Candle Light is a interactive project using sensor design that allows for an extremely fast reaction time to changes in light from a candle and a fluid interactive experience. At any given moment, a three dimensional cross section of the light from the candle is detected by the sensors and then amplified to fill the space of the room. This allows visitors to walk inside the field of the candle and experience it as a space.
Comic Sans. Say no more.
I still can’t get used to those odd-looking upturned wings. Good to see the pilot showing off.
Weeknote #1
I’m going to try writing weeknotes to get me into the habit of writing down what I’ve been working on and what were achievements. I need a kick up the bum and some new inspiration, and I’m hoping this will help. Let’s see….
Project achievements include:
- Completion of the Sydney budget, with a positive initial response.
- Updating my slot car / Scalextric controller and timing software to allow user configuration and support for Unicode characters (for it’s first Moscow outing).
- Found some good off-the-shelf parts to value engineer interactives we’ve built once already. These should cut the construction costs by 1/5th.
- Discovered the break even point for visitor tracking and personalisation technologies based on RFID or barcodes.
- Successfully convinced people that iPad really isn’t the solution for every interactive we design.
Additionally,
- Spent two days in our workshop in Crayford. Two hours commute from Reading but a refreshing change from the hot, stuffy office.
- Moved the dreaded PDA datacapture project on an inch or two, never ceasing to be amazed at it’s yawn-inducing power over creative types.
Well, that was refreshing. I feel like I achieved something this week. :)
Unattended bags may be removed, or damaged, or destroyed by the security services!
London Bridge Automated Announcer
Gesture-Based Interface Gloves are a low cost solution for gesture-based computer interfaces. The gloves are tracked with an ordinary webcam that can easily differentiate the colours on the gloves. Instead of digital gloves or attachments, the simple colours provide enough contrast to track.
More lovely Architectural mapping projection.
Upsetting a Developer
It seems that a recent tweet of mine, where I pronounced that I wasn’t going to give a new online banking tool a go because it used Microsoft Silverlight has upset one of the developers. My reasoning was that I didn’t have the plug-in installed and this site wanted my bank account details: there were too many unknowns to be bothered trying it out.
I’m a .net dabbler (I’d never call myself a developer, but I do use VB6, VB2005 in anger for various projects) and I can understand why developers are alway precious about the platform’s they know and understand well. For many years (probably longer than necessary), we used Macromedia / Adobe Director to create kiosk interactives for exhibitions and events as it was a good, fast, visual development platform with slightly more logic and extensibility than plain old Flash. You’d rarely do this sort of thing with VB as the development time was too long and it wouldn’t do the flashy stuff designers wanted.
At the end of the day, a development platform should be chosen for the application it’s being employed to create. Silverlight, Flash, HTML5, ActiveX, Java and numerous others are there primarily to create rich web content. If I was writing a brief, I’d say “I don’t care which one you use, as long as it works for the majority of my customers.”
I don’t believe that Silverlight is a standard install product, even on Windows 7, and a lot of the Mac users I know would question the need to ever install anything by Microsoft. :)
Using the info on riastats.com, it’s reasonably clear that Silverlight is still ‘undetected’ on around 46% of machines. Also, the fact that the online banking tool (still in beta) I wanted to try have had to post a news item explaining why they chose Silverlight is even more telling.
A nice take on Augmented Reality.
