Video games have been entertaining us for nearly 30 years, ever since Pong was introduced to arcades in the early 1970s. Computer graphics have become much more sophisticated since then, and soon, game graphics will seem all too real. In the next decade, researchers plan to pull graphics out of your television screen or computer display and integrate them into real-world environments. This new technology, called augmented reality, will further blur the line between what's real and what's computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell.
The Augmented Environments Lab (AEL) is a research group in the GVU Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The research, design and development activities of the AEL focus putting media in the world around people, using a range of techniques from see-through head-worn displays, video-mixed camera phones, spatialized sound, and video projectors. More generally, we are interested in exploring the potential of interactive computing environments to directly augment a user’s senses with computer generated material
Layar allows you to see what is around you by displaying realtime digital information on top of reality through the camera of your mobile phone. Just flip through the directory or layers and find ATM's, bars, houses for sale, hotels and other cool stuff around you.
NYTimes article survey's the present and future state of augmented reality. Mentioned in the article is an upcoming PSP game called Invizimls. Here’s the YouTube clip from it:
What does a recession look like? Well, here’s one view, as seen through retail sales. The theoretical mall maps below show 27 companies with stores or restaurants in malls across America. (In some cases, these companies own more than one chain of stores.) In the bottom map, the change in the size of the stores is determined by sales in the first quarter of 2009 as compared to the same quarter in the previous year. Color in the bottom map is meant to indicate the depth of the drop — or the height of the rise — in sales. The deeper the red, the steeper the loss.
I’ve been waiting almost a year now to tell you about all the cool Flash work that is featured in the new Star Trek movie. OOOii, which was formally named BlackBox Digital, is a live visual effects company run by Kent Demaine and is located in the heart of Hollywood. They design a lot of the amazing interfaces that you see on computer screens and other surfaces in feature films. Their credits include Enemy of the State, Minority Report, and The Island.
For the past decade when Hollywood directors like STEVEN SPIELBERG, JJ ABRAMS, MICHAEL BAY, and TONY SCOTT have dreamed of the future, they have turned to us to build it. From the gesture based interfaces in Minority Report to the immersive technologies in The Island, from the power walls of Déjà Vu to the 360 projections in the much anticipated Star Trek, we bring custom large-scale immersive environments to life.
Digital technologies are blurring the boundaries between the passive and interactive experience of visual art, entertainment, environmental design and the built environment. For all those engaged in the creative process of world-building and storytelling in narrative media, 5D: The Immersive Design Conference is the platform for exploring the present and future of immersive design, and its impact on all aspects of the creative media space.
Our goal is to unite a vital community of designers and image-makers and to serve as a catalyst for innovation.
It's about 1994. Part of you is pursuing a new line of research at the MIT Media Laboratory, trying to make information more literally spatial. Your feeling is that, ten years in, the GUI that's taken over the world's idea of interface isn't getting at everything there is. Substantial swaths of human brain are dedicated to understanding space, understanding geometry, understanding physical structure. A cartoon of a messy desk surface doesn't much tax these swaths. The swaths can work harder, ought to be made to. You propose that informaton — and maybe especially the newly-blooming internet — has a topology but not yet a topography.
Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.
Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an entire industry around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.
UX Management Materials
Links to materials assembled by Margaret Gould Stewart (Design Manager at Google) for a seminar she taught at this years MX (Managing Experience) conference.
The term “user experience strategy” gets thrown around an awful lot in design circles, but few people have offered an explanation as to what it means or how to achieve it. Here’s a look at the Miskeeto approach.
End-user satisfaction and quality of experience need to be the fundamental pillars of any worthy company's value system. Hence organizations must be structured in a way that tilts the odds in favor of achieving these goals. Good intentions are a start, but they are not sufficient. Appropriate tools and skills at the highest professional standards, applied according to best practice, are what's needed.
Horizonless Projection in Manhattan
Imagine a person standing at a street corner. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands.
As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer's local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.
Jacqueline S. Casey, a graphic designer internationally recognized for her "elegant posters" for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died Monday, May 18, at her home in Brookline after a long struggle with cancer.
The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
A massive collection of covers from Penguin's Sci-Fi collection over the ages. A great showcase into the progression of Penguin's cover style.
What is Grid Calculator?
Grid Calculator is a powerful standalone software application that helps you create a perfect grid for any design project. It is ideal for projects such as book and magazine design, and many more projects. This tool is great when working with layout, especially editorial layouts! A grid is used to divide space and create better design.
Emblematic of modernity, the grid gives form to everything from skyscrapers and office cubicles to Mondrian paintings and bits of computer code. And yet, as Hannah Higgins makes clear in this wide-ranging and revelatory book, the grid has a history that long predates modernity; it is the most prominent visual structure in Western culture. In The Grid Book, Higgins examines the history of ten grids that changed the world: the brick, the tablet, the gridiron city plan, the map, musical notation, the ledger, the screen, moveable type, the manufactured box, and the net. Charting the evolution of each grid, from the Paleolithic brick of ancient Mesopotamia through the virtual connections of the Internet, Higgins demonstrates that once a grid is invented, it may bend, crumble, or shatter, but its organizing principle never disappears.
The Interaction Design Pilot Year is a collaborative initiative between Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and The Danish Design School (DKDS). Our aim is for students, faculty and staff to work together in a multi-cultural, multidisciplinary studio environment to co-create a new kind of education that is relevant for academia and industry.
Looks like fun!
Design Fiction
New and insightful article by Bruce Sterling…
Many science fiction writers, believe it or not, were capable of understanding Wittgenstein. User experience design, however, was far beyond them. It was also beyond Wittgenstein, because there are things we might imagine and speak about that we do pass over in silence because we are writing in books.
What Google Does
Great write up from User Pathways on a talk by Bradely Horowitz, formerly VP of the Advanced Technology Group at Yahoo and now at Google, on the future of metadata and how we use it, and produce it. Deep thinking.
For the past week a diverse group of beautifully designed Dutch posters have been on view in the lobby of Chronicle Books. Staff and visitors have enjoyed the work of Bob Van Dijk, Willem Henri Lucas, Richard Niessen, Wout de Vringer, Studio Dumbar, Lust, and Harmen Liemburg. The designers created the posters between the years of 1988 and 2008. Many are hand silkscreened by the designers.
I went to this exhibition with my friend Peter. It blew me away. The links below will help you find the designers who were represented in the show. Check them all out - some even have posters available for purchase.
Design philosophy revolves around Process-based and Generative-based Design. Interested in exploring new pathways for design at the precarious edge where new media and information technologies, architecture and urban planning and graphic design overlap.
Intense, intelligent, and beautiful work. Definitely pushing the boundaries of generative design.
I am a graphic designer, printmaker and occasional journalist based in Amsterdam. I have a background in Geography and Cartography. Today imagination and storytelling are more important to me than the objective truth, but making maps and diagrams absolutely inspired my current interest in graphic techniques.
Harmen is one of my favs. He has some prints available for purchase up on his site.
Willem Henri Lucas studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Arnhem in the Netherlands under guidance of Karel Martens and worked as an intern and apprentice for Max Kisman. He works for clients mostly based in the field of Culture and Art. From 1990 to 2002
he served as a professor and chair of the Utrecht School of the Arts' Graphic Design department. In 1998 he designed holiday postage stamps for the PTT (Dutch Post and telecom company). In 2003 and 2004 he won a 'Best Book' award and a nomination from the Art Director's Club in the Netherlands. Since January 2004 he is a visiting lecturer at UCLA's D|MA
HAY
Copenhagen based furniture retailer. Their site has a nice subdued interaction model, Flash based.
Honda Insight - Let It Shine on Vimeo
Beautiful video, and beautiful/smart integration of the video into Vimeo’s interface. Did Honda paid Vimeo or the integration, or did Vimeo do it for free because they value Honda’s green co-branding?
On my way to becoming a graphics developer at Wolfram Research, I took detours through degrees in design and architecture. One of my enduring passions is exploring graphic design with programmatic and generative systems. While some aspects of design require the skilled hand of the designer, others can be formalized and explored by computer.
Ethan Eismann is an Experience Design Manager at Adobe Systems. This blog is about Flash, Flex, AIR, Flash Catalyst, RIAs, design management, and design writ large.
