tag yourself – photobooth

June 22, 2009 at 4:43 am | In interaction design, physical computing, technology | Leave a Comment
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As a part of mediamatic RFID hackers camp, RFID photobooth was created during Picnic conference. The photo booth team consisted of Timo Arnall, Anne Helmond, Jorn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen. The idea was to create something that brought people together both in a physical activity and in an online social network.

“A photo booth that encourages people to take photos of themselves with others. By waving multiple tags over a touchpoint inside the booth, a photo is taken, a connection is made and pictures are added to the Picnic website”

photobooth

A large white box was constructed, with a picnic-themed grassy interior that allowed up to about 10 people to have their photo taken at once. Inside there was an RFID reader, a camera and a screen that would show what was being recorded, as well as showing a countdown for picture taking. Outside a large LCD screen showed recent and random pictures from the booth, encouraging participation. By touching your tag to a reader outside, you could see pictures of yourself.

photobooth_schema

Photos from the booth were also uploaded to Flickr and tagged with the people’s first name (see for example all the photos taken of me and the tag cloud of the names and IDs of people who used the booth most). This realtime Flickr stream appeared on the outside of the booth, where people stood around watching their recent creations, as well as seeing random photos where they or their friends appeared.

photobooth_2

gesture based shortchuts on mobile

June 16, 2009 at 3:41 pm | In interaction design, physical computing, technology | Leave a Comment
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I guess after a long vacation of almost 15 days, i am publishing a new post. Ah!! going home feels toooo good.

I have always been fan of Adam Fischer/Kitchen Budapest’s work. I was just browsing around their website and i saw a nice exploration which i thought would be nice to share. Though it is not yet a product, but they have some future plans.

“we interact with mobile phones via 15-20 small buttons, which makes it extremely hard to reach certain functions. To write the word “hello” needs 15 button presses on an average mobile. We also need long keystrokes to find someone in the contact list with hundreds of names. Voice dialling has been available for many years, but it isn’t reliable at noisy places”

” we can define gestures by recording it a few times and selecting an action. Gestures are recognized by the computer and the action is sent to the mobile. It recognizes gestures with around 97% accuracy, using 10 different gestures. Future plans include implementing the recignizer application to the mobile phone, and building external hardware that works with older mobiles too.”

Interesting exploration & nice start!!

Natal – gesture based gaming by microsoft

June 2, 2009 at 5:26 am | In interaction design, ubiquitous computing | Leave a Comment
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Gesture based interaction is next 10 years, for sure. Started from Sony (Nintendo Wii), Apple (iphone) & now its turn of Microsoft (Project Natal). Microsoft as come up with an extension of XBOX which is completely gesture based. Interesting thing is, it does not require any remote like Nintendo Wii & its works on a camera recognition which recognizes full body gestures.

   ” Natal is controller-free, using what looks like a TV-mounted camera/microphone bar to sense motion, sound, and even 3D movement, suggesting that the technology involved is far beyond that of products like Sony’s PlayStation Eye “

the alloy!!

May 29, 2009 at 5:34 am | In design fun, interaction design, technology | Leave a Comment
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the alloy looks at different concept of navigating through several application in a single mobile phone. Today we use number of application on our mobile phones, like games, GPS, sms, call etc. The question is how a mobile device can become more intuitive to help users understand to navigate through the application.

” Ultimately the target audience for the user interface is anyone who wants to use their mobile phone to do more in a more intuitive and user friendly way than allowed before. It is a phone that allows for older eyes and clumsier fingers as much as for the younger touch screen savvy generation. In this respect the 01 User Interface has significant cross over value and broad appeal that could be applied within any multi functioned mobile handset or multi media device “

Cheers!!

mozilla labs design challenge!!

May 27, 2009 at 6:10 am | In design fun, interaction design | Leave a Comment
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In collaboration with IXDA & Johnny Holland, Mozilla labs is encouraging a design challenge focused on “reinventing tabs in the browser – how can we create, navigate & manage multiple websites within the same browser instance”

mozila_labs_design_challenge

“Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.”

Interestingly they have a discussion forum where designs can be discussed & designers can also get feedback of the designs.

what is mobile phone called in different countries?

May 7, 2009 at 6:19 pm | In interaction design | 7 Comments
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Currently there is an interesting discussion going on IXDA mailing list about different names of “mobile phones” in different countries. There are some interesting name we have come across, which is worth to share.

  • USA: Cellphone or cell, texting.
  • China: “Handy phone” (?)
  • Iran: mobile. (landlines are called “telephone”).
  • Spain: “teléfono móvil” or “móvil”.
  • Denmark: mobile phone.
  • UK: mobile or mobile phone.
  • Philipines: cellphone.
  • New Zealand: “mobile” (but cellphone is also used).
  • India: mobile. Telephone or landline for a landline.
  • Korea: “handphone”
  • Japan: keita.
  • Dutch (Netherlands): mobiele telefoon.
  • Dutch (Belgium): GSM.
  • France: “téléphone portable” or “portable” but since “portable” is used for laptop too some people call them “mobile”.
  • Germany: handy http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handy
  • Indonesia, they call it hand phone or simply abbreviated as “hp” pronounced “ha-pe”. “*Ha*” as if in *ha*m and “*pe*” as if in*Pe*psi. In terms of texting, they use “SMS”.
  • Turkey: “pocket phone” (“cep telefonu”)?
  • Cuba: cellular, or cell or il celular or movil
  • Argentina: movil, celular
  • Brazil: telefone celular or celular
  • Turkey: “cep telefonu” meaning “pocket phone”
  • Italy: cellulare or telefono celulare
  • Israel: Pelefon translates “wonder phone”
  • Costa Rica: “celular”

Any inputs guys??

NeuScreen-multitouch using Nokia N95

April 16, 2009 at 6:09 am | In creative, interaction design | Leave a Comment

Few months back, Nokia announced a competition “Forum Nokia”. Neuscreen was among the 11 finalist mentioned by Nokia.

NeuScreen has on-screen drawing tool to virtually draw on the TV screen, 3D image manipulation with the ability to rotate and zoom in/out on images, and an image gallery tool that will randomly load pictures from phones gallery for display on the TV. Using this last function of Neuscreen, an individual can move, zoom and rotate pictures with a touch of the screen. There are also options to reload to see new pictures, line-up to place the pictures in order, and a feature called shake for a real surprise. This project was developed by Sittiphol Phanvilai, a Forum Nokia Champion.

Other finalist projects can be seen here.

conference phone by Kicker!!

April 15, 2009 at 5:44 am | In industrial design, interaction design | Leave a Comment

Its always interesting to see when someone comes with a product for niche market (i would also love to day that). I remember some great designers designing for only one user. Kicker (owned by Dan Saffer) has developed a conference phone focusing on some point mentioned below.

conference_phone

dialer

conference_call1

The Kicker Conference Phone combines the humanity of in-person meetings with the convenience of efficient technology. Features:

  • Synchronizes with calendars and contacts for one-tap dialing
  • Quickly see who’s talking on a call and who wants to speak
  • “Hand Raising” to indicate a desire to speak
  • “Poking” to nudge other callers
  • Recording and marking of calls
  • Multi-line dialing
  • Adjusting individual lines for the best overall conference call quality
  • Comes in four different colors (silver, red, orange, and green)

I am not a frequent conference caller, or probably i have had very few conference calls, so can not say much about design, but personally i liked the idea of getting into niche & probably untouched market.

Here you can see more details.

preserving Indianness

April 14, 2009 at 8:57 am | In interaction design | Leave a Comment
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Students of interaction design from IDC-IIT Bombay are currently working on the theme of preservation. One of the group has taken the topic of “preserving Indianness”. They have come up some interesting points (can be seen in the image below) and specially the way the mindmap is drawn. Another group is working on “preserving first love”, again an interesting topic to work on.

preserving_indianness

preserving_first_love

Unfortunately they do not have a blog/website where they can showcase their brainstroming, mindmaping, ideas etc.

Nokia’s Go-Green

April 13, 2009 at 5:04 am | In creative, interaction design | 3 Comments

Nokia’s beta version of Green Explorer has started in december. It is geared specifically for people who want to travel in an eco-friendly fashion and provide their own travel tips, and the site has quite a few features that can make it a top resource when it comes out of beta.

nokia_go_green1

It has travel news, eco-centered information about destinations, tips from fellow green travelers, easy carbon offsets, mobile device access, and loads more. It is interesting web application they have developed and they are encouraging more travelers to register and put their area information.

go_green

Here you can related information about specific country, location, area etc. which is user driven. Everyone can come and put related about the place they want to. The beta version of the website has just started, so they do not have much database created. There is no information related to India. I have just enrolled, so i will put some  :)

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