Interactivity

Programming for children

April 12, 2008

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 [...]

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Maze Frenzy

April 9, 2008

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. [...]

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ClickToy – A game for two year-olds

April 4, 2008

Image: ClickToy Interactive Inc. Old skool interaction designers will remember Grandma and Me and the rest of Broderbund’s Living Books series. Those early ‘multimedia’ children’s books were some of the best examples of simple, playful interactivity. Anything on the screen that looked like it could be clicked did something – there was rarely a disappointment. [...]

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Jackson Pollock Interactive

March 29, 2008

Once again proving that the simple interactives are often the most engaging and playful, this Jackson Pollockpiece by Miltos Manetas and Stamen has apparently been around since 2003, but I hadn’t seen it. It’s a simple click and move the mouse around affair, but the feeling of the paint splodging around is surprisingly pleasant. You [...]

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Game Controller Family Tree

March 29, 2008

From the old, beloved Atari 2600 joystick to the Wiimote, how did we get from there to here? The “Sock Master’s” family tree of controllers has the goods. There are some classics and some real stinkers like the The Nintendo Virtual Boy Controller. What were they thinking? [tags]controllers, games, videogames, hardware[/tags]

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Website Navigation Via Camera Tracking

March 28, 2008

The website of Publicis & Hal Riney uses camera-tracking in Flash for the navigation – the first website to use it as far as I know. Although described by a Twitterer as “Minority Report-like controls” (can we stop using that as the yardstick please!), it’s really more like the method used in the EyeToy Play. [...]

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37signals versus Don Norman

March 13, 2008

If there was ever a clear example of the generation gap between those who have been steeped in digital culture from the start and those who have had to adopt it later in life, the current debate between 37signals and Don Norman is it. I took note of the original article in Wired on 37signals [...]

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iPlay – interactivity without the flab

February 19, 2008

Chris just posted an interesting find called the iPlay. It’s basically an interactive playground frame game, which means that children have to run around a lot to push, pull and twist things as well as use their brains. Interactivity and play, what more can I say?

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Troika is on Cloud, er, Five

January 25, 2008

If you haven’t already explored the background behind Troika’s cloud for BA’s Terminal 5 – “a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture” – Pixelsumo has got the goods and also images of the [...]

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Wii remote for a head tracking display

January 3, 2008

Here’s an interesting video of inverting the Wiimote and infrared sensors to create a surprisingly realistic optical illusion for a single user: A lot of interaction and GUI design is about optical illusion and willing suspension of disbelief, something usually talked about in fiction. It’s tempting to try and make things ‘for real’ sometimes, when [...]

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