2013-09-05

Nymi wristband

Upplagd av Unknown

Description and video can be found at: http://www.gizmag.com/nymi-identity-bracelet/28922/


2013-09-04

Second Surface

Upplagd av Connie Huanca

http://vimeo.com/50854686

"An environment for creative collaboration is significant for enhancing human communication and expressive activities. We introduce Second Surface, a novel multi-user Augmented reality system that fosters a real-time interaction for user-generated contents on top of the physical environment. This interaction takes place in the physical surroundings of everyday objects such as trees or houses. Our system allows users to place three dimensional drawings, texts, and photos relative to such objects and share this expression with any other person who uses the same software at the same spot. Second Surface explores a vision that integrates collaborative virtual spaces into the physical space. Our system can provide an alternate reality that generates a playful and natural interaction in an everyday setup."-

Shunichi Kasahara, Valentin Heun, Austin S. Lee and Hiroshi Ishii / 2012

Turn signal biking jacket

Upplagd av Fredrik

http://www.instructables.com/id/turn-signal-biking-jacket/



Simple thing that helps cyclists to signal turns. It looks nice and it could be very useful, even save lives. About 1,900 cyclists are injured each year in Sweden. But you would have to wear the same jacket everytime you ride your bike. Maybe a clip-on thingy would be better, to put on your bike/jacket/backpack.

2012-11-14

The Chameleon chair manual

Upplagd av Unknown

To allow future students of this course to easily understand the inner working mechanisms and reuse parts of our prototype, the Chameleon chair manual has been created. It consist overview of technology used for this project and also user-friendly guide how to connect everything together. Example Arduino code for communication with the color sensor is also included.
As an additional part there is also one chapter dealing with heat and cooling in electronic devices.

Chameleon chair manual.pdf

2012-10-23

Mingle 2.0

Upplagd av Víctor Guerrero



Mingle 2.0: the interactive beer coaster its a prototype that tries to overhaul the classic concept of mingle using technology available to improve it. First of all, a mingle is an informal (usually with drinks) meeting of people with the purpose to know new people as well as making new contacts either professional or of other kinds. In these basis, we wanted to help people stablish conversations with new people. 

How? 

Using the glass we have developed. This glass has a light that shows information to help the mingler. This information is based upon 3 steps: 

  1. ice breaking phase: mingler is walking around and the glass gives information about the connections he or she has with the poeple around him/her. The information is shown with the color: the red it is your glass the less you have in common with people around you and green is used for high connections. This information can depend based on the purpose of the mingle. It could either use information from linkedin if it's a professional one or from facebook and other social networks if it has another purpose. To get this information, the mingler previously registers to our webpage where his personal information is specified (links to social networks, etc.). 
  2. shared information phase: by cheering up the glass with another mingler you can have extra information about your particular connection with that person. This information is given by blinks: the faster it blinks the more you have in common and the other way around. 
  3. connecting phase: after cheering the glasses and staying close, they start to interact together to give an extra feeling of connection between the people in the group. This interaction consists in the change of colors of the glasses: first one changes to one color and gradually and one by one all the other glasses of the group change to that color until the first one is reached again. Then it changes its color and the same procedure is repeated. The colors shown in this step range between green to blue. This is to avoid and differenciate it from the first step. 

obs: it can be a good experience knowing people that you don't have any connection with. This can open new unexpected connections. 

Technical description: 

Using sunspot's radio signal strength we can measure distance between devices and use that information to update the behaviour of sunspots in each glass. The initial approach used a server to receive all the information of the sunspots but when it was demonstrated the sunspot that was used as a proxy to have internet connection stop working after a while. For this implementation built-in information in the sunspots was used so the evaluation of the connections is precomputed in the sunspots to avoid the internet connection. 

Authors: 

Daniel Nyberg, Sandra Hindskog, Sara Sandgärde, Víctor Guerrero

2012-10-17

The Chameleon Chair

Upplagd av Ryan McLeod

Chameleon Chair from Ryan on Vimeo.

The chameleon chair is a prototype created at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden for a physical interaction design class. This video demonstrates the chair's ability to match the color of the sitter's clothing and fade in the longer they stay seated. When the sitter leaves the chair slowly fades out their color to represent their past presence. (At the time this video was made, not everything was fully working so this video is just a demonstration of how it should work and not how it currently does. In it's final form the chair would fade in and out much more slowly than shown in the video.)

2012-10-10

Digits

Upplagd av Víctor Guerrero


Digits by Microsoft Research is a new technology that Microsoft has presented in the UIST 2012  (the 25th Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology). Basically is a device with IR sensors and accelerometers that can read your hand gestures. It seems to be like a portable and more basic version of the Kinect. This doesn't mean to be less "expressive" in terms of interaction because the exmaples presented on the video look like more useful than the ones been able to do with a Kinect.