Archive for WoW
May 9, 2008 at 8:22 am ·
Filed under Fun, WoW
Bert Simons has upped the ante in the field of paper craft. Seriously. I remember when I used to fumble around with my little Origami books, folding swans and other cute animals. It always took so much time. Then yesterday I saw an email fly by on an internal alias about this guy in the Netherlands who makes 3 dimensional pseudo realistic paper portraits and sculptures, and all I could say was WOW! This is waaaay cooler than any paper art I’ve seen so far. Check out his site, and try the DIY thingy. Might take a couple of hours to finish it though. :)
These are papercraft sculptures made in the same way as the familiar papercraft houses and animals. Bert Simons rules.
February 29, 2008 at 1:50 am ·
Filed under Technology, Releases, WoW
Straight out of MSR comes the (already rumored and anticipated) launch of he WorldWide Telescope (WWT), which is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.
This beauty was announced while I was in Madrid, and I didn’t had time to pre-schedule a blogpost, but you can tune in to the announcement talk at TED if you want to know all about it. It will be made available to the public in Spring 2008. Start the countdown :)
Find it at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/
Download the clip at the TED site (HiRes)
February 5, 2008 at 11:17 am ·
Filed under Video, Music, Technology, WoW
If there is one thing I truly like, it’s the mix of music and candy :) In this case the combination leads to The Bubblegum Sequencer, a physical step sequencer that lets you create drumloops by arranging colored balls on a tangible surface. It generates MIDI events and can be used as an input device to control audio hardware and software. The Bubblegum Sequencer senses the position of the balls through a video camera mounted underneath the surface. The captured image is processed by a computer vision routine that computes the average color in each hole. The colors are quantized and mapped to notes. For each note, a MIDI event is generated and sent to the operating system’s MIDI bus.
Video: Bubblegum Sequencer
In addition to the original features shown in the video, we’ve implemented a few more:
- Tempo tapping: Tap three or more times on a pressure-sensitive area on the side of the sequencer to set a new tempo for the playback loop.
- Visual feedback: The sequencer now sports a row of running LEDs to indicate the current position. We’ve also experimented with projecting animations of popping bubbles onto the surface to provide direct feedback which beats are currently played.
- Melody mode: Instead of just playing monophonic beats, we developed a mode in which the vertical position of the balls encodes the pitch of the sample played. To increase the range, two balls can be combined, totalling seven different possible notes on the blues scale.
- Voiceover mode: To make the sample mappings less reliable on computer-based UIs, we wrote a Processing application that lets you record voice samples for each color at playback time. You record by holding down the spacebar and speaking into a microphone.
Finally, people can’t claim anymore that electronic music isn’t handmade.
The Bubblegum Sequencer is a project by Hannes Hesse, Andrew McDiarmid and Rosie Han.
It was conceived and created in the course “Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces” at UC Berkeley’s School of Information in the Fall semester 2007.
For more information, visit the project site
December 9, 2007 at 3:14 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video, Technology, WoW
Another glance in the future and at the same time an example of a real experiment in South Africa, this time coming from the Cambridge department of Microsoft’s Research heaven. In this demo, we’re being introduced to how mobile communication can help spread information in regions where broadband is not as penetrated as it is in the Western hemisphere, through content delivery over the mobile network. Another part of the demo takes us through the concept of ‘living tomorrow’, focusing on how families would communicate in the future. So the story as it goes on the one hand is how ‘public’ communication works, when strangers request and share information. On the other hand, the communication happens in a closed group, e.g. a family, where all members know each other. The level of communicating is different, more personal. I really like where this is going, and I am wildly enthusiastic about a touchy interface in my house like that. That is so cool. At least to me, it beats the regular message board or giant cork pin cushion in the kitchen which is mostly overstacked with post-it notes anyway. The future is looking better and better!
Video: Mobile Living
December 9, 2007 at 1:10 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video, Technology, WoW
On December 4th, Carrie Longson and I got a booth on the exhibition floor to demo Silverlight and some cool applications that have been created with it so far. Apart from the fact that Carrie totally rocks with her demos, we got a quite a bunch of people that dropped by our booth and we showed off some superb cases of the Silverlight website, whilst talking about the benefits of Silverlight, both from a developer as from a consumer point of view. In between demos, I walked around a bit and went to interview and record the cool things that were on display. Below is an interview with the rep from MS Research Asia (Bejing, China). He brought with him an impressive piece of software that is called ‘Video Collage’. What it does is: it analyses the movie you upload into the tool, then it makes an image of all significant frames in the video and blends them in nicely so it forms some sort of thumbnail cloud. This gives you an overview of what is in the movie, and if you clip an image, you get taken instantly to that specific part of the movie. Nice work!
Video: Video Collage
December 8, 2007 at 11:52 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video, Technology, WoW
One of the coolest things I saw at the Innovation Day was a demo done with a Lego box. A software program was preset with the characteristics of the object that needed to be shown, in this case the contents of the Lego box. The a camera was set up to film the box. The software then interpreted the box and rezzed the contents on top of it. Obviously this is just one of the things the software could do, but it is by far one of the better ways to create some WoW about your product. This booth was crowded all the time. People were intrigued, wanted to see and learn and wanted to try and understand how this was possible. Other ways in which this software could be used include: a folder of a car that, when put under the camera, would rez the car and make it ride over the folder. One last example: you could also put a DVD box or DVD under the camera, and if it is programmed to do so, the screen will display the trailer of the DVD. I see a lot of very cool things happening in stores and on exhibitions if you can bring in a technology like this one. It’s absolutely amazing and as I was discussing with Kris… this has a lot of potential.
Video: Virtual Lego
December 8, 2007 at 2:43 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video, Technology, WoW
At the Inspiration Week in The Hague, the booth next to mine was the one of the DelFly team. Booth keepers Bart Remes and Filip Saad stole the show with their 17 grams light weight devices that looked a lot like a dragonfly. DelFly is a project of the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. In December 2006, after a year of developing, designing and building, the team has exceeded any expectation and produced the DelFly II, with camera onboard. The device can fly not only horizontally with a velocity of 15m/s, but it can also hover and even fly backwards with a velocity of -0.5m/s. This makes the DelFly II the world’s first ornithopter that has such a wide flight envelope without any adjustments in the plane’s configuration. This student graduation project has a lot of potential, especially when it comes to exploring small locations where little helicopters don’t have access to, or where they are sucked against the ceiling or wall due to natural forces. Think about exploring disaster sites of collapsed buildings, exploring pipelines and so on. These guys definitely deserved to be crowned with the ‘best product - best demo’ award, and a lot of the other exhibitors thought so too. Check out this small demo and be amazed. For me, this was a serious WoW moment.
Video: Delfly
December 8, 2007 at 3:06 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video, Technology, Photography, WoW
Last week I was at the Inspiration Week in The Hague and I got the chance to look around and check out some pretty impressive things. It took me a while to get all the movies done, since I was kinda busy and on the road a lot, but I’m trying to backtrack and post as much videos as I can during the next couple of days.
So, here is an interview with Tim Van der Zijden from NXP, who came to the Inspiration Playground with a mobile phone, a printer and a digital picture frame. That might not be so inspirational at first sight, but the WoW factor is in the speed and ease of use of the devices. Just look at the video, and it’ll be all clear :)
Video: NXP Bluetooth Printing
What I really like about this setup is how portable it makes digital living; how fast it transmits an image and the fact that the image is fully printed during the time it takes to transfer the image over bluetooth. As for the digital photo frame… I can see a device like this at, for instance, your mom’s house and then when you pass by on a Sunday afternoon, you simply put the latest picture of the kids in the frame. Some phones nowadays already have a decent image quality (3 to 5 Megapixels) so that should pretty much be enough to deliver a nice image I think.
November 21, 2007 at 9:37 pm ·
Filed under Video, WoW
I just couldn’t think of any other word but ‘WoW’ when I saw these guys going at it in the center court. Jeez. What a masterpiece of coordination and guts…
Video: Super Cool Bastketball Tricks
