Robot Readable World
By Timo Arnall. Release notes here.
Depthcam
3D web enabled Kinect webcam. Announcement here, source on GitHub.
Golan Levin 3D Interview
Golan Levin was invited by the FITC conference to answer a series of “Ask Me Anything” questions posted by Reddit visitors. At the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Golan’s video was created by Fellows James George and Jonathan Minard, artists-in-residence researching new forms of experimental 3D cinema. Their work explores the notion of “re-photography”, in which otherwise frozen moments in time may be visualized from new points of view.
Much nicer than my primitive 4-hour-hack.
Android Mannequins
Don’t order your team to work more hours
Excellent piece by Rafe Colburn:
Working more than forty hours a week is hardly outside the norm in software development, but directly demanding more hours from people is a bad idea for a number of reasons. I won’t get into basic issues of justice and decency and instead focus only on effectiveness. Even if your only goal is to get things done as quickly as possible, demanding that your team work more as a group is still a bad idea.
I believe the same arguments hold true for pushing unrealistic and unnecessarily tight deadlines.
Puppet Parade
Remember Theo Watson’s interactive puppet Kinect prototype from back in 2010?
He and Emily Gobeille turned it into a beautiful installation called Puppet Parade (via):
Vienna, the Top Smart City in the World
This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as going into the research I had not heard much about Vienna as a smart city. But Vienna was the only city that ranked in the top 10 in every category: innovation city (5), regional green city (4), quality of life (1) and digital governance (8). Vienna is establishing bold smart-city targets and tracking their progress to reach them, with programs like the Smart Energy Vision 2050, Roadmap 2020, and Action Plan 2012-2015. Vienna’s planners are incorporating stakeholder consultation processes into building and executing carbon reduction, transportation and land-use planning changes in the hopes of making the city a major European player in smart city technologies.
Flattering, though i do have to say that it’s somewhat disconcerting that i haven’t noticed much Smart-City-ness in Vienna after having lived here for the past 12 years.
That being said, it’s a fantastic city to live in and i love it here.
Averia, the Average Font
Averia by Dan Sayers:
This is the story of the creation of a new font, Avería: the average of all the fonts on my computer. The field of typography has long fascinated me, and I love playing with creative programming ideas, so it was perhaps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “generative typography”. A Google on the subject brought up little, and I put the idea to the back of my mind until it occurred to me that perhaps the process of averaging, or interpolating, existing fonts might bring up interesting results. Luckily at this point I didn’t do any more web searching – instead I grabbed my laptop and came up with an initial idea for finding what the average of all my fonts might look like – by overlaying each letter at low opacity.
The article includes some interesting insights and technical details of the underlying process.
Previously: Average Font by Moritz Resl.
Multitouch eBook Concept
Some interesting concepts in there. Not sure how well they would perform with real users as far as intuitiveness and discoverability are concerned. (via)
Two Views on Online News Editing
Felix Salmon on Elizabeth Spiers’ success at the New York Observer (via):
The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the more opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.
Salon editor Kerry Lauerman (via):
We’ve also — completely against the trend — slowed down our process. We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic.
So, yeah, i guess there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all approach in online news editing.
