Richti-Areal
Impressive augmented reality projection mapping installation around an architectural model by Zürich-based Projektil (via):
SHOWROOM RICHTI-AREAL from PROJEKTIL on Vimeo.
Two Years of Kickstarter
Kickstarter just turned two and released some stats on the occasion: $53 million dollars pledged, more than 7.000 successful projects and film projects raking in most of the money. I’m surprised that games aren’t doing better.
Clever use of augmented reality to preview a new tv set in your living room by Panasonic:
(via)
Relatively early on we brought a handful of people off the street (literally) for our first round of usability tests. Most of them had trouble even getting through the installer: for example, zero of the five people noticed that we had a tray icon (our most important UI element), and more than one person tried clicking the screenshots in the tour. This was a mortifying experience for us, causing us to add a Giant Ass Blue Bouncing Arrow pointing to the tray icon during install, and to tweak the coloring of the screenshots to distinguish them from your OS chrome. Forcing these people through some kind of folder mapping scheme would have been a colossal train wreck.
Such are the joys of usability testing.
Build Your Own Newstweek
Y’know, i would be impressed with Newstweek if it were just some elaborate piece of design fiction, but apparently you can now build your own Newstweek device for less than 50 Euro. Unless this howto is just an elaborate piece of design fiction as well – i haven’t tried building one myself, so how would i know…
Cascade
NYTLabs presents Cascade, an interactive visualization tool to explore how stories from the New York Times propagate through social media. Nieman Journalism Lab has more background information. (via)
The New York Times reports about personal data visualization. The article is a bit all over the place, but i guess that’s maybe the point?
Incidentally, Daytum founders Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case just yesterday announced that they will be joining Facebook. I wonder what will become of Daytum (which wasn’t acquired).
Wired on Push Pop Press
Wired reports about iPad publishing company Push Pop Press, which is backed by Al Gore:
Al Gore’s Our Choice Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.
Their technology sure seems very smooth and well executed, but watching this video brings many problems described in Donald Norman’s critique of touch interfaces to mind – lack of affordances, visibility, discoverability and consistency. Just look at that folded, pinchable image around 1:05 – how is that intuitive?
Added later: re-reading this post it strikes me as way too negative, especially considering my past leniency towards other iPad publishing efforts. I don’t wanna be a jerk, so please let me clarify: This is obviously a tremendous feat of engineering prowess, way beyond anything other tool developers and publishers have shown so far. It’s also well designed, and maybe the lack of visibility and affordances isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a one-off, media-rich book, adding a certain sense of playful discovery to the overall experience. But i’m not quite convinced that the interactions truly solve the fundamental problems of existing iPad publishing efforts. It almost seems to me as if they’re trying to be too clever for their own good, what with the excessive use of pinch gestures and gimmicks like blowing into the microphone to spin a wind wheel. Maybe it’s just a matter of time, ongoing education and standardization across different publishers until this problem sorts itself out.
Added later still: 90WPM has a great and balanced review of Our Choice.
What Does Your Phone Know About You?
What Does Your Phone Know About You? More Than You Think by Alexis Madrigal:
I plugged my phone into my computer and opened an application called Lantern, a forensics program for investigating iPhones and iPads. Ten minutes later, I’m staring at everything my iPhone knows about me. About 14,000 text messages, 1,350 words in my personal dictionary, 1,450 Facebook contacts, tens of thousands of locations pings, every website I’ve ever visited, what locations I’ve mapped, my emails going back a month, my photos with geolocation data attached and how many times I checked my email on March 24 or any day for that matter. Want to reconstruct a night? Lantern has a time line that combines all my communications and photos in one neat interface. While most of it is invisible during normal operations, there is a record of every single thing I’ve done with this phone, which also happens to form a pretty good record of my life.
If your phone falls into the wrong hands, some location data in a cache file certainly isn’t the only thing you should be worried about. As Tim Maly put it on Twitter, “Our outboard brains allow outboard mind reading.”
Wired interviews Joi Ito, who just joined MIT Media Lab as director (congrats!):
What you don’t want is a bunch of people who read the headlines of all the newspapers and just consume everything that everyone else is consuming and then call themselves generalists. That’s not useful.
They know everything that everybody else already knows and they’re probably going to come up with the same thoughts. When you go deep on anything, you start to find nuances that other people don’t know.
If you don’t know much about Joi, John Markoff has a nice profile at the NYT.
