SketchSynth by Billy Keyes lets you sketch out interactive user interfaces using pen and paper:

SketchSynth lets anyone create their own control panels with just a marker and a piece of paper. Once drawn, the controller sends Open Sound Control (OSC) messages to anything that can receive them; in this case, a simple synthesizer running in Pure Data. It’s a fun toy that also demonstrates the possibilities of adding digital interaction to sketched or otherwise non-digital interfaces.

Brilliant. (via)

Before that, Petr Altman and @Rob_cz presented something similar at Microsoft Fest in Prague:

But the first Kinect Sandbox i know of is Project Mimicry, a multiplayer sandbox game developed by Monobanda:

I love that progression – from media installation to hack to research project. Normally you’d kinda expect these things to move in the opposite direction.

If you had a huge pile of data about websites and services that might pose a competitive threat and billions of dollars in cash at hand, what would you do? Right: You’d buy Instagram. And you’d be able to make a very informed decision without consulting anyone, because, well, math.

No, Facebook Has Not Already Peaked

When talking about Zuckerberg’s most valuable personality trait, a colleague jokingly invokes the famous Stanford marshmallow tests, in which researchers found a correlation between a young child’s ability to delay gratification—devour one treat right away, or wait and be rewarded with two—with high achievement later in life. If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists’ subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: He’d still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows.

The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man

ZeroN by Jinha Lee. (via)

Recursive Drawing by Toby Schachman. Source available on GitHub.

(via)

An algorithm is the key to the game experience in a different sense as well. As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules which operate in the universe constructed by this game. She learns its hidden logic, in short its algorithm. Therefore, in games where the game play departs from following an algorithm, the player is still engaged with an algorithm, albeit in another way: she is discovering the algorithm of the game itself. I mean this both metaphorically and literally: for instance, in a first person shooter, such as “Quake,” the player may eventually notice that under such and such condition the enemies will appear from the left, i.e. she will literally reconstruct a part of the algorithm responsible for the game play. Or, in a diffirent formulation of the legendary author of Sim games Will Wright, “Playing the game is a continuos loop between the user (viewing the outcomes and inputting decisions) and the computer (calculating outcomes and displaying them back to the user). The user is trying to build a mental model of the computer model.”

What we encountered here is an example of the general principle of new media: the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself.

Lev Manovich: Database as a Symbolic Form. (via)

As far as we can work out, a Weavr’s most obvious use is as a sort of discoverability tool that you can fine-tune to your own preferences — think of it as similar to an automatically-generating Tumblr or Pinterest. If you’re planning a move to another city, you could create a Weavr with your preferences but geolocate it in the city you are moving to. That way, the Weavr will trawl around finding places, experiences and content that might interest you in your new home. “Think of it as advanced reconnaissance on the ground using live data. The Rough Guides can’t keep up.” O’Hara explains.

I seriously doubt this works well (yet?), but i absolutely have to try this.

James George, Alexander Porter and Jonathan Minard, who did the Golan Levin 3D interview, have released their RGB+D toolkit as an open source project. It allows you to combine DSLR HD video material with Kinect depth data.
Check out some examples of what you can do with it at the RGB+D tumblr.

Social media is to the Read/Write Web what sprawl is to the metropolis of modernity: a homogenous, cancerous, rhizomatic junkspace that expands exponentially outward on a sludgy wave of strip malls and sponsored links, greed and induced demand. This ruthless modernization produces miles of “junkspace” — a term coined by the architect Rem Koolhaas, who wrote that “more and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction… Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends … Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever.” Koolhaas was referring to the airport and the strip-mall and the single-zone sprawl, but he could have been talking about Facebook.

Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs – The New Inquiry

[There's] a new phenomena that I like to call the Stacks [vertically integrated social media]. And we’ve got five of them — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. The future of the stacks is basically to take over the internet and render it irrelevant. They’re not hostile to the internet — they’re just [looking after] their own situation. And they all think they’ll be the one Stack… and render the others irrelevant. And they’ll all be rendered irrelevant. That’s the future of the Stacks.

Bruce Sterling At SXSW 2012: The Best Quotes.

Fashion retailer C&A may be a fading brand in much of Europe, but its Brazilian arm is doing what it can to stay on the pulse of social media. A new initiative called Fashion Like allows people to ‘like’ certain items of clothing on the company’s Facebook page, and these clicks are collated and displayed on the relevant clothes rack in real-time. Customers are thereby able to view the item’s online popularity in the real world to help them make their decision.

Real-time Facebook 'likes' displayed on Brazilian fashion retailer's clothes racks.
Next step: visualizing real-time likes directly on clothes.

Five years ago, three artists legally changed their name to Janez Janša and joined the conservative Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS.) So far, so almost normal. Except that Janez Janša is also he name of the leader of the party and Prime Minister of Slovenia. Suddenly there were more Janez Janšas acting together within the same physical and media space.

My Name Is Janez Janša – we make money not art.

Somewhat related: Two Bejars – Daniel Bejar the artist impersonates Daniel Bejar the musician.