One emerging trend on the internal mailing list has been a steadily growing number of threads about robots – covering both big mechanical things, and also more domestic models, and even (as in the case of Barbie below), barely-bots. Time to start gathering those up!
Gadgetwise point out the Barbie Video Girl Doll. It’s a Barbie doll, with a video camera embedded in it, so you can make movies pointed from her point of view, and a slightly immersion-breaking screen in her back. You can also transfer videos off the doll via a USB connector. And, as the Gadgetwise article point out, “because the doll can be posed, she doubles as a pretty good tripod.”
It’s more than just a doll because it’s a sensing object, albeit not a very smart one. Still make it walk and you’d have something not unlike a telepresence robot for kids.
The Wall Street Journal last week covered Autom – a robotic weight-loss coach. Weight-loss programs could be just be software applications, but the vaguely anthropomorphic robot perhaps adds a layer of reassurement and engagement:
Autom also uses social cues to seem more lifelike, a big psychological difference from working with a static computer screen. She blinks her eyes, turns to look at who she’s talking to, and ends conversations by saying, “I hope we can talk again about your progress,” in a female voice.
From the end of 2008, it’s a map of the top 10 countries of the world by Robot Population Density, as part of this IEEE Spectrum article. Of course, it’s very specifically talking about industrial robots, but it’s an eye-opening set of figures nontheless.
And finally, some fictional robots – namely, this gorgeous set of illustrations for a Russian children’s book from 1979, entitled Your Name? Robot.
The July release for Schooloscope is now out. The release includes all manner of bugfixes, thousands of new OFSTED inspections, and easy output to Facebook and Twitter… and also these beautiful papercraft schools that you can download for any school on the site.
Tom is hammering away at Schooloscope. He’s off at a conference about play and invention next week, so hoping to get this month’s feature release cooked before then.
Nick and Matt B are in the other room, working together on new product development. They’re aiming to take a tech proof of concept to minimum viable product.
Two other products – one near term, the other medium – are also taking shape.
Campbell, Timo, Jack and Matt J are working on a film called Future Magic.
There’s been a lot of business development this week. Lots of exciting conversations. And accounts: it was financial year end recently, and that’s a good chance to revisit processes with Kari. I like that company administration runs so smoothly, like a machine. I’ve been making higher level metrics, attempting to attach meaningful numbers to the budgets of cash, attention and risk.
Last week I was in California with Matt J, recharging, hiking, and attending Foo Camp. There was a lot about robotics there – everything from articulation to low-cost development to fractional A.I. – and it has influenced my thinking considerably. Most of my thinking happens in conversations, or while writing, or while drawing.
The week before that we handed over Mag+, the end of a 9 month journey. It went from R&D design concept to iPad app, and from there to a constellation of systems and processes (production tools and help-desks), which were finally divided up and stitched back into a broader corporation to run as “business as usual.” That’s how R&D should happen. I’m pleased.
On our last night in San Francisco, walking back to the hotel from hosting drinks for our West coast friends, we passed the Apple Store, and just as we went past the giant iPad in the window started playing this. A great sign-off to Mag+.
It’s odd to be back in the studio, able to pay attention once again to health, growth and direction. It’s wonderful. This is a self-sustaining spaceship now. A culture garden full of my favourite people.
I can see the mountain-tops. I can see the stars. And I am impatient for them.
I liked this take on what a Digital Holga might look like (the Holga, if you’re not aware, is a little toy camera). It’s well presented and has some lovely illustrations, but the two things I liked most were: the rotatable control panel, making it simple to convert for left-handed use; and the idea that, whenever it might exist, it should always use a previous generation of sensor technology. Built-in nostalgia.
Giles Turnbull coined a nice neologism in his write-up of Economist direct – “impulscriptions“; not a true subscription, but one-click issue purchasing when the current edition takes your fancy. Lovely service.
“Hybrids are smooth and neat. Interdisciplinary thinking is diplomatic; it thrives in a bucolic university setting. Chimeras, though? Man, chimeras are weird. They’re just a bunch of different things bolted together. They’re abrupt. They’re discontinuous. They’re impolitic. They’re not plausible; you look at a chimera and you go, “yeah right.” And I like that! Chimeras are on the very edge of the recombinatory possible. Actually — they’re over the edge.”
Last Saturday, Matt Webb and I hosted a short session at O’Reilly FooCamp 2010, in Sebastopol, California.
The title was “Mining the Trough of Disillusionment”, referring to the place in the Gartner “Hype Cycle” that we find inspiration in – where technologies languish that have become recently mundane, cheap and widely-available but are no longer seen as exciting ‘bullet-points’ on the side of products.
While not presenting the Gartner reports as ‘science’ – they do offer an interesting perspective of the socio-technical ‘weather’ that surrounds us and condenses into the products and services we use.
In the session we examined the last five years of the hype cycle reports they have published – it’s kind of fascinating – there are some very strange decisions as to what is included, excluded and how buzzwords morph over time.
After that we brainstormed with the group which technologies they thought had fallen, perhaps irrevocably, into the trough. It was fun to get so many ‘alpha geeks’ thinking about gamma things…
Having done so – we had a discussion about how they might breed or be re-contextualised in order to create interesting new products.
These “hopeful monsters” often sound ridiculous on first hearing, but when you pick at them they illustrate ways in which a forgotten or unfashionable technology can serve a need or create desire.
Or they can expose a previously unexploited affordance or feature of the technology – that was not brought to the fore by the original manufacturers or hype that surrounded it. By creating a chimera, you can indulge in some material exploration.
The list we generated is below, if you’d like to join in…
It was a really fun session, that threw up some promising avenues – and some new products ideas for us… Thanks to all who attended and participated!
Nick found this lovely work from Karsten “Toxi” Schmidt: a cover for Print magazine. The final piece of work – a 3D print-out of generated text – is lovely; just as beautiful, however, are all the steps in the process, “growing” type through reaction diffusion. The video above is one such illustration, but the whole write-up is fascinating, and definitely worth your time.
Thinking about what defines a particular game medium, one doesn’t always consider elements like the player’s physical posture, and where they sit relative to their fellow players. But the experience of playing a digital game with a friend on the iPad proves quite different than that of sitting side-by-side on a couch with Xbox controllers in hand, or sitting alone with a mic strapped to your head. Your sense of posture and presence is part of the game’s medium, as much as the material of the game’s manufacture.
Presence as part of a medium – fantastic.
I enjoyed this gigantic, Lego-Mindstorms-powered chess set. Not as much for the technological “wow” factor as the little details: the Knights’ legs pawing at the air as they move, and, best of all, the way the pieces politely get out of each others’ way as they move about. Machines embody politeness in a most curious way.
Art Lebedev have redesigned the Moscow Metro map. Never an easy task, subway mapping, but the result is striking. I’m not sure how much better or worse it is than the previous map: I’m not a Moscow local. But it’s clear from the fascinating “process” page just how much care and attention went into the design. The inner ring is clearly iconic, but their more eccentric representations are perhaps the most interesting – the topographic versions in particular.
And, finally, how’s this for proper augmented-reality: NYC The Blog report that stencilled compass roses are appearing spray-painted outside subway exists, to help travellers’ get their bearings. Brilliant, and not a screen held at head-height in sight.
“…it’s likely that we’re locked into pursuing very conscious, very gorgeous, deliberate touch interfaces – touch-as-manipulate-objects-on-screen rather than touch-as-manipulate-objects-in-the-world for now.”
It does look very much like we’re living in that world now – where our focus is elsewhere than our immediate surroundings – mainly residing through our fingers, in our tiny, beautiful screens.
Like a lot of things here, they are deeply connected to other places. Their attention is divided. And, by extension, so is ours. While this feeling is common to all cities over time, cell phones bring the tangible immediacy of the faraway to the street. Helped along by media and the global logistics networks that define our material lives, our moment-to-moment experience of the local has become increasingly global.
Recently, of course, our glowing attention wells have become larger.
We’ve been designing, developing, using and living with iPads in the studio for a while now, and undoubtedly they are fine products despite their drawbacks – but it wasn’t until our friend Tom Coates introduced me to a game called Marble Mixer that I thought they were anything other than the inevitable scaling of an internet-connected screen, and the much-mooted emergence of a tablet form-factor.
It led me to think they might be much more disruptive as magic tables than magic windows.
Marble Mixer is a simple game, well-executed. Where it sings is when you invite friends to play with you.
Each of you occupy a corner of the device, and attempts to flick marbles into the goal-mouth against the clock – dislodging the other’s marbles.
Beautiful. Simple. But also - amazing and transformative!
We’re all playing with a magic surface!
When we’re not concentrating on our marbles, we’re looking each other in the eye – chuckling, tutting and cursing our aim – and each other.
There’s no screen between us, there’s a magic table making us laugh. It’s probably my favourite app to show off the iPad - including the ones we’ve designed!
It shows that the iPad can be a media surface to share, rather than a proscenium to consume through alone.
[GoGos]‘d be the perfect counters for a board game that uses the iPad as the board. They’d look gorgeous sitting on there. We’d need to work out how to make the iPad think they were fingers – maybe some sort of electrostatic sausage skin – and to remember which was which.
Inspired by Marble Mixer, and Russell’s writings – I decided to do a spot of rapid prototyping of a ‘peripheral’ for magic table games that calls out the shared-surface…
It’s a screen – but not a glowing one! Just a simple bit of foamboard cut so it obscures your fellow player’s share of the game board, for games like Battleships, or in this case – a mocked-up guessing-game based on your flickr contacts…
You’d have a few guesses to narrow it down… Are they male, do they have a beard etc…
Fun for all the family!
Anyway – as you can see – this is not so serious a prototype, but I can imagine some form of capactive treatment to the bottom edge of the screen, perhaps varying the amount of secret territory each player revealed to each other, or capacitive counters as Russell suggests.
Aside from games though – the pattern of a portable shared media surface is surely worth pursuing.
“interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience.”
Designing media and services for “little-ass” rather than “big-ass” magic tables might propel us into a future not so removed from the one I thought we might have lost…
We’ve just rolled out a new version of Schooloscope. The June releases contains both minor fixes and major new functionality. You can find more about what’s new for June over at the Schooloscope blog.
