Adam Little @ CIID

Face Off - Computer vision project 1

ReacTIVision - Computer vision project 2

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (Presentation, part 1 0f 8)
This is part 1 of a speech by Adam Greenfield that outlines the ideas in his book Everyware: The Dawing Age of Ubiquitous Computing — a detailed survey on the implications of ubiquitous computing. The rest of the speech can be found here.

The Web in the World
A slide show presentation by Timo Arnall which has many great examples of physical interfaces, networked objects, etc…

Also by Timo Arnall is Touch, a website and research project about Near Field Communication (NFC) which enables connections between mobile phones and physical objects. An ongoing archive of interesting applications and technologies.

Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
A highly informative slide presentation about Personal Informatics — “services that surface information about you and your network to your advantage.” And here is a recent article on the subject from the Wall Street Journal.

Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things

Written by Julian Bleeker, this paper looks at what it means when objects, animals and other things start to contribute to the social web and the value that holds. More notes from Julian here: Networked Objects and the Internet of Things.

The Coming Age of Calm Technology / The Computer for the 21st Century
Both of these papers are by the man who coined the term Ubiquitous Computing back in the 80s, Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC. Required reading on the subject.

Screenshot from an application running on a home made interactive table

After setting up an interactive surface with ReacTIVision, we needed to create an application that would be engaging to the rest of our classmates and demonstrate the potential of this new tool. The result, which needed to be accomplished in less than a day, was a toy that allowed you to mix and match the body parts of all the Pilot Year students (plus a few unsuspecting faculty). No video yet, but keep reading for some photos…

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Francesco setting up table, photo by Yaniv Steiner

Reactable is a “collaborative electronic music instrument” in the form of a multi-touch tabletop interface and was created by a team of Music Technology students in Barcelona. As an exercise in Computer Vision, to expand our toolkit as Interaction Designers and to have a little bit of fun before vacation, Yaniv Steiner helped a group of us set up our first multi-touch surface which we powered with the same software that runs the Reactable. Keep reading for some notes and photos of this process…

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Some photos from last week’s project by Alice, Ujjval and I…

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As a final project for our Physical Computing workshop, Ujjval Panchal, Alice Pintus and I created a physical email notifier in the form of a wine bottle.

Message in a Bottle is the first prototype in a series of physical objects for the home that notify their owner of incoming emails. Our goal is to limit our compulsion to obsessively check the computer for new messages while also bringing characteristics of postal mail to the digital world.

Through ambient lighting, this wine bottle will display the amount of new emails from a set of specific contacts (i.e. friends from back home) which are defined in the user’s email client. Picking up the bottle will activate an LCD screen with a summary of the most recent message and turning the bottle upside-down will load the next new message. Once all messages have been read, the LCD screen and ambient light will shut off until new messages are received and looked at.

We envision different objects for different sets of contacts, such as a picture frame for family, a pencil holder on your desk for work contacts or a sentimental object to notify emails from a significant other.

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Photo by Tobias Toft

The topic of the last two weeks was Physical Computing. The course was taught by Massimo Banzi from Italy and Gwendolyn Floyd from the US with help from CIID faculty member David Mellis. Our tool of choice was Arduino, the open-source electronics platform that is most popular amongst designers and hobbyists because of its flexibility, ease of use and large online community. Massimo and Dave are two of the original Arduino developers (and featured in the current issue of Wired) so learning from them was a real pleasure.

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