LONG BEACH, California -- Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done.
FULL STORY: http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-digital-six.html
Several cool tools have emerged on the Web 2.0 tech horizon that enable swift data visualization of numbers and text. Below are examples of Obama's speech as parsed by two such on-line utilities.
ManyEyes is the “shared visualization” site run by the Visual Communications Lab at IBM Research. This utility allows for more data formats, including bubble charts, scatter plots, networks, word trees, and block charts. See more versions of President Obama's speech here.
(via PopTech Blog)
Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.
How many Saturday afternoons did I spend with a huge sheet of paper, a box of crayons, and visions of spaceships careening, cowboys shooting, cannonballs arching across the page?
"It's a game where your crayon drawings come to life," 25-year-old independent games designer from Finland named Petri Purho. "You draw stuff and your drawings behave physically correctly.
LOOK: The game trailer
LISTEN: Interview with NPR's Melissa Block
GET: Buy the game ($19.95) from http://www.crayonphysics.com/
"Before Tom Cruise went crazy," notes the unnamed reviewer in this video from WIRED, "he starred in this actually pretty cool movie called Minority Report, where he was controlling this computer interface purely with his hands."
At CES 2009, Toshiba showed off a conceptual computer interface that uses hand gestures for control. With simple motion sensing technology and a software interface, Toshiba hopes to open up applications for video games and other interactive media.
The WIRED reviewer concludes: "I think it is pretty cool. I don't think it'll hit the mainstream anytime soon. I don't think people will be solving crimes or anything with it."
Who knows? Three years ago, Jeff Han blew the roof off at TED 2006 by premiering his touchscreen interface. Then the iPhone came out and made smallscreen multi-touch an expected feature on gadgets.
Oh, there's the Wii which is fast putting the concept of a hardwired game controller in the category of rabbit ear television antenna.
I want to know when we can use it to start painting in virtual 3-D!
Christian Nold thinks we should pay more attention to how our environment shapes our emotional and physiological states.
His work with Bio Mapping—which measures people’s responses to their environment and connects those feelings to their physical location—suggests that a map of emotional landscapes represents a powerful tool for analyzing the relationship between place and broader social issues.
My grandfather was a geography professor for four decades until his death in 1970. I can only image the awe and enthusiasm that he would have felt at the powerful, simple and free tools brought to us now in the form of Google Maps and Google Earth.
From bomb scares to stolen radioactive material to rebel attacks, alarming things happen around the world, all day, every day. Morgan Clements, founder and publisher of the Global Incident Map, talks about why it’s important to map them.
Continue reading "Plotting Terror: The Global Incident Map" »
Moo is a Web 2.0 service takes content from other web and print apps (iLife, Flickr, Bebo) and mashed the content together with on-demand printing. Both the site and the products are very savvy and design oriented. Great for creating
rich, artistic, post-event deliverables for
participants.
from Liquid Treat...
Whelp, we've arrived. At least at Madison Avenue. Oh, and on the televisions and monitors of millions of viewers.
With the current UPS advertising campaign, the visual language of graphic facilitation is being used to explain the company's new value proposition. In recent years, UPS has made the move to position itself away from competing with FedEx and DHL for fast overnight delivery services, to positioning the company as a key asset in a business' supply chain.
As graphic facilitators, the tools that allow us to synthesize ideas into images--whether static or dynamic--are expanding exponentially.
In this video thought piece hosted on YouTube, Kansas State Anthropology professor Michael Welsch uses the simple, cheap digital tools at hand to weave an engaging narrative of the birth of Web 2.0.
Welsch expresses the miracle of that birth, writing: "We're teaching the machine, and the machine is us. Time to rethink the world. The network is the machine; the machine is us."
Digital Ethnography is a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.
He literally draws the path of communication evolution from handwritten, linear text to non-linear hypertext, HTML, XML, RSS and mash-ups.
This is the most elegant and engaging description of where media is today. And to think, he did it without using a single bullet point!
[ via Jarrell McAlister ]
