There is a general sense of curiosity held by the people who work in this room.



It’s evident through the sheer volume of web links exchanged each week.
Some of these fall away quickly but others gather such traction that they live on for days as a sort of rolling cultural Katamari Demacy.



Tracing lines back through these threads imparts individual preoccupations and quietly reveals the collective interests of the studio.

So, here are a few things that people have been up to and what’s captured their attention in week 352.

Andy has been chasing up sizeable quantities of power adapters and continued to receive ‘proof of life’ for atoms in constellations of his design. You can read more about this intriguing image at:
http://bergcloud.com/blog/



He also sent around the output of a collaboration between visuals artists Memo Akten and Quayola.


http://vimeo.com/37967381

These animations are described on thecreatorsproject.com as ‘a study of the relationship between the human body and movement’ rendered through abstract 3d forms. This prompted a discussion about the visual queues required to convey a sense of human movement. Matthew discussed the conflicts and payoffs between 2d and 3d. And Timo highlighted the capacity for the simple lines and dots of ‘motion capture’ to create hugely characterful movements. “There’s a magic about seeing human movement in the simplest of forms, like this.” (examples below).

Denise spent time designing characters for a forthcoming animation that plays a part in a project for Uinta. And readying an exciting proposal for a potential client.

She forwarded this little poem to the group:


http://pinterest.com/pin/106749453637547898/

And the beautiful Clouds project by Amsterdam based Berndnaut Smilde. This sparked some conversational speculation on the possibility of channeling this into the design of consumer electronics.


http://the-design-ark.com/2012/03/clouds-by-berndnaut-smilde/

Then, of course, the inevitable question of whether we could keep a cloud as a studio pet cropped up. It’s yet to be answered.

James, the impenetrable logic dynamo and fashion maverick, has spent the week sculpting code and sharing some splendidly weird links.

First up, this animated gif of a chirpy chap spotted in a couple of eggs, which I looked at for way too long.


http://www.lememe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/57890589505.gif

He also suggested that if Jack were to design an album sleeve it might look something link this:



Timo prepared the Silverton workshop for next Tuesday and managed to find time to write an excellent blog post with Nick entitled: ‘Swiping Through Cinema, Touching Through Glass’. (Read it here: http://berglondon.com/blog/2012/03/08/swiping-cinema-touching-glass/)
He’s also been filming and editing for Uinta and Chaco projects with Oran.

He shared this NASA image from the March 6. A “Multiple-wavelength View of X5.4 Solar Flare”.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/6962299865/

And also this slice of optical motion capture processing (mentioned above)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9dMzTTgAZ4

Helen spent the week coordinating with different parties to ensure ongoing organisational legitimacy and defend the studio against exposure to fire or other catastrophes.

Alice, the Little Printer whisperer, has managed to convince the the device to send and receive picture messages. I now have My Little Pony and Power Puff Girls receipts on my desk.
Her other major triumph this week has been to discover an image of Rihanna throwing up ribbons. On loop.


http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luvkboF9zC1r31cpxo1_500.gif

Nick can usually be found lurking in the Linux mines. Or Tooting.
He sent around a link to the ‘Freescale Mechatronics Robot’ coupled with the message, “Anyone fancy a walking development board? Now with added ‘face’.”



http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=FSLBOT

And a project by Fay McCaul concerned with “….embedding reflective material into cotton yarn and using fibre optics and iridescent acrylic to create unconventional materials”


http://www.tentlondon.co.uk/news/exhibitor-profile-fay-mccaul#overlay-context=news-category/exhibitor-news (more info: Fay McCaul.)

Jones stands upon stilts, like a shepherd of the Landes, extending his field of vision for a string of sales meetings, workshops and presentations.


http://woodtrekker.blogspot.com/2010/11/mouleyre-shepherd-of-landes-france.html

He’s also been very active on the mailing list.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/markcph/5290175436/

The new iPad app from Bloom.io


http://biologic.bloom.io/

A PhD research project making AI that can design, evaluate and develop entire video-games.


http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/

Spacewalking helmet, fully loaded: 3 videocams, old lights and new LEDs, plus nose pad to clear ears inside.


From a tweet by chris hadfield
https://twitter.com/#!/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/177375221437833216

Wearable projector makes any surface interactive by Hrvoje Benko of Microsoft Research.


http://www.psfk.com/2012/03/wearable-interactive-projector.html

And evidence of tool use in bears.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17264679

Alex spent much of the week fusing artistry with pragmatism to find fitting ways to present the LP systems architecture to the user.
He’s also been hyperactive on the studio mailing list, in a very good way.

Starting with ‘Fresh Guacamole’ in which the director, PES, ‘transforms familiar objects into fresh guacamole’.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMO6vjmkyI

The stunning stunts of Jorian Ponomareff.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9VG4N5DfY

He also pointed out a post by Stephen Wolfram on his attitude towards the quantified self.

“One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.”


http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/

A new supermarket scanner that recognises food by it’s colour and shape, no barcodes needed.


http://designtaxi.com/news/351869/New-Supermarket-Scanner-Recognizes-Food-No-Barcodes-Needed/

LEGO Space Shuttle Launched Into The Stratosphere.


http://designtaxi.com/news/351818/LEGO-Space-Shuttle-Launched-Into-The-Stratosphere/

And finally the latest DARPA robot named ‘Cheetah’ sets speed record for legged robots.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2D71CveQwo

Simon is the gravity to which all projects are subject. Involved in everything to some degree.

This week he described the similarities and differences between Channel 4’s new service …

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2012-03-08/channel-4-launches-new-channel,-4seven

and the BERG project Shownar: http://berglondon.com/projects/shownar/

He also showed everyone the Dollar Shave Club website which features one of the finest corporate videos I’ve seen in recent memory (which admittedly doesn’t say much, but it is very good).


http://www.dollarshaveclub.com/

Webb distinguishes scale from perspective in a series of sales and logistical meetings. He and Jones presented the outcome of the Kletting project to Uinta and he generally mans the helm of this good ship.

In response to Andy’s post about ‘Form’ he wrote this: “A 2d animation can do anything at all. When you watch this …”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBgghnQF6E4

“It mimics a 3d scene, like a live-action movie, but it’s not 3d: it’s constructed to look awesome to the viewer. Micky’s ears exist outside the 3d world, they exist entirely for the viewer and the screen, you can’t even imagine what they might look like to anyone else in the frame, they transcend the world of the cartoon.”

“But when you watch a Pixar movie – a 2d render of a 3d scene – or this thing, the magic of the moving screen is replaced by a view into a world which has to obey the physics of the 3d. Its potential is somehow made smaller. It exists independently from me, and so somehow there’s less room for it to explode into magic.”

In other dispatches, he notified people of the Microsoft holoreflector project to which Alex pointed out that the typing position is under and behind the display. It was agreed that this is Odd! Neat!


http://www.extremetech.com/computing/120293-microsoft-research-shows-off-see-through-3d-display-holoreflector-illumishare

And excitedly sent around the Sim City announce trailer:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kztNWdhRdnw

Finally, I have been feeling somewhat under the weather and a tad delirious. But you’ve probably noticed that.

The studio is continually interested in the beautiful and inventive stuff that can happen when you poke and prod around the edges of technology and culture. Mag+ emerged from a curiosity from both Bonnier and BERG about reading on tablets while Making Future Magic emerged from experiments with light painting and screens.

Early last year we were experimenting with product photography for a retail client pitch. We wondered how we could we use cinematic techniques to explore product imagery.

Watch the video of our experiments on Vimeo.

What would happen if instead of a single product image or a linear video, we could flick and drag our way through time and the optical qualities of lenses? What if we had control of the depth of field, focus, lighting, exposure, frame-rate or camera position through tap and swipe?

Swiping through cinema

This is a beautiful 1960’s Rolex that we shot in video while pulling focus across the surface the watch. On the iPad, the focus is then under your control, the focal point changes to match your finger as it taps and swipes across the object. Your eye and finger are in the same place, you are in control of the locus of attention.

Jack originally explored focus navigation (with technical help by George Grinsted) in 2000, and now Lytro allow ‘tap to focus’ in pictures produced by the ‘light field camera‘.

The lovely thing here is that we can see all of the analogue, optical qualities such as the subtle shifts in perspective as the lens elements move, and the blooming, reflection and chromatic abberations that change under our fingertips. Having this optical, cinematic language under the fine control of our fingertips feels new, it’s a lovely, playful, explorative interaction.

Orson Welles’ Deep Focus.

Cinematic language is a rich seam to explore, what if we could adjust the exposure to get a better view of highlights and shadows? Imagine this was diamond jewellery, and we could control the lighting in the room. Or to experiment with aperture, going from the deep focus of Citizen Kane, through to the extremely shallow focus used in Gomorrah, where the foreground is separated from the environment.

Cold Dark Matter by Cornelia Parker.

What if we dropped or exploded everyday objects under a super high-frame rate cinematography, and gave ourselves a way of swiping through the chaotic motion? Lots of interesting interactions to explore there.

Touching through glass

This next experiment really fascinated us. We shot a glass jar full of thread bobbins rotating in front of the camera, on the iPad you can swipe to explore these beautiful, intricate colourful objects.

There is a completely new dimension here, in that you are both looking at a glass jar and touching a cold glass surface. The effect is almost uncanny, a somewhat realistic sense of touch has been re-introduced into the cold, smooth iPad screen. We’re great fans of Bret Victor’s brilliant rant on the problems of the lack of tactility in ‘pictures under glass‘, and in a way this is a re-inforcement of that critique: tactility is achieved through an uncanny visual re-inforcement of touching cold glass. This one really needs to be in your hands to be fully experienced.

And it made us think, what if we did all product photography that was destined for iPads inside gorgeous Victorian bell jars?

Nick realised this as an App on a first-generation iPad:

Each of the scenes in the Swiping through Cinema app are made up of hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of individual images, each extracted from a piece of real-time HD video. It is the high speed manipulation of these images which creates one continuous experience, and has only become possible relatively recently.

During our time developing Mag+, we learnt a great deal about using images on tablets. With the first-generation iPad, you needed to pay careful attention to RAM use, as the system could kill your app for being excessively greedy, even after loading only a handful of photographs. We eventually created a method which would allow you to smoothly animate any number of full-screen images.

With that code in place, we moved onto establishing a workflow which would allow us to shoot footage and be able to preview it within the app in a matter of minutes. We also consciously avoided filling the screen with user interface elements, which means that the only interaction is direct manipulation of what you see on-screen.

With the Retina display on the third-generation iPad, we’re really excited by the prospect of being able to move through super crisp and detailed image sequences.

We’re really excited about re-invigorating photographic and cinematographic techniques for iPads and touchscreens, and finding out how to do new kinds of interactive product imagery in the process.

Soon, we’ll get back to managing to publishing Friday links on Friday – but for now it’s Sunday night and I’ve got time to round up interesting things that flew around our studio mailing list this week.

First of all a bit of a meta-point… Often things will be sent to the list with the prefix ‘X-Watch’ where X is a preoccupation of the studio. James decided to run a script across his mail to see what the most popular ‘watches’ were…

• 12 Parallax
• 4 Product page
• 2 Music Video
• 2 Printer
• 1 Injection Moulding
• 1 Baby
• 1 Bridge
• 1 Things on dogs
• 1 Kickstarter
• 1 weird skeumorphotablet
• 1 Car software
• 1 incidental media

What that tells you about us I don’t know…

Anyway. Onwards.

Our friends at RIG have been working on making jeans a bit more spime-y with Hiut Denim.

Joe found these lovely animations forming a children’s guide to critical thinking.

We discovered this amazing photograph from the ISS via Gavin Starks on Twitter

Nick and Matt Webb both pointed out this kinect-hacked shopping trolley companion species. Nick suggested that we should forget our ongoing search for a studio dog, and get this as a pet.

I think I’ll keep looking for a suitable pooch for us…

CoffeePhysics from Andy, and a car interiors tumblr from Alex, via ex-BERGler Tom Armitage.

The recent rash of babies from BERG might explain why this made the list… “…the first ever wireless, biosensor baby pajama.” [sic] Don’t worry. We restrained ourselves from wiring up Kari’s newly-arrived little boy with some arduinos when he made his inaugural visit to the studio this week.

MW liked this illustration of a speech-jamming gun a lot:

The new Nike store thats opening in a shipping container near us looks like it has a lot of interactive elements, some of which will hopefully be the human staff, but y’know.

Alex found this collection of googly-eye-enhanced bits of the planet, but he also found what I think was my favourite thing I saw on the list this week – an absolutely wonderful bit of manga illustration by Yusuke Murata, that uses the physicality of paper and folding to amazing optical effect.

Lovely.

I mentioned in weeknotes that Denise was doing some quick character sketches for some film work we’re planning, and she kindly let me take a shot of her pencil sketches before she took them into Illustrator.

I love the grumpy, determined intensity of the bear…

351 is a Harshad number, sum of five consecutive primes and also the designation of an extremely-loud V8 engine by Ford from the 1960s.

Here’s what’s revving at BERG this week, as recounted around our big red table on Tuesday morning…

Simon as per usual is running all our projects in the studio and also making sure Little Printer and BERG Cloud gets delivered on time. This week we’re finishing up a few client projects, so he’s helping wrap them up and deliver them to their respective homes. He’s also working on documentation for Little Printer, and helping with our ongoing sales process.

Timo’s working with Oran O’Reilly on editing some films for Chaco, and planning some Uinta filming with me. He’s also been doing some design research with Nick that hopefully we can show very soon. He’s the lead on one of the new client projects coming into the studio, codenamed ‘Silverton’, so he’s starting some research on that.

Andy’s working hard on Little Printer – paying particularly attention to assembly, diagnostics, testing samples, and certification. He’s also been investigating manufacturing options for Ojito – an invention of ours that we may revisit shortly.

Alice’s week is full of Little Printer dev work and Guardian Cryptic Crossword wrangling at lunchtime around our big red table, with our visiting cryptic expert, Phil Wright.

Nick’s working on Little Printer hardware and software with Phil and James Darling – and as I mentioned doing a spot of design research and filming with Timo.

James is helping NL with all of the LP work to get us to the next milestone, which is a list on a whiteboard with words on it I am not clever enough to understand. Luckily for me, James, Nick, Phil and Alice are more than clever enough.

Joe’s working pretty much full-time on the final presentation for Uinta’s Kletting project, making storyboards and images with Alex to communicate new service concepts.

The graphic style of the deliverable that they’ve come up with is lovely – halfway between storyboards, comic books, system diagrams and arresting montages of images that communicate some quite complex things really clearly.

Alex has been heads down on Kletting final deliverable work with Joe, teaching at the LCC for a day today, finalising our online shop designs for BERG Cloud, packaging design for Little Printer and starting to do some really brilliant product graphic experiments for the BERG Cloud ‘Bridge’ unit.

Denise has been supporting Joe and Alex as the creative director on the Kletting work, applying her service-design expertise to Little Printer stuff. In her non-copious spare time thinking about some iPad experiments with typography and doing a little bit of character design for an animated sequence Timo and myself are planning for a Uinta film.

MW’s been really pushing on our sales process to make sure it’s bringing in the right sort of work for the studio and in tandem with that thinking about project planning for the different shapes of new projects that are coming in, which will stretch us in new and interesting ways we hope. He’s also dealing with our finances along with Helen, and getting used to using a Windows Mobile phone after years of iOS…

Helen’s deep into spreadsheets, running the studio, replying to people getting in touch with us with various requests and helping MW with the finances.

I’ve been helping with the finishing stages of our current projects for Uinta, all of which I’m pleased as punch with – and concentrating on sales with MW to line up what we’re doing for clients through the spring and into summer.

---

AOB: I’m pleased to report the lights in the loo work, there’s a good deal on Innocent veg pots at the local supermarket which have pretty much dominated lunch for 50% of the studio, and we had a cracking return for BERG Drinks last night at The Reliance, where much amber fluid was drunk and Yahtzee was played by our friends from MakieLab.

We had a visit from our friend Einar of Voy, and we’re expecting some students from his university AHO in Oslo later this afternoon.

^ Daff Photo by BERG Alumni Paul Mison

Other than that – Happy St. Davids Day, and happy week 351!

What have we been looking at this week?

Telecommunications services for the 1990s

Friend of BERG Tom Stuart is writing a book for O’Reilly: Understanding Computation

answering questions about computation and the fundamental mechanics of programming languages: how do they really work? what can they really do? what do the programs we write in them really mean?

Music video watch:

“lonely AI whose efforts to reach out to its creators ends in tragedy” by @johnpavlus.

Injection moulding watch:

Injection moulding of 72 screw caps in less than 3 secs

Mattel’s Apptivity iPad toys enhance ‘Fruit Ninja’, ‘Cut the Rope’, and ‘Angry Birds’ gameplay

Pneutu.be

Nine block pattern generator

Wrap Your Head Around These Gears

The Strongest Weapon In the World a.k.a. Weapons of Mass Happiness / 2006

Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer

Nike+ new sensor array using Bluetooth LE.

The Mu

Weekend in SF from robert mcintosh on Vimeo.

Related: CINESTAR-360 COMPLETE PACKAGE

And the quest for a studio dog continues, Maddie is our inspiration.

This week saw us filming the prototypes for one of our clients, Chaco, that meant two days with a studio full of people, cameras, lights, product models and as it turns out, a huge amount of extra radio waves.

(click for larger image)

This is a visualisation by Phil Wright who is working with us. It shows the usual BERG wifi network versus the monstrous chunk of the spectrum taken up by the ‘CHACONET’. That’s what happens when you have experience prototypes that use four wifi phones, two wireless baby monitors and eight bluetooth connections.

Week 350 from BERG on Vimeo.

Suwappu – the augmented-reality toy we invented with Dentsu London is a nominee this year in the Digital category of the Designs Of The Year show at London’s Design Museum.

It’s in great company – with other nominees in the category such as the Kinect, the Guardian’s iPad app (which we also consulted on, with Mark Porter and the brilliant internal team at the paper), High Arctic by UVA and others.

The Suwappu certainly get around a bit – here they are last year where they went to Pop!Tech with me to speak about toys, play and learning in a Robot-Readable World.

And last year they also lived for a while at MoMA, at the Talk To Me exhibit…

We worked with Dentsu London from their original idea to bring them to life through model-making and animation, and then build working prototype software on the cutting-edge of what’s possible in computer-vision on smartphones.

It’s great to have partnerships like this that can rapidly get all the way from a strategic idea ‘What if toys were a media channel’ through to working, real things that can be taken to market.

That’s our favourite thing!

Of course – it’s a lovely bonus when they get recognised in a wider cultural context such as MoMA or the Design Museum.

As well as making our own products, we spend most of our time in the studio working closely in partnership with clients to create new things for them – making strategy real through research, design, making and communication.

Do get in touch if you and your company would like to work with us this way.

Back in 2009, BERG created Here & There — a horizonless projection of Manhattan, and a new kind of city map that let you see simultaneously where you are and where you’re going. (The art prints are not currently on sale, and we’re not currently planning a reprint.)

Last year, the uptown and downtown maps were included in Talk to Me, an exhibit at MoMA – the Museum of Modern Art in New York – about design, things, technology and people, alongside some incredible peers and inspirational design work. (Read about Here & There on the Talk to Me website.)

(Here & There at Talk to Me, photo by Fiona Romeo.)

Last week, our Here & There maps became the latest addition to the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

I feel privileged and proud that our maps of Manhattan now have a permanent home in New York and at MoMA!

Many thanks to MoMA’s Acquisition Committee, and huge congratulations to the team: Jack Schulze, James King, and Campbell Orme.

If you’d like to read more, our previous blog posts about Here & There dig into the appearances and design influences of the project.

(A thought… we’ve been wondering about Here & There for other cities, perhaps as public display and taking the concept in new directions. It would have to be in partnership with a brand, so if you have any ideas then do get in touch: info@berglondon.com.)