Open source

Todays year 3 theory class will talk about open source among other things:

Interview with Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer, Greg Papadopoulos – Part 1

Interview with Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer, Greg Papadopoulos – Part 2

The open source movement

Mac adverts

Some funny new Mac adverts by Mitchell and Webb.

Useful resource

A useful resource for anyone interested in advertising/marketing that just got emailed to me.

Visit4info is essentially a web based library which allows access to over 37,000 advertisements of up-to-the-minute television, cinema and press adverts. You can view ads by agency (useful for research or finding a job when you leave the degree), type, . The video advert side of this seems to be very interesting as sometimes it gives you details about who made the advert, the music used etc. Sort of like imdb for adverts

Turning The Pages 2.0

Not sure if any of you saw the Money Programme on BBC 2 tonight, Coming To Your Screen: Microsoft’s New Vista, which was all about the launch of the new windows Vista system. Looks visually interesting although strikingly similar to Apple OSX (it wouldn’t be the first time windows did that) but something they did show on the programme which Microsoft worked on in collaboration with the British Library was the Turning The Pages 2.0 interactive system viewable in the library itself and online. Below is a video which explains what the system is about and briefly shows the touch screen version in the gallery:

The online version is a little demanding (you need windows vista or xp, internet explorer and .net 3.0) but there are shockwave versions here.

First Life

The second Life backlash has begun!

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.

Intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen

Jeff Han is a research scientist for NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates—for the first time publicly—his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 09:32)

City info in time

Interesting Kiosk for train stations. City info in time is:

a trainstation infosystem that gives you information about the citysights when you have limited time left. It gives you suggestions what you can do if you have 30, 60 ,90 and 120 minutes left.

Art+Com and LAb[au]

Two companies / organisations / art groups that work with the technologies we keep talking about in Multimedia Authoring (year 2) at the moment i.e. touch screens, motion tracking etc. etc. are Art+Com and LAb[au] (who seem to be rebuilding their site so all their projects are offline).

Two posts have just been posted at Digital Experience (good weblog for research for current project):

Home and Exile
and
Touch

focusing on particular work by both groups. Might be an idea to trawl their respective sites to see other works they have done.

The reactable

Not convinced this would work for kids as the image suggests here but nonetheless a good reference for Lisa’s project idea.

The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

This instrument is being developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), at the Music Technology Group within the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

Note the use of building type blocks, very good idea to use something kids know already and physical to trigger whats happening on screen. Below is a video showing work developing purely that idea.