soft, ‘living’ display that bulges and collapses in sync with the graphics on the screen, creating visuals that literally pop out at the viewer.

Yoichiro Kawaguchi, a well-known computer graphics artist and University of Tokyo professor, created Gemotion by arranging 72 air cylinders behind a flexible, 100 x 60 cm (39 x 24 inch) screen. As video is projected onto the screen, image data is relayed to the cylinders, which then push and pull on the screen accordingly.

“If used with games, TV or cinema, the screen could give images an element of power never seen before. It could lead to completely new forms of media,” says Kawaguchi.

The Gemotion screen will be on display from January 21 to February 4 as part of a media art exhibit (called Nihon no hyogen-ryoku) at National Art Center, Tokyo, which recently opened in Roppongi.

Found here and Kotaku

Imagine if we could use screens like this in our prototype assignment.  Especially if your creating a game.  It would sure grab someone’s attention and get them using it.

Humble Voice Web 2.0

Humble Voice is a community allowing people to create profiles, share and access music, videos and art in general. Once a member has created a profile, they can upload, maintain and manage their work. Members can showcase their photography, art, film, writing or music in which other members can comment, share and view to the community of friends, family and other artists. Users are also able to search directly for the art and music etc uploaded on the site. (However not all of the search pages have been developed yet)  Humble Voice Strap line: Humble Voice is geared toward you—made by artists for artists. It’s not just your space. (Quoted from About HV as it explains it clearly)“Features include calendars to track local readings, art shows, band performances and community events. Each artist community homepage contains featured artists, each day’s top listened to/viewed/read creations as well as a shout out to the newest members of each community. Members can manipulate their own profiles by uploading a profile photograph, their own art of any and all kinds, basic biographical information, messages and friends’ profiles as well as unique-to-the-site features with bulletin boards, commentary, featured texts, blog space, and community actions and photos.”Benefits of this Web 2.0 are that people can exchange advice and tips from other like minded people. As well as making a profile and uploading art, music, writing etc, members can make friends, browse communities tag favorite bands and artists, earn points and redeem them for great merchandise and special offers.

Lisa

Web 2.0

The web 2.0 website I have been looking at is the lazyfuck.co.uk/unscene.co.uk, the site doesnt aim to be big but is easily found. Members sign up, create a profile and can then post columns (blogs), put up videos, music clips, photos, enter the messageboards or talk on the live tagboard.

The site is designed to mix together all the elements of popular 2.0 sites such as youtube and myspace but is aimed at people in the south east of England, the main aim of the site is to promote small bands and nightclubs but is mainly used as a blogging service.

People upload photos of their nights out and of gigs theyve been to and people can view them, this is very popular with the users and goes back five years. The site also has a message board and a live tag board so that users can chat while on the site and they can also send private notes to eachother.

Web 2.0!

The web 2.0 application that I have found is DeviantART. This is a site that is mainly about uploading your creative work for others to see! It currently has 30,493,926 pieces of work submitted, but this number grows every second! Users create a account and get there own page that contains a gallery, journal section and places for people to leave comments. There is a free account and a paid account. The paid account allows you to personalise you page more and add extra features. 

Contribute: Users can upload anything that they have created, be it pictures (digital or scans), art work, graphic art or any other design work! when you upload you choose from different categories that suit your work. You can also add keywords to your work to make it easier for people to search through. All these allow for easy searching of vast amounts of work.

Above picture shows the ‘Submit Art’ screen. As you can see there are many ways to categorise your work, with main sections and 2 sub sections. This system allows for easy searching by what interests you most.

Collaborate: You can post comments about peoples work, these allow users to give tips and pointers to people about how to improve there work. You can also add people as friends and ‘watch’ there work. There is also a favourites feature, which allows users to add other peoples work to there individual page for others to see what they are looking at and what inspires them. Most people are also willing to lend a hand if you need one and explain how they did things!

Participate: Users are the ones that add the content for the site! without the user there would be no site! They can participate in many ways and not just in one. The can upload work, comment on other peoples work, there is also a small blog section and forums as well.

This site is good at what it does, however due to the huge amounts of work submitted it can be hard to get noticed without spending vast amounts of time looking at everyone else’s work and commenting so they come and look at your work! But then this is the same with any site like this! It is a useful site though as it opens up your work to criticism that can help you improve within your particular field of art/design. You can also get ideas from other peoples work as well as advice about how to do things.

Andy Hall

Photobucket Web 2.0

It is a very useful website (similar to Flickr) for people who want to upload images and may not have a server that they can upload images to. It enables a user to quickly upload images and it then also generates a code that can be then copied and pasted into a forum or blog. It provides code for HTML, [IMG] and just a normal URL.

To upload an image a user simply has to locate the file on their computer and select ‘upload’.

In my opinion it is a very useful application. It’s a fast and reliable service for all computer-users and it also makes it easy for people who may not be very computer literate to upload and share their pictures. It is very straightforward and user-friendly and anyone is allowed to upload a great many images for free.

All of Us

Some interesting works by an agency called All of Us reviewed at this weblog Playful:

These two X-Ray and Grid (images above) are focused on explaining / exploring art work in a gallery environment.

While this one, Plink Plonk (images above), is less site specific and more an exploration of novel audio-visual interfaces.