This is a beautiful piece of interaction design from our friends at Berg. Love the sideways browsing in connection with the “digging in up-down” browsing mode. Two fingered swipe gesture for fast browsing and “dog-earing” (genius!) I suddenly feel a bout of gadget envy!
Here is what they say:
Popular Science + is the first digital magazine to emerge from Bonnier’s Mag+, an ongoing project across all Bonnier titles in the U.S. and Europe to rethink the way magazines can be read on a new generation of full-color, touchscreen tablet devices.
Popular Science+ is a new way of experiencing magazines on digital devices and a first step toward our vision of what digital magazine reading can be. Mag+, Bonnier’s digital magazine platform, is a project that began months ago in a collaboration between Bonnier’s global R&D task force and BERG, a London-based design studio.
Our goal has been to preserve all the qualities that make magazines such a powerful, popular medium—inspired packaging of carefully curated content by a team of expert editors, delivered in a visually dazzling issue with a beginning, middle and end—and at the same time to reinvent it in a way that makes it come to life on the iPad’s screen.”
Read more about Mag+ and join the conversation about the future of digital magazines at www.bonnier.com/betalab
We’re excited to have a conversation with you to find out what you think of the Mag+ platform and the Popular Science+. We’ll base our changes and upgrades on your feedback, so please give us your thoughts.
An interesting new platform has been showcased at last week’s BVE trade exhibition which represents the closing gap between entertainment and social networking. Project Canvas, is “a proposed partnership between the BBC, ITV, C4, Five, BT and Talk Talk to build an open internet-connected TV platform”. As well as creating a technical standard for internet connected TV devices, the proposal also includes a split-screen experience with networked conversations on sites such as Twitter appearing next to TV pictures.
With many people already known to watch TV whilst also browsing the internet, Project Canvas marks an inevitable shift for the media industry. Previous blog posts on here about the reach of shows such as Glee and the Superbowl have already highlighted the role online interaction is having in boosting viewing figures, increasing brand awareness and, ultimately, acting as a drive to consumption. Added to the expected lift on the ban for product placement on UK TV, and we are likely to see a dramatic shift in how people watch and consumer media in their homes.
(Apologies for low quality movie – currently only example of the demo available)
Nearness is a lovely contemporary take on the famous Fischli and Weiss‘ film “Der Lauf der Dinge“, which describes a series of everyday objects triggering each other in a long chain. Most of us are probably most familiar with the highly controversial yet in itself brilliant Honda Cog commercial which almost literally translated the artists’ award winning film into a car commercial. Nearness takes the Fischli & Weiss concept further though as it explores how modern day interactive technologies (RFID) with the use of proximity detection make “touching” redundant. It’s an original modern day version of a masterpiece.
A collaboration between our friends from Berg and Timo.
A few of us went to the onedotzero 09 launch party last night at Village Underground.
The showpiece of the night was the projection of a living identity created by former MB creative Karsten Schmidt and W+K London. The identity is build in processing and pulls in conversations through API’s from Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo and relevant blogs. These feeds form the thread like strands of the visualisation. The main type rendering writes out text messages send via a bespoke application that was build for the N900 by Gary Birkett. It was fascinating to send messages directly into the projection, but also moving the phone itself manipulated the animation. A stunning piece of work we all agree.
Lovely tactile RFID interface ideas. Sleepy audio visual cushions, cups that play last fm favourites, a clay cook that suggests recipes when licking on ingredients, wooden toys that trigger sounds and more.
Interaction Design students at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design participated in a three-day Touch workshop where the brief was to design a playful, exploratory or characterful RFID interface. The emphasis of this workshop was on exploring the relationship between material, tactile properties of physical objects and digital interaction through RFID and required material experiments made to a high level.
There is a lot of augmented reality experimentation out there but rarely you see such simple and stunning work.
Le Monde des Montagnes by Camille Scherrer shows a table with a book underneath an angle poise lamp. The camera is positioned inside the lamp (nice touch!) and when the user turns the pages a magic story of beautiful animated illustrations layer on top of the existing book content.
The interaction seems really natural. No awkward holding strange symbols to perceived cameras in fact there doesn’t seem to be an AR marker insight. Looks like the camera analyses on a basis of page left and right. Very clever! View here
In this world where everything happens at the merest touch of a button (which is not even protruding anymore) I have been hunting for more effort, more sweat when it comes to human interaction with a machine.
So I found this piece again: Tokyo based VJ and band project dvd beat away on their drum kits and launch a world of abstract Pong Style animations.
A sensor on their drum sets transmits the vibration of the drums as signals to a midi interface. Those signals are then converted into midi note numbers and the data is then sent to a visual PC that creates the animations generated in processing.
We love the labour, yet its minimalist and effective! d.v.d on vimeo
Daito Manabe is a Japanese electronic artist/musician utilising his body work as an interactive platform to create his musical performances. In this video he uses electric stimulation of his facial muscles to trigger a midi sequencer and create facial muscular music (here is a link to his youtube video archive).
I like the way his physiological make up (the structure of his face) becomes a framework for his expression based performance. In parasitically hosting off a predefined system (in this case, a soft/wet system) we get adaption in progressive terms. This approach creates new experiences and also provides methodological thinking as a spur for innovation.
Japanese Flash developer ‘Saqoosha‘ made FLARToolkit which is basically a port of the Java ARToolkit into AS3, creating a way to publish to the web with ease (as long as you have the printed markers and a web cam) Check out his SWF demo (Flash 9 player), you can also get the source code, and marker pdf. If you do not have a web cam there is a desktop fireworks demo video.
