Via defense review, another use of video-game controllers for military purposes (see for the ps2 pad that controls missiles): a remote-controlled throwable robot for which the controller was copped from a PlayStation 2 gamepad (according to popsci). The 'Dragon Runner' and its handheld controller/...
Malleable Music: pinching, twisting or squeezing to do music
Malleable Music is a project by Sidney Fels at the Human Communication Technologies Laboratory at the Unversity of British Columbia in Canada: The malleable surface touch interface combines a deformable input surface and video processing to provide a whole-hand interface that exhibits many attribut...
Military tech versus street tech
Interesting discussion on PopSci: Military Tech Versus Street Tech: Who’s Got the Edge? by James Vlahos. I picked up what I found relevant: The question naturally occurs: Who gets the better stuff, soldiers or civilians? The military’s gear is often tougher (witness their laptops and cars), more pr...
txt files addiction
If you're like me a txt file user, read this post on kuro5hin: "So you want to make textfiles" which is a nice how-to about this very topic. It's also a good reminder for simple typography. One great benefit of textfiles is that they don't need any sissy header text: you can just open up an editor ...
Loosing gadgets everywhere
The IHT has a funny piece about tgis new fact: people have more and more gadgets but they are losing them more and more by "misplacing them in airplanes and airports, hotel rooms, restaurants, cabs and rented cars." A study conducted by Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a mobile-data protection softwar...
Awareness Communications by Bear/Doll
Close to Nabaztag (the WiFi rabbit), there is this appealing project: bear/doll interface: Awareness Communications by Entertaining Toy Doll Agents by Kazuyuki Saitoh1 , Tomoko Yonezawa, and Kenji Mase (paper presented at International Workshop on Entertainment Computing 2002) We propose a sen...
DVD player for kids
A new DVD player for kids (9 9euros), created by the company Shindo (shinco?) and distributed by Sodifa. It plays DivX, MP3, DVD and burnt CDs: Why do I blog this? it's part of my daily watch for a video game interface. I found it's a relevant new interface to play DVDs (and interactive DVDs) for k...
Tangible Computing versus Standard Game Controllers
There seems to be some papers that compare the difference between physically controlled game controllers and standard ones. The following one tackled this issue with regard to how appealin is it for the players to use these 2 kinds of interactions: Johnson, D. M., Gardner, M. J., Wiles, J. H., Swee...
To be read for sunday: the European Constitution
Homework for sunday, I have to read this more carefully: ...
NOKIA rubber boots
For some people around who are not aware of it, finnish company Nokia also does rubber boots. Well actually I don't know if they still do that but before entering into the phone business, they manufactured pretty cool rubber boots like the following one (lady walking boot). Have a look at the old l...