Some time ago, I blogged about Rob-o from LOEIL (laboratoire objet espace intelligence langage, Aix en Provence, france). I recently stumbled across another piece that I found stunning. It's called E-Rex (same naming pattern). E-Rex is basically an interactive installation made of a robotic screen ...
Design principles for tangible interactions?
The case of sculpting atmospheres: towards design principles for expressive tangible interaction in control of ambient systems by Philip Ross and David V. Keyson (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(2), 2007, pp.69-79). The paper addresses an important issue in the field of tangible interactions:...
Do you need to lock your doors when you can track your belongings
In "Visionary in Residence: Stories" (Bruce Sterling), there are different short stories. In one of them, there is this email discussion about the design of a new category of product based on location-based technology: If Al has the location and condition of all his possessions cybernetically track...
Many Eyes: crowdsourcing + social computing + InfoViz
After selling its PC division, IBM recently dropped the printer business. At the same time, they explore other paths such as the super-mediatized SL but also other interesting platforms. I have intrigued by Many Eyes. Internet News has a short discussion about it: IBM (Quote) launched a new ...
Empty query on Google
Google prevent users from typing nothing in the search engine. It's a pity, I'd be curious to know what should come out from a research on an empty query. Why the hell an empty query would be important in a search engine? At first glance, it's a weird idea because if you go to a search engine, it'...
Inflatable simulated targets in the form of tanks/aircrafts
Military Decoy is a company that sell huge military-like inflatable objects such as tanks, aircraft and trucks: Founded in 1992, Shape International, Inc is a world leader in the research, development and manufacture of simulated military target equipment for the industry. We specialize in inflatab...
Lazarus/Zombie devices
On waiting and killing time: doing hanging around is a paper by Mark Perry that would surely be of interest for Karen Martin, Arianna Bassoli and Johanna Brewer who organized a workshop on this topic ("Waiting: a workshop on place/time and future technologies"). In this short paper, the author expl...
How to drop evidences of futuristic technical development
A quote I like, taken from "What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations Of Philip K. Dick" (Gwen Lee, Doris Elaine Sauter, Tim Powers). Also pointed by Tim Powers in the introduction of the book: "That's another technical advice, you casually have one character say to the othe...
RepRap: cheaper 3D printing
RepRap seems to be a Bruce Sterling -esque tool that may allow the existence of spimes. What's curious here is that it will be cheaper, based on an open source model and available on various computer platforms. RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is a practical self-copying 3D prin...
The work of Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who invented a large amount of interesting artifacts ranging from speaking tube, perpetual motion machines to cat pianos. Among the devices this Renaissance man created, there are two that I found amazingly intriguing, in terms of ubiquito...