Obviously nothing has happened here in quite a while. And this won't change for another few weeks, while I take care of a few things. But on May 1st, 2010 this Blog will be rebooted and rise from the ashes, better, stronger and sexier than ever before...
Promise.
Found some amazing youtube videos by Dub FX. At a first glance it's an interesting, experimental way of using your voice and electronics as a mobile studio to produce great music. But after this first impression wears off and you don't just concentrate on the technical aspect of how he is producing the sounds, you also realize that it's actually well composed music by a talented artist.
Related Links:
'Love someone'
'Step on my trip'
'Flow' (with sax)
'Soothe Your Pain'
'Society Gates'
Flash will officially support multi touch. That's great news. The quick mock ups that I made for a possible three finger navigation up there might not be anything special, in fact I don't even think that the three finger solution is a good one. But just the fact that I felt like quickly putting this together illustrates one of my strongest beliefs: Inspiration for anything can come from anywhere.
For me, both movies and computer games are regularly a huge inspiration for my daily work. Game interfaces of course have to be pleasing to the eye, but at the same time they have to be easy to understand and efficient to use and navigate, otherwise players won't be able to concentrate on the actual game. A bad interface means the players won't perform well and the game experience will be frustrating. That is why some of the most innovative interface design solutions originate from game design.
The same thing goes for movies. Looking at how the ways we interact with technology changed drastically in relatively short time (two finger scaling - like on the iPhone - was unheard of only a few years ago) a movie can quickly look dated if the technology, including the interfaces, aren't up to date with the latest developments in the real world. So if a director wants to create the illusion of a futuristic environment, interface design will play a huge role in that as well. Everyone who saw the movie 'Minority Report' will remember the convincing interface that Tom Cruise was using. So convincing in fact, that some of those ideas displayed in this movie are already/or will be adapted to real world technology (sliding a piece of data off the screen to transfer it to a portable device for example). The question "What came first, the egg or the chicken" of course works for interfaces in movies too. But it's irrelevant at the same time: Even if the futuristic movie interface was based on existing 'real' research, I personally didn't know about it at that point in time. So despite the possibility of existing research it was the movie that inspired me and made me think about how to implement those ideas and bring them to a further level.
Today I saw 'district 9' (a really good movie btw) and in many scenes of the movie, you see an alien interact with alien technology / alien interfaces. While much of the interaction actually looked an awful lot like the interface from 'Minority Report', there was one moment that made a huge impression on me... The alien had some sort of circle on the screen, and with three fingers tentacles it then moved, scaled and rotated the circle. Wait what? Rotated a circle sounds pointless, but yeah: what was a simple 2D circle at first, turned into a rotating 3D circular globe animation (similar to a 3D star map) through a certain interaction with three touch points. Even though that particular scene lasted maybe even less than one second, it made me think about how we could bring the typical iPhone navigation with two fingers to the next level and how the use of three fingers makes sense because of three dimensional space...
So to answer the question that the title brings up: You know that you work in the interactive field, when you leave a movie and while everyone around you talks about whether they liked the movie or not, you think about interface design and start preparing some quick mock ups in your head...
Two co-workers of mine just have been interviewed on the FWA. Definitely worth a read.
Related Links:
Dave Snyder (ACD)
Zeh Fernando (Senior Dev)
OTTO is a simple and inspiring tangible sound sampling interface. Check it out.
Related Links:
vimeo video of OTTO in action
creator's homepage
Now that's an extremely cool competition. The task is to write a controller (agent) for Super Mario that controls the game by itself, winning as many levels of increasing difficulty as possible. The main purpose of this competition is to be able to compare different controller development methodologies against each other, both those based on learning techniques such as artificial evolution and those that are completely hand-coded...
Related Links:
http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/ (official site)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8 (screen recording of one entry)
Puma got a nice mention in Rob Ford’s Adobe Edge column:
Related Link:
http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/june2009/articles/article3/
Tribal DDB and director Adam Berg (Stink Digital) produced a nice little short film to promote Philip's latest 21:9 aspect ratio TV. The execution is damn awesome and I definitely prefer the approach to show the aspects of the 21:9 aspect ratio by an actual video instead of just talking about it. The spot has a "Dark Knight" feel which is a plus, just like the little details like the duration of 2:19 minutes. I just wish that there were more comments of the director or the post production, because that is what brings this thing to the next level (and could even more). Aside from the fact that regular ratios (which only is like 99% of the content you'll usually watch on a TV) will probably look crappy on this TV and that once again it's a website that's just a video in the end with user interaction only playing a minor side role, it's still a really well executed campaign microsite. Check it out.
Related Link:
http://www.cinema.philips.com/
Directors Cut
Find me a church like this and I will attend religiously. This video made by "airloaf" is hilarious, but why is it featured in my "Good Design" category? Simple. It's the perfect example for the favorite topic of my former design professor Paul Lottermann a.k.a. "Bruno Paulot": A picture can tell more than a thousand words. In one of his many experiments he took a simple photo of a woman, standing next to a river, looking at the other riverside where you can see a power plant. He then mailed this photo to different people, including celebrities and politicians. He asked them to write a little caption to the picture, anything they like, and then send it back to him. The collected captions were then published in a book. It's simply amazing how different the human mind and its perception is. Everyone saw the same picture, but everyone saw a different story... So yeah: A picture tells more than a thousand words, which is photography's and video's strength. But a picture can also leave too much room for interpretation, which is where text and audio come in. They help to put the picture into the right context. The art of design is to say the right things with text or audio, while not simply boring the viewer and repeating what's already been said visually. It's a basic rule of good design: A user who has to think for himself will be interested and spend time with your product. If it's too abstract and too hard to figure out though, it gets frustrating and you lose your audience. Good photo/video - text/audio relation is a fine line, but if it's done right a simple video of people rocking out in church can make your day.
Related Links:
http://www.youtube.com/user/airloaf
Amazon: Ein Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte