by Andy Polaine on August 16, 2008
in General
Battery hens flap to help battery hens in the Flap to Freedom installation that Chris O’Shea and Icodesign created for the V&A Village Fete to support freedom for farmed chickens.
Contestants flap their arms and their chicken moves in sync. Quickest flapper wins the highest place on the pecking order. More over at the Icodesign site.
There are also Flickr sets showing the build process and the chickens in action.
Chris has also posted more details about the Flap to Freedom project as well as a bit of technical how-it-was-done.
For someone like me who is always interested in getting people to act playfully (dare I say stupidly) via interactivity, this is pretty hard to beat. They’re so into the activity, they take the technical ‘magic’ for granted, which is how it should be. I especially like the way the music eggs them on (sorry).
Bet you that music sticks in your head for the rest of the day too.
(NOTE/UPDATE: I thought I’d posted this whole thing before, but it was on draft for some reason, so I’ve combined the two posts).
Tagged as:
arduino,
chicken,
chris-oshea,
icondesign,
Interactivity,
openframeworks,
Play
by Andy Polaine on July 23, 2008
in General
Let’s face it, all Australians are dangerous on the sports field, but the the Australian Museum has a new interactive installation called Dangerous Australians that allows you to interact (safely) with Australia’s deadliest top ten creatures. The saltwater crocodile, funnel web spider, box jelly fish, brown snake are among them. Via the six-metre long interactive table you can explore what happens if you encounter them and what should you do to survive.
The installation was created by Lightwell under the technical direction of ex-COFA and ex-Fabrican Dave Towey. The whole thing is running under OS X and coded in Cocoa/Objective-C++ with a bunch of open source libraries including Ogre3D, OpenFrameworks and OpenCV (computer vision for the tracking).
Thanks to the Objective C++ it looks like it runs extremely fluidly and fast. For me, it’s interesting to see how the interactors act and react. The children use really quick jabs at the ‘buttons’, as if they’re trying to test the interface and its affordances. But the bit I love most of all is how the person with their hand in the ‘water’ snaps it away in reflex to the Great White Shark that suddenly appears (around 0:50 in the video).
More images and details on Lightwell’s page – and take a look at their other work whilst your at it.
Tagged as:
australian,
Interactive,
Interactivity,
lightwell,
museum,
Objective C++,
Ogre3D,
OpenCV,
openframeworks,
oxidise,
table,
towey,
tracking
by Andy Polaine on May 23, 2008
in General
by Andy Polaine on May 22, 2008
in General
My brother, Matt, just e-mailed a link to this interface on the 3M website. Given the multitouch hype at the moment, it’s quite a clever little riff on the theme.
Basically it’s as if you are standing to the rear of a multitouch screen. Your mouse controls the finger movements of the person blurred out in the background and a selection does the old two-finger click-and-drag-larger movement that seems to have become a multitouch standard.
Tagged as:
3M,
Design,
flash,
interaction,
Interactivity,
interface,
multitouch
by Andy Polaine on May 6, 2008
in Uncategorized
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Sebastien and Eva from Troika, the studio behind the Cloud and All The Time In The World installations at new Terminal 5 at Heathrow. So, if you were one of the hundreds stuck at Terminal 5 when it opened, at least you had something decent to marvel at.
Troika are unusual in their combination of disciplines, I feel. It’s not so often that graphic and motion graphic design and this kind of interactive installation work come together – architecture is the more usual bedfellow.
I found it very interesting to hear them talk about the development of their creative palette and language of the objects they create as well as how some of the seemingly tiny technical issues can end up defining a massive part of the work.
You can have a listen to the interview on Core77.
Tagged as:
Art,
Culture,
Design,
Interactivity,
interviews,
Play,
Podcast
by Andy Polaine on April 27, 2008
in Uncategorized
by Andy Polaine on April 18, 2008
in Uncategorized
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, who created one of my all time favourite interactive pieces, We Feel Fine, have a new piece called I Want You To Want Me commissioned for MoMA’s Design and The Elastic Mind show.
I Want You To Want Me explores the world of online dating, scraping data from thousands of online profiles all in search of love. As with We Feel Fine the interaction is simple, but allows you to view the data in lots of beautiful, emotional and meaningful ways. The interface is made up of balloons representing each person and each one has one of over 500 specially shot video silhouettes inside it.
The ways of looking at the data are described as movements and include things like “Who I Am” and “What I Want” along with “Openers”, “Closers” and “Taglines”, which are used in the profile descriptions. There’s also a matchmaker section:
Matchmaker algorithmically pairs people based on their descriptions of who they are and what they’re looking for. Balloon couples emerge on the horizon and drift to the foreground, before pausing side by
side for a few seconds and then floating off together.
The project’s website explains it all in detail with some great images from it. A real treat is that they also documented their process with sketches, photos, etc.
[tags]Jonathan Harris, Sep Kamvar, MoMA, installation, dating[/tags]
Tagged as:
Art,
Culture,
dating,
Design,
installation,
Interactivity,
jonathan-harris,
MoMA,
Sep-Kamvar,
Technology
by Andy Polaine on April 17, 2008
in Uncategorized
My latest Core77 Broadcast interview with Jason Bruges from Jason Bruges Studio is now online.
In a slightly echoing room in Jason’s studio, accompanied by the usual sirens and car alarms of London’s Shoreditch, he talks about his roots in architecture, the journey to interactive surfaces, sustainability and his thoughts about giving this emerging area a proper name.
Hope you enjoy it.
The next one, coming soon, is with Troika.
[tags]Core77, Jason Bruges[/tags]
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Core77,
Culture,
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Interactivity,
interviews,
Jason-Bruges,
Podcast,
Technology
by Andy Polaine on April 12, 2008
in Uncategorized
Following on from my post and Nigel’s comments about Clicktoy, I just found Scratch, which is a simple multimedia authoring environment for children. It looks like it outputs to java applets as a playback format.
The team is led by Mitch Resnick at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten, which would frankly be my dream academic post.
Scratch is free to download and is for Windows and OS X.
[tags]games, programming, multimedia, children, MIT, Scratch[/tags]
Tagged as:
children,
games,
Interactivity,
MIT,
multimedia,
Play,
programming,
Scratch,
Technology
by Andy Polaine on April 9, 2008
in Uncategorized
Some little games, like Line Rider are simple and instantly addictive.
Quite a few of my students have tried to build something like Maze Frenzy in the past, but this one is great. Just click on the dot and move the mouse. I wasted at least four minutes of my time playing it. Not bad.
There’s also a more difficult version if you’re already the maze master.
[tags]games, maze[/tags]
Tagged as:
games,
Interactivity,
maze,
Play
