A striking and unexpected paper in the FinancialTime about mirror neurons: neurons which are activated when mimicking the actions of others. They have been discovered by Giacommo Rizzolatti (at the University of Parma, Italy). The paper is much more focused on inferring other actions when carrying ...
Scream: a software application to facilitate screaming.
(via) Scream by deprogramming.us ( a cool bunch of folks, check their philosophy on runeme-org): Scream sits quietly in your computer's system tray and automatically springs into action when it detects a scream. Scream disturbs your Windows interface. But it isn't aimed just at computer frustration...
Nearest toilet locator: Dial-a-toilet
(via): Dial-a-toilet launched in China The world's first telephone toilet location system is to be launched in Shanghai next month. The move was announced at the First World Toilet Forum held in the Chinese city, reports City Express. Users dial a special number and the system tells them the locati...
Visitor.Files: displaying patterns of traffic/pedestrian activity in neighborhoods
Visitors.Files is a neat project in between art and information visualization by Christina Ray. Christina Ray's Visitor.Files originated with a wish to replicate the heightened awareness commonly felt when first landing in a foreign city, when every person, sight and smell appears curious and...
Another Newsmap
Buzztracker is an interesting news map (similar to newsmap or in the news). Instead of just putting the events (extracted from google news) in squares like in newsmap, it displays the news on a world map. Another great feature is the fact that events are threaded: connections between events and pla...
Measurement Techniques and Game Design
A great article on Gamasutra: Measurement Techniques for Game Designers by Ben Cousins.It deals with the topic of measures (e.g. time, distance, density of game events) and agreed systems of units. He connects this with the notion of balance. It’s amazing given the importance of measurement in so m...
Remapping High Wycombe
(via the PLAN mailing list)The blog Remapping High Wycombe describes the development of a project by Cathy & John Rogers. The point is to remap the area of High Wycombe earmarked for town centre re-development (formerly Project Phoenix). The remapping is to be undertaken in collaboration with commu...
Audio d-touch: tangible interface for music
Audio d-touch by Enrico Costanza: Audio d-touch is a set of 3 tangible interface applications for music composition and performance: the Augmented Stave, the Tangible Drum Machine and the Physical Sequencer. " Audio d-touch" uses a consumer-grade web camera and customizable block objects to provide...
Webootie
(via): webooti is a very simple computer made up for people who are not tech-savvy. 500euros for this rough platform. Developed by What is funny is that the tagline is: "webootie, as simple as the Minitel". The french minitel is still given as an example of a successfull product: people does not f...
EyeDraw: draw pictures with eye movement
After the nose-based interface previously described in this blog, here is a simpler controller: EyeDraw (by Anthony Hornof, director of the Cognitive Modeling and Eye Tracking Laboratory, and developed with Anna Cavender and Rob Hoselton): EyeDraw is a research project at the University of Oregon t...