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Archive for July, 2010

Surface with Friends and a Couple of Dragons

July 28th, 2010 by Kris in

A student project at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment and Technology center have completed the 4th iteration of their Dungeons and Dragons Microsoft Surface game, and it looks like alot of fun. The game’s structure is that there is a Dungeon Master who is the game leader and he is in control of the monster team, and the players up to 4 of them are in control of the heros.

The game uses a combination of RFID tagged figurines that the represent the monsters and heros, and a heads up display facing each of the 4 corners, plus, users can bring up menus around their figurine to cast spells and attack or whatnot. The game shows off the communal possibilities of large format touch screens like the Microsoft Surface.

Each player has information that faces them.

Tweet Map for Volkswagen, Geo-location Twitter Heat Map

July 20th, 2010 by Kris in

Cars, Geo-Location, NUI, Touch

Volkswagen ran a competition recently to see what kind of apps developers from around the world would come up with if they released a developer kit for flash. I took a couple evenings to see what I could come up with. I had a clear idea that something utilizing the geolocation capabilities would be a good direction to look into. Originally I was leaning towards a directional photo viewer using Flickr’s geolocation API and the photos would rotate around the app as you turn, though the idea felt too distracting for a user.

I ended up going for a tweet map, where the newest tweets around your location would display and you could drill down according to direction. Here’s the elevator pitch:

Tweet Map – Heatmap of Conversation: It would be a blast to go out for the evening and see the nearby tweets of special events or of people enjoying themselves and tweeting it. This app will not only allow you to view nearby tweets, but also indicates from which direction conversation is coming from.

I ran through a couple of concepts, and during that time it eventually become clear that:

The general direction of the tweets was more important than the individual tweets.
The tweets should rotate around the car as you turn. So that if you see conversation coming from the right side. It means directly “look out your right window”.
Less information onscreen was required to make the app less distracting.

Here are some shots of the final designs:

The root of the design concept is that the touch screen doesn’t feel like a computer, it just blends into the instrument panel. The design is based off of the new generation of the Volkswagon Scirocco, a European only hatchback model. This Scirocco direction also took into account the aluminum interiors one sees in Volkswagons.

You can see the app here and vote for it if you want. The Tweet Map is more of a proof of concept as I ran into developer restrictions with how many geo-location queries one can make in an hour. So the data is actually canned for the city of Braunschweig during the Germany vs. England world cup match.

Some of the other interesting submissions included:

It was a fun little project and it appears that the in-car application is heating up in the next couple months, as Microsoft has indicated they’ll release their own SDK soon for Ford’s in car “Sync” system. Its definitely an area that we’re diving into when we it goes public.

Create Places Worth Caring About: Let’s Color Project

July 10th, 2010 by Kris in

Architecture, Campaigns, Community

The Let’s Color Campaign from Delux which is just now getting traction in the states, but has apparently been going on for a while, has Delux paints going to cities around the world, bringing as much paint as anyone could want, and commencing to “Colour” all types of public and private buildings.

This short documentary features footage of locals in Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Istambul, and Jodhpur India, going completely color crazy.
I was particularly interested in the time ramping technique they used in their timelaps. The letcolor youtube user gave clarification:

We used motion control to track very slowly at 0.5mm per second or slower. Some of the moves took 90 minutes in real time For the shot at the start we tamped the camera tps, iris and exposure time in sync to move from 25fps to 0.1fps – all in camera!

A while back I heard the architect James H Kunstler give an excellent speech arguing:

What we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

Here is Kunstler’s speech:

The idea is something that has been sticking with me for a while. In many cities in the US we haven’t taken the time to build them to connect with us on a human level as opposed to a utilitarian one. Thats one reason the Let’s Color connected with me. I will say that painting places with much color is something I’d like to do, and its something I will do at the next opportunity because places should be worth caring about.