Pixelsumo is a blog about interaction, with an emphasis on play, installation, video game culture, playgrounds and toys. Written by Chris O'Shea.
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Posted February 16th 2010 under Education, Open Source, Toys
When I was a little boy of 10, I (for a short time) joined the young engineers club at our school. Yes not the football team, the engineering club :) One day they took us to the workshops of a large Uk energy provider and they showed us how simple circuits work, then using educational kits we soldered our own FM radios. This is a really great way to learn and more of this should be done in schools, kids aren’t given enough credit for what they can achieve on their own I feel. By knowing how to things work we have a better understanding of the world. This is why I like the migon game kit so much.
Digital cameras for children tend to look like this (some times for a good reason), but wouldn’t it be great if they could build their own camera and understand how everything works, learn how to take photos & what makes a good image, how to apply filters & share photos with friends?
Recently I stumbled upon the Bigshot camera & initiative, started up by Shree Nayar at the Computer Vision Laboratory at Columbia University…
“A camera designed for kids can be much more than just a toy: it can serve as a powerful educational medium. We believe that such an educational camera must have a radically different design from that of a typical consumer camera. (a) It should be designed as a kit for assembly by students. The assembly process should not only demystify the workings of the camera, but also expose students to various science and engineering concepts. (b) It should include features that cannot be found in other cameras, allowing students to explore new creative dimensions. (c) It should be low-cost, with the potential to serve as the basis for a scalable social venture.”
The website breaks the process down into very nice clear sections, build, learn, use, share. I’m excited about the possibilities of this making it into schools worldwide. For now it says “The Bigshot camera prototypes shown here are being used in workshops and are not on sale”, but I will do an update when more word on release becomes available.
For now take 5 mins out of your day to watch this video.
Friends With You
Posted February 15th 2010 under Inflatable, Installations, Playgrounds, Toys
How much do I enjoy the work of Friends With You? More than chocolate & cake, that’s how much. If I could, I’d live inside one of their spaces instead of grey old Britain.
“Established in 2002 by Miami-based artists Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, FriendsWithYou set forth on a mission to spread the idea of Magic, Luck, and Friendship™ around the world, and become Friends-With-You!”
Yes they do quirky & playful character design, lots of plush toys & merchandise, great animations, but aside from this there are 2 things that I’m happy to see.
1) As artists, they have managed to straddle (successfully) the art world and commercial brand activities, keeping integrity in their work and the way they diversify in their products…
“As leaders in developing a new approach that crosses Fine Art, Commercial Work for Hire, and Intellectual Property Brand Development, FriendsWithYou holds a prominent well-respected place in the merging worlds of art and business” - from company page.
2) “FriendsWithYou experiential installations are fully immersive experiences that draw audiences into a magical world where the line between imagination and reality is blurred”
Have are some of my favourites…
Rainbow Valley
“Rainbow Valley is a permanent playground installation at Aventura Mall in Miami, Fl. This is our first-ever dream playground brought to life! Rainbow Valley tells the enchanting story of a miniature mountain who loses his family and goes on a search for other small mountains to play with. This adventure is filled with rainbow blasts, magic, and earth moving moments! If you’re in Aventura Mall, go check it out!”
Fun House
“Our FriendsWithYou Fun House is the most fun art piece you will ever experience (and it’s for big kids too)!”
Skywalkers
“In 2006 we opened Art Basel Miami with an out-of-this-world inflatable procession! Skywalkers, commissioned by Toyota Scion, featured 18 giant blimps (designed by FriendsWithYou & our artist friends), over 300 volunteers, a high school marching band, and thousands of attendees all working together..”
They even have a new boutique store in Miami (see below)…
Make iPhone apps using Processing?
Posted February 13th 2010 under Processing, iPhone
Just a quick post. For any readers that haven’t seen this yet, you can now prototype, and possibly publish, iPhone apps using Processing.
Called iProcessing & created by Luckybite (see BirdBox Alarm Clock)…
“iProcessing is an open programming framework to help people develop native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for iPhone.”
Of course you can also make iTouch apps in openFrameworks, and soon export from Flash CS5, or if you are hardcore just the native SDK, but we like easier entry points and saving some boring work.
There are some speed & graphics limitations, and one downside at the moment is : “It is unknown as to whether apps created using the framework will be approved if submitted to the App Store”, but things will improve over time & this is really good news for students who are just starting out in coding Processing.
Much better coverage on Create Digital Motion & CreativeApps.
Thanks Tom Hulbert @ Luckybite!
Drawing tables & furniture
Posted February 13th 2010 under Drawing, Furniture, Toys
Right now I am doing a lot of research around approaches to drawing. So, here is a summary post of drawing tables and things you can draw on…
Childrens Paper Chair
“The chair encourage people to buy environmental friendly products, intended to make a comment on our use of paper, is shaped as a toilet-roll. As the paper is being used the size of the toilet-roll increases, such the small child sits on a small roll and the older child on a bigger roll! The Chair is made with drawing paper, as the paper is being “drawn upon”, the size of the front cylinder increases and thus follows the child’s growth”
Stencil Play Table & Spira Dining Table
“The Stencil Play Table allows sheets of A1 paper to be placed under the removable acrylic table top, which comes in a variety of large themed stencils, and spirograph set. Children can use the stencils to either colour in using crayons or felt tips, or to draw around the patterns and paint the pictures after removing the stencils. A shelf underneath is used to store a stack of paper.”
Porcupine Desk
“The table surface shows a printed motif resembling a charm bracelet, with animal shapes and other symbols attached to a chain link circle. Some of the links in the chain are bored through the tabletop, so that coloured markers supplied with the desk can be stored in the holes. Add a little imagination, and the table resembles a porcupine— which is what inspired the name.”
Technically not to draw on, but I like the pens in the table.
Charles Storage
Kids toy box inside and chalk drawing surface on top.
Desk House
“Our re-creation of our universal ‘first drawing’ of the square house with its chimney and winding garden path…Available in 2 sizes, this is the perfect table to show your child the pleasure of reading, drawing, and sharing. At the same time, it is the ideal playhouse, to be lived under and played with”
Chalk Spinner
“The Chalk Spinner is an interactive classroom element that brings play and learning together. This spinning 3-D cylindrical chalkboard is an innovative educational center that promotes creative thinking and the discovery process. The Chalk Spinner offers many activities aimed to encourage drawing, refine coordination, and develop social skills. It keeps kids and their imaginations active while teaching basic art elements and techniques. Its unique rotating motion inspires kids to explore and discover.”
Paperstorm
“A total of 2.600 single sheets, each 50 x 100 cm build a table with 40 cm height, which stands on a flat stainless steel base. Stay-down rolls let the table stay movable. This is especially important for the positioning in the children’s room. The selected paper from IGEPA is produced out of Eucalyptus trees, which are planted as renewable raw materials on special ecologically certified plantations.”
See also writingtable and Little Genius.
The Artvertiser
Posted February 12th 2010 under Augmented Reality, Devices, Games
I am a big fan of the works Berlin based Julian Oliver (see Fijuu2, levelHead & q3apd) so I am very pleased to see his latest work, The Artvertiser, come to life at the recent Transmediale.
“The Artvertiser is an urban, hand-held Improved Reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art.”
The project was initiated by Julian Oliver in February 2008 and is being developed in collaboration with Clara Boj, Diego Diaz (hardware) and Damian Stewart (software).
“The Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space. An instrument of conversion and reclamation, The Artvertiser takes imagery seen by millions and re-purposes it as a surface for the presentation of art”
“The Artvertiser software is trained to recognise individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual ‘canvas’ on which an artist can exhibit images or video when viewed through the hand-held device. After training, where ever the advertisement appears, the chosen art will appear instead when viewed live through the hand-held device. It doesn’t matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle.”
Its a fantastic use of Augmented Reality. Of course this software could work on netbooks, smart phones / iPhones etc, but what interests me most is the custom hardware device (shown below)…
Billboard Intercept Prototype
“A set of urban and weather-proof digital binoculars have been built. This device guarantees high-quality immersive advertisement substitution and is be more performant for AR applications than any hand-held device currently available; equipped with a high-quality wide-angle lens, fast CPU and GPU, powerful wireless adapter, long battery life and plenty of solid state storage space.”
I would much rather have a portable device like that than view it on a phone. The styling is great too, retro games machine feel (like these).
BirdBox Alarm Clock
Posted February 12th 2010 under iPhone
The BirdBox Alarm Clock created by design consultancy Luckybite (Durrell Bishop & Tom Hulbert), packaged under the Luckybits brand (for releasing products), is an interesting way of making money from the app store.
The app is free, but you pay for the self assembly card BirdBox. Its a neat idea for a revenue stream and I like it as a product too, its quirky fun and its nice waking up to the sounds of chirping birds, puts a smile on your day.
The app itself is great to use. The night mode darkens the screen only showing the clock hands, good for not being too bright when you want to sleep. Setting the alarm time you simply scroll an arrow on the clock face around. In daytime mode you can also get an hourly cuckoo clock style alert too. Unfortunately (like all apps) they can’t run whilst you are in sleep mode, so you need to keep the device powered and not locked. Not too bad if you already charge your phone overnight.
“The BirdBox turns your free app into a nesting box/cuckoo alarm clock. The box is made of high quality heavy card and comes flat. It is easy to assemble and has lots of nice features: Tap through the hole and the clock doors open to see the birds nesting » Lifting the lid also raises the iPhone out of the box » Choose the box colour you like and the app has a clock face to match”.
You can watch the video here. Someone has also made a review video here.
Inside Project Natal
Posted February 10th 2010 under Computer Vision, Games
(image Popular Science)
Previously on Pixelsumo I posted a closer look at Project Natal, from hardware status & origins. As the post suggests, the key to the technical success is bringing complex algorithms that estimate body joint positions to a mass consumer level. Getting this right in every home & lighting condition is no easy task.
The processing of the depth image was going to be on a chip in the camera, but it’s now been reported that the processing will be done in software, to keep the costs of the hardware down.
Recently lots more behind the scenes videos and press revealed insights into how the body processing works.
This video shows some of the body estimation processing in the making.
Originally it was thought that Natal might use time of flight (like the 3DV ZCam) to measure the time it takes for infrared light to bounce from objects.
“Frances MacDougall, chief technology officer at GestureTek, said his company was also working on Project Natal. Asked why there were so many vendors on Natal, he said that Microsoft will be using a low-cost 3-D camera from PrimeSense. But it purchased 3DV because it had a strong patent portfolio. And GestureTek itself is providing a software layer that helps interpret the data coming in from the 3-D camera and makes it useful for the game machine”. (source Venture Beat)
Instead of time of flight, the PrimeSense camera projects a pattern (like a barcode) of infrared light, with the sensor reading back this pattern and computing the depth map (which they are calling Light Coding).
This video (linked above) shows how impressive the tracking is, calculating accurately body parts from a side angle, and when joints are occluded out of view.
Popular Science has a great article about how Microsoft are training the brain behind the pose estimation & how the algorithms work. I really hope to get my hands on this one day…
“Step 2: Then the brain guesses which parts of your body are which. It does this based on all of its experience with body poses—the experience described above. Depending on how similar your pose is to things it’s seen before, Natal can be more or less confident of its guesses. In the color-coded person above [bottom center], the darkness, lightness, and size of different squares represent how certain Natal is that it knows what body-part that area belongs to. (For example, the three large red squares indicate that it’s highly probable that those parts are “left shoulder,” “left elbow” and “left knee”; as the pixels become smaller and muddier in color, such as the grayish pixels around the hands, that’s an indication that Natal is hedging its bets and isn’t very sure of its identity.)”
The Pool
Posted February 8th 2010 under Light, Playgrounds
The Pool by Jen Lewin is a really interesting and modular approach to creating a light based game / playground space…
“The Pool is an environment of giant, concentric circles created from interactive, wireless circular pads. By entering the pool, you enter a world where play and collaborative movement can create a cascading effect of swirling light and color .
Each pad in The Pool is its own wireless controller. All of the 120 pads communicate and listen to each other in an organic network formed in the same way people interact. The Pool has no single master computer and does not use a router to route or control connections. Each pad is independent, and simultaneously interacts and listens to its environment based on user feedback.”
I’d love to get my hands on the set-up to prototype game ideas.
