Turbulence Commission: No Matter by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott (Part of the Mixed Realities exhibition, on view until April 15, 2008) - NO MATTER is an interactive installation that activates the transformation of imaginary objects through the Second Life virtual economy into physical space. Second Life builders construct replicas of famous buildings, luxury goods and custom-designed objects, first reproducing, then inverting the notion of value itself. With zero cost for gathering resources, production of goods and transport of finished product, these items proliferate widely and quickly. Continue reading

(Essay for Share Festival Catalog 2008) (Here is my slide presentation, related to the essay below. But, I did not read this essay at the festival, rather it was printed in the festival catalog.)

There are a few things to say about manufacturing, design and digital arts. First, we’re not talking about manufacturing. Manufacturing is about making things on a large scale using machinery. Manufacturing evokes cavernous, cold, awesomely huge assembly lines with scales all out of proportion to the experiences of mere mortals. Factory floors throwing sparks, littered with metal shavings, huge overhead cranes moving impossibly large masses of steel - this is what manufacturing means. Continue reading

Making Things Talk - Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects by Tom Igoe: Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when devices that you’ve built start to talk to each other, things really start to get interesting. Through a series of simple projects, you’ll learn how to get your creations to communicate with one another by forming networks of smart devices that carry on conversations with you and your environment. Whether you need to plug some sensors in your home to the Internet or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other creations, Making Things Talk explains exactly what you need. Continue reading

Slow Messenger Prototype (II) by Near Future Laboratory: This is the second prototype hardware for the Slow Messenger project … (It) uses a small 96 x 64 pixel OLED display by 4D Systems and the idea is that you’d have your “instant” messages displayed over relatively long periods of time, and the more you carried the messaging device with you — the more you held it — the more of the message you would see. If you left the device by itself — thereby not really showing much commitment or affinity to the message — the longer it would take for the message to reveal itself. Continue reading

Sketch Furniture by Front allows sketching onto space to become an object.

Motion Capture translates motions into 3D-files and are used in this project to simply record the tip of a pen when people draw pieces of furniture in the air. Rapid Prototyping is a technique that materializes 3D-files. A laser beam builds the 3D-file layer by layer within a liquid plastic material. Every 0.1mm the liquid harden by a laser beam. After a few hours, the 3D-files come out as materialized pieces. The Sketch Furniture project in Japan is made in collaboration with Barry Friedman Ltd. Tokyo Wonder Site Aoyama and Crescent. [via architectradure]

“Shadows are being used by Japanese researchers as an non-intrusive way for friends to stay in touch. Called Teleshadow the system pipes video of what people are doing at home via the net to their friends’ houses. But instead of showing images in full motion and colour, Teleshadow turns them into shadow outlines projected on the inside of a small decorative lamp. Creator Shunpei Yasuda said the shadow presence system aims to fill the gap between live video and static images.

Mr Yasuda, a post-graduate student in Media Design at Japan’s Keio University, said the inspiration for the system came from Japanese history. For many years, he said, Japanese homes have had Shoji or paper walls that divide some rooms. The thin walls preserve some privacy but the shadows cast on the paper as people move about also act as a reminder of that person’s presence…” Continue reading Shadow lamps to connect friends by Mark Ward, BBC News.

Hotels ‘Bleed’ into the Neighborhood

Park View Hotel– by Ashok Sukumaran–stretches between the Cesar Chavez plaza in downtown San Jose and the neighbouring Fairmont Hotel. Using specially-built pointing devices, audiences in the park can access interior hotel spaces, by “pinging” them optically. Once found and hit (two different modes on the scope) the interiors release their properties into a wireless network… the color of the interior propagates stochastically, leaking out of the building skin, jumping across the street, and entering some street-lights in the park below. In this way, the park enjoys a certain neighbourly access to the hotel, inverting the usual character of the relationship.

This project was the result of a residency at Sun Microsystems Labs, where the artist was (according the residency brief) working with SunSPOTs, small “programmable object technologies” which are a simple-to-use prototyping platform for embedded technologies, or the so-called “Internet of Things”. [via] Continue reading

Augmented Realities

A little bit on digital marks, I selected a variety of them.

The semacode, a two dimensional code that encodes a URL. The picture (left) is the semacode of architectradure. Thank you Michael Surtees for the link! This tag embed the URL address of my blog, that can be read by your cell phone and send you to its page. I guess it avoids typing in the URL and you can rapidly go through a series of web sites using the respective tags.

It is especially useful for combining physical space to digital content. The Semacode’s Software Development Kit has is developed for ubiquitous computing by creating visual tags for objects and contexts, and read them using a mobile camera phone. The physical Wikipedia called Semapedia, created by Alexis Rondeau and Stan Wiechers, allows you to add place tags on places and things to link them to the relevant Wikipedia articles. Continue reading

Ubiquitous Content + Pileus: The Internet Umbrella

“[…] “Ubiquitous Content” is an idea of a new design objective of our lives in the post-PC era. In 20th century, a notion of media contents has been meant contents like movies, music, animations, video games etc. Figuratively speaking, such contents were entities supplied in containers designed as “boxes”. But now, a spread of networks and a realization of ubiquitous computing technologies are going to change those styles of media. The container is not like a “box” any more: It will change its forms freely to give us advanced computer augmentations in a specific context and it will be sometimes invisible embedded into our environments. It is more appropriately called Ubiquitous Media and it will be a new style of media. When we design such Ubiquitous Media, we need to think about the container as our environments in which many things are cooperating rather than a single hardware, a single software or a single standard. Users will not need to be conscious of those medias, therefore such containers emerge for users as “their lives” themselves. “Ubiquitous Contents” are contents for such media. Those must be “experiences” in “their lives”.

As Ubiquitous Content project focuses on our lives and experiences, all things in our everyday lives are targets of the design. The 10 Laboratories of KMD are working on this wide subject from different perspectives…. Continue reading

Interview/Article

“As the Internet permeates our lives, our future may include networked devices in the home and workplace that provide global connectivity. Closely examining this concept is German architect and designer, Tobi Schneidler. Schneidler’s work explores the seemingly limitless potential of networked furniture, living spaces, and clothing on our daily lives and experiences. From his “Remote Home” project that provided an Internet link between the furniture and lighting fixtures in two apartments in Berlin and London, to his “Ticker Chair” which dynamically displays stock market and news information on an illuminated chair. Schneidler’s work uncovers striking associations between interior design and external data streams. Gizmodo recently caught up with Schneidler to discuss his past and current projects, and to discover exactly why dynamic information displays need to exist in physical, not only screen-based spaces.” Continue reading Networked Furniture and More with Tobi Schneidler; Interview/Article by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Gizmodo. Continue reading