Created by Sebastian Trump, Orphion is a musical instrument in-between string and percussion. Aim is to create easy or virtuosic melodies just by moving fingers on virtual pads. Included are a several layouts and depending on the surface area of your touch, the sound is softer or on the contrary with more attack. Here is what is included:

• Different articulations from soft to plucked to hardly slapped
• Natural interaction
• Extend your ways of expression as a percussionist, guitarist, pianist or other musician
• 9 transposable pad-layouts with different tonalities from easy to complex (Five, Bluesscale, Pentawheel, Piano, Guitar Strings, 5ths circle, 3rd Matrix, Bassdrums, Waterdrops)
• 8 individual voices for 8 fingers (4 on iPad 1)

Continue reading.... Orphion – Musical instrument for iPad [iPad, Sound]

Bowyer is a new company by Vadik Marmeladov, Sergey Filippov, a man known as “The Client”, and Ilya Kolganov. In this interview we talk through their first collaborations, philosophy, process, commercial projects, and future plans.

“Craftmanship is attention to details. Luxury is attention to unnecessary details.”

Typical phone games and apps retain a certain average appearance with a target on mass-market appeal. Design is usually not a priority, and as a result, often mediocre. Unlike the fashion industry, for instance, app development is young enough that nichés have not yet developed fully. Seeing this gap in the industry, Bowyer wished to target luxury markets.

“About 2 years ago while working on a commercial website we came up with a simple app for a luxury brand,” Vadik explained. The screen would be completely black, and through in-app purchases, individual diamonds could be bought and populated on the screen. The concept would be a reflection of physical diamonds: holding no real value other than the inherent scarcity and cost of ownership.

Continue reading.... An Interview with Bowyer – UIDesign + Funware + Luxury [Theory, iPad, Interview]

Photo/Nykto is an experimental game conceived by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley as part of the “Unterplay” project at the Master Media Design —HEAD, Genève. Edric describes at as a game for nyktophobes (fear of darkness – wiki) and photophobes (the oposite). It is played by switching on and off the lights in order to avoid reaching the edge of the screen. The score increases exponentially near the edges, and speeds up with each change from light to dark and back.

Continue reading.... Photo/Nykto [iPad, openFrameworks, Games]

How did we get from command line to computer interfaces we know today? PlosBlogs’s NeuroTribes offers an insight into the sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist who’s high-school friend Andy Hertzfeld, the lead software architect for the Macintosh operating system, offered a job to design fonts for the Mac.

Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.

Continue reading.... The Sketchbook of Susan Kare [News]

Created by Teehan+Lax Labs, Touch Vision Interface is a combination of software and hardware to allow realtime manipulation of content on a remote device via touch interface on a mobile device. Instead of purely using mobile device screen as an input, the user views the remote content and applies the content simultaneously, better know but not necessarily a form of AR.

I can still recall the first time I saw an Augmented Reality demo. There was a sense of wonderment from the illusion of 3D models living within the video feed. Of course, the real magic was the fact that the application was not only viewing its surrounding environment, but also understanding it. AR has proven to be an incredible tool for enhancing perception of the real world. Despite this, I’ve always felt that the technology was somewhat limited in its application. It is typically implemented as output in the form of visual overlays or filters. But could it also be used for user input? We decided to explore that question by pairing the principles of AR (like real-time marker detection and tracking) with a natural user interface (specifically, touch on a mobile phone) to create an entirely new interactive experience.

Continue reading.... Touch Vision Interface [openFrameworks, Arduino, Android]

Beta is a fictional prototype by Lukas Franciszkiewicz addressing media influence and the decision making shift from individual to computer. Lukas divides interaction with the computer into three needs: finding and consuming information, the use of communication and mediation, and the automation of processes. The three objects represent these, handing over decision making to the computer in the particular sphere of operation. In addition, the objects plays a part in this relationship, how it’s interacted with and the primitive instincts it promotes.

If we assume that the amount of information we feed into the grid, the computer increasingly carries more power of decision, we give up control of the technology. Output, input and process are the functions of the object and refer to the formal characteristics of the blocks. The reduction of concrete and transparent structures constitutes the possibility of the occurrence of this relationship. Motivated human irritation open the demand for a change of perspective and awareness to make restrictions. The physical change of the screen is both a break and brings with it new freedoms, but offered only a replacement of one paradigm against the other.

The project film will be exhibited at the “Körpersichten” Exhibition from 01.06. – 24.06.2011 in Kiel (www.muthesius.de).

Project Page

See also We Play Bodies [Inspiration, Objects] – ‘Behaviouristics Test Lab …

“Sometimes it seems as if I were looking at myself from the outside. As if the imaginary camera eye moved away from first person view to third person view. I think it is an error in perception. Brain creates reality in itself after all and senses are only reference points for its creation. But I know what a feeling it is. It is as to look at the whole chaos of life from from above and to feel the line around which new events spring up. It is a united line which is the median of everything that happens.”

The interface by Boris Vitázek uses kinect as input via vvvv. The piece represents the first version of software that Boris plans to evolve into a more complex type of performance. Boris also sees it as something that could be a musical instrument which includes a combination of object and body control.

The piece originated from the impulse at kinect workshop in progressbar and it was displayed as an output of this workshop at the festival Multiplace 2011 in Bratislava.

/found via gamescenes.org

Created by Matt Ruby, ALT CTRL is a series of works that examine the way we interact with digital systems through the use of experimental interfaces. The three major works in this series are Excitebike, Sympathy for Pacman, and Swap Meet. All three works appropriate an early video game: Excitebike, Pacman and Pro Wrestling as the content for interface. The controls of each game have been subverted to create new experiences with these existing systems.

The series builds on the premise that our relationship to the systems that we use is an fundamental part of who we are and how we understand the world. The focus is on experimental interfaces that attempt to push the boundaries of comfortable interaction by challenging the user with foreign and difficult controls. These interfaces provoke foreign and expressive interactions in hopes of inspiring viewers to question their role as participant.

Excitebike is a piece that replaces hand controller with a helmet embedded with a microphone to control original Nintendo game Excitebike. Sound generated by the user is sent to openFrameworks app for analysis. Volume controls the gas buttons and frequency/pitch controls the lanes up and down.

Sympathy for Pacman is a piece that attempts to recreate the life of the Pacman character. Users must turn around the television to rotate the onscreen character, confronted by an oncoming stream of cheese puffs.

Swapmeat is a piece that includes stripped down Nintendo controller requiring user to moist their fingers tips to allow button presses to be registered (if I read this right). In any case, new behaviour requires user to rethink operation of the interface.

More information as it becomes available on altctrl.matt-ruby.com

Matt Ruby is a designer living in New York City. He is working towards his MFA at Parsons the New School for Design. Skills include logo, identity, print, web, three-dimensional and interactive design as well as producing fine art.

One of the interesting cultural by-products to have emerged from the American assassination of Osama bin Laden is the public’s sudden fascination with situation rooms. As noted by Alexia Tsotsis on TechCrunch last week, the photograph of Obama and his national security team taken during the raid has received millions of page views and inspired both serious commentary and dumb meme photoshop tomfoolery. Additionally, given the gravity of the action and the secrecy that allowed it to be executed so seamlessly, the media has revelled in celebrating every minute detail of the planning and management of the operation.

I’d been meaning to plug a project proposal by the Argentine artist Gustavo Romano that will be developed at the upcoming Visualizar’11 workshop in Madrid. Considering its mandate, it is undoubtedly the perfect moment to discuss this venture and I think it will serve as a useful point of entry into a related discussion on the visual representation of conflict and power relations.

Given the theme for this year’s edition of Visualizar is “Understanding Infrastructures”, the projects that have been selected for developmentexamine a range of supply chain, consumption and finance-related topics. The above image represents Gustavo Roman’s proposed The Psychoeconomy War Room Table (PWRT), a tangible interface for exploring global economic data. PWRT will utilize the open source computer-vision framework driving theReactable Live! musical instrument to create a collaborative workspace for exploring (quantified) international relations. Roman outlines the goals for his project as

… try[ing] to display the relationship between two or more countries in the world in terms of some specific social and economic variables. The proposal builds on the metaphor of the table of the War Room, the room where are discussed possible tactical moves in a military confrontation. Using a multitouch surface,reacTIVision and fiducials, persons using the table may choose to place different flags on stage of the global economy and they can visualize the relationships between these countries. We will use data related to flows of assets (goods and financial capital), human flows (migration and tourism), energy flows (fuel and food), information flows (corporate media and alternative media). We will collect the data from public websites like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the CIA, etc.

I think this is an utterly brilliant idea and look forward to seeing the proof-of-concept interface that Roman and his team prototype next month. Imagine being able to manipulate the contents of the World Bank data catalogue and browse the interdependencies between nations – it would be both engaging and illuminating. Given the project is currently only an elevator pitch, I’ll make a point of mentioning the work that emerges when the results of the Visualizar workshop are posted online later this summer. It is worth noting that PWRT is part of Roman’s larger Psychoeconomy project, an artistic platform for exploring global issues.

For those within striking distance of Madrid, you might consider applying to work on PWRT or any of the other selected projects. Medialab-Prado is accepting applications through June 12, the workshop runs over the second half of June.

The still of Dr. Strangelove in the lower right corner of Roman’s PWRT collage gets me thinking about how depictions of these strategic ‘command’ spaces have evolved over the decades. The above image is a still from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s opulent 1963 film Cleopatra that hypothesizes what ‘real time naval imaging’ might have looked like during the Battle of Actium (31 BCE). For those unfamiliar with the downfall of Mark Antony, the military leader sailed his flotilla into a trap set by his nemesis Octavian (who had obtained vital intelligence from a defecting general). As Antony’s naval forces were decimated the strategists remotely monitoring the battle at their ‘war room table’ set the appropriate ship models aflame. The interesting thing about this fictional case study is—as it is pre-screen—it functions as a tangible interface…

…and the scale models of Cleopatra bring us back to the inescapable reference of wargaming. The cleverest of the anonymous internet situation room photo edits was a tight crop of the intensely-focused Obama wielding a Playstation controller alongside a Brigadier General hunched over a laptop; drone mishaps notwithstanding, perhaps this is our caricature of warfare for 2011? The absurd addition of a gaming controller brings to mind a 2006 sound bite by Henry Kissinger where he described the (pre-makeover) White House situation room as “uncomfortable, unaesthetic and essentially oppressive” – in this image, wargaming is pure playbour.

I still contend that the most engaging game mechanics that I’ve encountered is the visualization of empire in Sid Meier’s Civilization series. The above screen capture is the city management interface from Civilization V, where you see the players’ borders butting up and flowing around those of their neighbours as well as detailed informatics that reveal the yield of the landscape and chart out where expansion will occur. There is sufficient depth in Civ that competing nations are required to develop extremely nuanced trade and diplomatic relations to acquire needed luxury items and natural resources while forging strategic alliances. However, the game kind of falters in failing to represent these complex flows of goods, materials and capital visually – at times it can be quite difficult to determine exactly what is going on. This is why I’m so fascinated by the PWRT as it aspires to provides a handy interface for exploring the global economy as a field of vectors rather than relying on stale geographic representations of borders and trade routes. In Newsgames, Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer describe this kind of open engagement as an exploratory graphic that

…shows data that is meant to be synthesized by the user independently of the creator’s expectations. Both [Edward] Tufte and Benjamin Shneiderman encourage the use of information graphics to offer multiple levels of granularity for maximum flexibility. Tools or controls allow the reader to arrange, filter, or zoom data.

Can the complexity of international relations be distilled down to a work surface or game environment? Presumably, but exploring this kind of data can only be as revelatory as the interface it is delivered in.

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About this article: The Psychoeconomy War Room Table (And Other Situational Awareness Vignettes) first appeared on serialconsign.com on 2011-05-11.

About the Author: Greg J. Smith a Toronto-based designer and researcher with interests in media theory and digital culture. Extending from a background in architecture, his research considers how contemporary information paradigms affect representational and spatial systems. Greg is a designer at Mission Specialist, blogs at Serial Consign, writes a column on emerging technology for Current Intelligence and is a managing editor of the digital arts publication Vague Terrain. He currently teaches in the CCIT program (University of Toronto/Sheridan College) and at OCAD University.

‘Extending the Touchscreen’ is an ITP Thesis project by Michael Knuepfel which includes seven devices designed to improve upon or supplement the functionality of capacitance touchscreens; game controller, digital signet rings, mechanical stylus, sound stylus, pulse generator, dial-a-rama and future devices.

Touchscreens like those found on smartphones and tablets have enabled a new generation of versatile user interfaces. My thesis project, Extending the Touchscreen, aims to further this versatility by using conductive materials to construct a series of physical, mechanical, and electrical devices that touch, interact and communicate directly through the touchscreen interface. My goal in constructing these external devices is to make touchscreen interactions more tactile, physical and potentially more expressive and fun.

Instead of utilising USB connection to extend the functionality of iPad and iPhone, the devices rely on the software, simple light senors or magnets to allow objects to communicate between each other. Some devices are just used as tools to unlock the iphone for example, others allow robot like objects to behave in a certain way by ‘reading’ information from iPad’s screen. See video for more + follow Michael’s blog for updates.