Blog (page 30)

It’s Friday, so time for our usual jumble-sale of the near-future, as detected via the studio mailing list.

Nick found ChumbyCV – a computer vision framework for Chumby. Here’s one that can not only see, but has acquired motive power.

At the other end of the slightly-terrifying robot scale, are the newest designs to come out of Boston Dynamics – makers of BigDog – which include this incredible ‘cheetah’ design…

Which just gives me flashback to my youth, and the evil Decepticon cassette tape / jaguar – Ravage!

From one 1980’s toy to an update of another – what happens when you combine scalectrix (or perhaps, micromachines) with projection and computervision? Answer: you get this brilliant experiment by Lieven van Velthoven: Room Racers…

As pico projectors get cheaper and more powerful I wonder what new play forms are going to arrive in the next couple of years.

Friends of BERG, Bjorn Jeffery and Emil Overmar are likely to be involved if the first products of their new Bonnier-backed venture Toca Boca are anything to go by.

They are consciously not making games for kids but – get this – “digital toys”.

Brilliant.

I downloaded “Helicopter Taxi” and it really is a digital toy. It’s simple, delightful, charming and radiates play. It’s aimed at 3 years old and up – but the 30somethings in the studio who played with it had stupid grins on their faces from the first couple of seconds they picked it up. Really looking forward to seeing what else the Toca Boca playsmiths come up with.

More beautiful digital playthings. Tom pointed to Fez, which I won’t even try and describe – it’s just lovely. Watch.

FEZ PAX EAST GAMEPLAY VIDEO from POLYTRON on Vimeo.

And finally, Matt Brown pointed us to the new video by Airside for Flashman – the new band by Fred Deakin (Lemon Jelly) and Robin Jones (Beta Band). It’s lovely – and as Matt points out, very New British Modern…

Flashman — The Proposition from Airside on Vimeo.

Have a lovely weekend!

You don’t have to spend much time around BERG to work out that when it comes to coffee, supermarket grounds and a cafetière don’t cut it – at least not for long. Coffee geekery has an important place in the life of the studio, and the Shoreditch area of East London (where BERG’s current studio is located) is a great place to be based if you are a coffee geek. In fact, it becomes easy to take for granted the access to fantastic coffee that we have here.

I’m not going to go into the recent history of London’s coffee scene because that’s been covered rather exhaustively, recently by Bean Scene magazine. Also, I’m not going to try to list all the best coffee shops in East London because that’s been done a lot too (just google “London best coffee”), and besides there’s an app for that – and the folks who created it are on Twitter. I’m just going to highlight a few things that you might like to know if you’re planning to visit BERG or East London any time soon and want to know where to get a great cup of coffee.

Less than a half mile away from the studio up on Shoreditch High Street you’ll find Prufrock tucked into the front of clothes shop Present. It’s very much a “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of place. I have no idea how many times I walked past it without ever noticing that it was there. Prufrock founder Gwilym Davies was the 2009 world barista champion. If you’re going to be around for more than a couple of days, you may want to have a go at Gwilym’s disloyalty card which he created to encourage coffee fans to patronise other high quality coffee shops around London. (I recommend Nick Wade’s lovely account of his disloyalty card tour and accompanying photos.) If you want to visit Prufrock, look for the “The Golden Horn Cigarette Company” sign outside. Prufrock Café has also recently opened in Leather Lane.

A mile and half from the studio in Bethnal Green is the home of Square Mile Coffee Roasters. Square Mile’s director James Hoffmann was the world barista champion in 2007 and is a prominent figure in the London coffee scene. You can’t buy Square Mile coffee at that location but they have an online shop. They also do a monthly subscription service. Last month James started a short weekly video podcast about coffee. One of the most interesting things Square Mile have done lately is collaborate with London-based Kernel Brewery to create Suke Quto Coffee IPA. It’s quite lovely!

Of course, with all this revitalisation going on in the London coffee scene, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to put on a festival. Sure enough, on August 8th-11th 2011, the folks who run The London Coffee Guide are putting on The London Coffee Festival at The Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. That’s just a half mile walk from the studio.

Any discussion about BERG and coffee wouldn’t be complete without a mention of The Shed (aka The Hut, The Shack, etc). It’s a branch of Taylor Street Baristas located in a little garden shed in a car park just off of New North Place. Since it opened late last year, we only have to walk about 200 feet to get really good coffee. Lucky us!

p.s. Want to know how to make great coffee at home using Science? Scientific American is here to tell you how.

We weren’t at SxSW, but some of our friends were – and via their twitter-exhaust this report by David Sherwin of FrogDesign from a talk by Intel’s Genevieve Bell popped up on our radar.

In her panel yesterday at South by Southwest, Genevieve Bell posed the following question: “What might we really want from our devices?” In her field research as a cultural anthropologist and Intel Fellow, she surfaced themes that might be familiar to those striving to create the next generation of interconnected devices. Adaptable, anticipatory, predictive: tick the box. However, what happens when our devices are sensitive, respectful, devout, and perhaps a bit secretive? Smart devices are “more than being context aware,” Bell said. “It’s being aware of consequences of context.”

Here’s a lovely quote from Genevieve:

“[Today’s devices] blurt out the absolute truth as they know it. A smart device [in the future] might know when NOT to blurt out the truth.”

This in turn, reminded me of a lovely project that Steffen Fiedler did back in 2009 during a brief I helped run at the RCA Design Interactions course as part T-Mobile’s ongoing e-Etiquette project, called “Instruments of Politeness“.

These are the titular instruments – marvellous contraptions!

They’re a set of machines to fool context-aware devices and services – to enable you to tell little white lies with sensors.

For instance, cranking the handle of the machine above simulates something like a pattern of ‘walking’ in the accelerometer data of the phone, so if you told someone you were out running errands (when in fact you were lazing on the sofa) your data-trail wouldn’t catch you out…

It’s my turn on the blog rota this week, which means I get to do weeknotes!

We usually start our Tuesday 10am weekly standup with both a) theme music (this week was Hoyt Curtin‘s rousing theme music for “Battle Of The Planets”) and b) a fact about the week number.

301 is:

…the sum of three consecutive primes (97 + 101 + 103), happy number in base 10, and a HTTP status code, indicating the content has been moved and the change is permanent (permanent redirect).

This week, we are both a happy number – but also going through some permanent change.

It’s Tom’s last week with us before he heads to the golden lands of games design, and we’re going to be sending him off in style at the end of it.

For now though, BERG Employee #1 is documenting all of the awesome work he’s done in the last two years and change. He’s also working on the website and e-commerce system for SVK, and setting up some maintenance dashboards behind the scenes for Schooloscope.

Matt Brown is cranking on Barringer. As we garner more knowledge about how we’re going to make it, that’s leading us into more confident exploration of its aesthetics.

Matt’s been pulling together beautiful moodboards, references, material samples and examples under the umbrella of what he calls “New British Modern“.

I’ll bet we’ll be talking more about “NBM” here soon. The voice and surface of the product is almost there – it’s tantalising. He’s also working to support Alex on Dimensions2 and SVK this week.

Alex is wrangling ad production for SVK, and working hard on getting the interaction design and visual direction of Dimensions2 together for an end-to-end demo for tomorrow at a client workshop.

Dimensions2 is a slightly different beast to the original “HowBigReally.com” prototype – and it’s revealing nice new corners and opportunities as Alex gets deeper into the detail of both the visuals and the cracking bits of code-sketching that James is doing alongside him.

James is also creating some more end-to-end demos in code for Weminuche this week. Looking forward to Friday Demos on that one.

Jack has a bunch of meetings with potential new clients, but his studio time is divided between work with Timo bringing Haitsu home, and sketching with me and Timo on work for a new project: Chaco.

Which means, wonderfully – that Timo is in the studio with us this week!

Andy is busy with supplier meetings and research on Barringer. Nick is consulting on Chaco, Haitsu and working with James on Barringer. Matt W. is talking with accountants about R&D and lawyers about IP – as well as attending various new business meetings with Jack and myself. Kari is keeping the machinery of the studio going with process, prodding and peerless music selections.

I’m helping out with Dimensions2, SVK, going to a few meetings and typing – always typing… But – very excited about starting to sketch a little on Chaco. It’s in the very early stages but it involves working again with a favourite immaterial of mine – SpaceTime…

There. I think that’s everything! Busy times.

The content has been moved and the change is permanent. 301.

Hearty congratulations to our friends at Plumen/Hulger, who have just been named as winners of Design Of The Year by London’s Design Museum.

Shipping atoms is hard.

Shipping atoms when you are a small company is harder.

Shipping populist, beautiful atoms at affordable prices that aim to change the world a little tiny bit is the hardest thing.

But it’s not impossible now, and should always be applauded and recognised.

So glad that Plumen is getting this applause and recogniton.

It’s all deserved.

Chris O’Shea’s Body Swap is a Kinect-based installation that lets two people control “paper cut-outs” of one another. Especially fun, as the video proves, with two people of very different height – and the provision of music to encourage acting and play is a nice touch.

Photo credit: obvious_jim

Another Kinect-related link: this Flickr set shows what happens when you map depth data (from a Kinect sensor) to a traditional digital camera photograph – and then pivot and distort it in three dimensions. The above image is probably my favourite, but the whole set is worth a look – if only for the way the set progresses through increasingly distorted takes on the original photographs.

3ERD is a tumblelog of jitter-gif photographs from Matt Moore. He’s using a stereoscopic compact camera (a bit like, say, the Fuji W1) to take stereoscopic images – but then turning the left and right image into a two-frame animated gif. The results are uncanny. It’s hard to comprehend that both frames were taken at the same time, however simple the idea may seem; the translation of two images separated in space into two images separated by time is a strange one to wrap your head around. A little slice of bullet-time.

50 Watts’ Space Teriyaki is a wonderful collection of Japanese futurist art and imagery from the seventies and eighties. It veers between the bleak and gynaecological; throughout, though, there’s a fascinating use of colour and form.

And finally: a robot arm, repurposed into a physical feedback system for a racing computer game. It brings a whole new meaning to “force feedback”.

Three hundred weeks!

Everybody likes a number ending in zeroes.

Matt J and Jack are still in New York, where they’ve been teaching at the School of Visual Arts. They return tomorrow morning, landing straight back into the thick of things at the studio. (Well, they land at the airport really. They’re not falling out of the sky back into their seats, though it’s an amusing thought).

Matt W is also away, talking at FITC Amsterdam. He’ll be back on Thursday, I think.

Everyone else is here, and busy.

I’m working on Schooloscope this week – scraping new Ofsted inspections, little bits of maintenance. I’ve also been working around SVK – firming up the infrastructure around selling things. That’s coming together nicely out of several disparate pieces.

Alex is hard at work on various different design elements relating to SVK – working with advertisers, promoting the product, designing websites to sell it. Important stuff.

Nick’s darting around between a selection of technical prototypes, as well as ongoing work on Weminuche. Every now and then he waves people over to his desk to show us some magic working; every time we wander over, he shows us magic.

A box of fruit arrived this afternoon, which is all down to James. This scheme – wherein various people through Brig put a pound in an envelope, and we get a box of fruit delivered a week, has been christened Fruit Club; Alex even designed a logo. I am enjoying the fruits of Fruit Club as I type.

Workwise, James is attacking both Dimensions and Weminuche this week – the former likely heading towards a nice demo on Friday.

(We’ve started doing Friday demos – sometime in the middle of the afternoon, anyone who, on Monday said they’d have something to demo, shows it to whoever’s around. We usually all try to cram around monitors, or break out the projector; it’s really exciting to see work you’ve not been involved with emerging. James and I will definitely be showing things this week; there might be more Weminuche to show, too).

Matt B is mainly focused on Barringer, but he’s also got some fingers in SVK this week – including hitting “go” on some exciting buttons.

Last week, Kari was inside mass of dense accounting and reporting work, which has now been complete, and we await the results of it. This week, she’s writing a bit, keeping on top of admin, and keeping track of the flows of information and work, in and out of the company.

I went over to the studio doors just now, to check the list Kari maintains of what everyone’s doing – she updates it every Tuesday after our standups. At the top is the week number – and this week, 300 is in a different colour, a larger size.

Which made me smile.

If you’ve missed that today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, well, you’ve not been spending much time on Twitter today, have you? Here are a few links in honour of the day:

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have started a movement with their book Half the Sky. (The title comes from an ancient Chinese proverb: “Women hold up half the sky.”)

When Fangirls Attack collects links (LOTS of them) to articles on gender in comics.

The Guardian list their Top 100 women. Tellingly, only two of the 100 fall in the category of Technology.

Channel 4 Food have a list of the most inspiring foodie ladies in Britain.

TEDWomen is a treasure trove of talks and performances by awesome, inspiring women.

Today is a great day to re-read Sojourner Truth’s 1852 speech Ain’t I A Woman. (Or, even better, hear it read by Maya Angelou.)

And finally, if you really have been absent from Twitter today and haven’t seen EQUALS‘ video of 007, er… Daniel Craig dressing in drag to make a point about gender inequality, please watch it now:

;

Wired UK magazine gets the scoop on the secret of our upcoming comic collaboration, SVK:

Why should superheroes have all the fun? In SVK, a new one-shot comic by Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan) and Matt Brooker (2000 AD), you get a power of your own: mind-reading.

Shine the special torch (bundled with the book) on the page and you reveal the characters’ thoughts, printed in UV ink.

Boom!

I gotta tell you, it’s magical.

(That’s a little of Matt Brooker’s test art.)

Read more at Wired: How Warren Ellis is using torchlight for his latest comic.

We’re due to publish Ellis and Brooker’s creation in April 2011. Sign up for news of SVK’s release at getsvk.com.

Everyone in the room has gasped at least once this week.

I’ve just glanced over Nick’s shoulder. Every time I look, he’s working on something different. Many, many strange and brilliant things are brewing in the dark recesses of his terminal windows.

Out in the room known as New Statham, Weminuche grows. We all creep in, feeding it with whiteboard drawings, spreadsheets, gantt charts, collaborative experiments and wordplay. Some weeks it simmers; other weeks, people stride out, fists clenched in triumph. That’s happened more than once.

Kari continues to tame the beast that is managing the studio. Her work this week has looked even more intense than usual.

Alex and James glide back and forth between desks and whiteboards, sharing and iterating code sketches, drawings and animations. They’re at the point where they’re starting to really crack the back of something, and keep revealing things that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up a little.

Tom is in deep integration mode, tightening the bolts on structures and systems that will fuel BERG’s longer term plans, occasionally looking up to send the usual brilliant, obscure links around the studio mailing list, before diving back down, brow furrowed, earphones in.

There’s a little sneak peek at SVK, the comic we’re publishing with Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker, in this month’s Wired. I’ve been helping to pull the various strands of it together over the past few months, and from where I’m sitting, it looks to be an absolute belter.

Mr Jones and Mr Schulze are in New York, teaching at SVA and scheming on new projects. They’ll be back mid next-week with tales of derring-do under the influence of weapons-grade Haribo.

Mr Webb has been zipping around, having lots of meetings, each time coming back into the room wide-eyed with new possibilities. I would love to be able to jack directly into his brain this week.

The room has been calm, yet fizzing with energy.