The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

Sorry I’ve been away from the blog for so long, folks. I’ve been driving cross country from Cambridge to Seattle. It was a wonderful, amazing trip which I will write more about in subsequent posts. In the meantime I wanted to share three videos, stolen from three friends. I’ll show the videos first, and then talk about relevance. (Many thanks to the friends I’ve looted.)

1. Ratatat has a new album coming out. T, has been feeding me links to leaked songs (and this video) and the album promises to be awesome. Much less dance-able (to the dismay of the young-uns) but clever and infectious as usual. Here’s a video to their song, Mirando, made from snippets of the movie Predator:

2. Allen showed me this amazing video for REM’s song Imitation of Life. The video is built out of single 30 second clip that’s played forwards and backwards, but zoomed into to provide a continuous song crafted from moments and reversals:

3. Last but not least, Eva, a former co-worker, recently posted this video about manipulating video via objects in that video. The video is quite beautiful and the source (which I had delicious’ed earlier) is a little more academic, but continues bringing home the bacon.

So the connection between these three videos is that one of my current assignments is to think about time-based interfaces. Specifically timelines and calendars. But, we’d like those interfaces to feel more like the “infinite canvas” (the pan and zoom demo in my last post). Something elegant and intuitive. So I’ve been looking at interfaces with some notion of time represented in them; time represent linearly, time represented circularly, time as discreet moments, and time as a continuum. Success would be to make something that’s easier to use than a calendar, and more powerful, a task that many many applications have taken on.

I remember the first time many years ago when I was working for AMNH that I had to write some php scripts to parse through old ANWR temperature data and build a website with a calendar. It sucked. Months have different lengths. Years can have different number of days. And when you get beyond that, weekends and holidays (although they’re just days, too) are qualitatively different than other days. What I mean to say is that from our Roman calendar to Christian holidays to “American” work week our experience of time is very dependent on soft culture. It would be great to have something malleable to help me manage my experience of time.

So here are the nice-to-haves of a new calendar app:

1.See multiple timelines simultaneously. This includes one’s own paths, as well as timelines of friends, family, and co-workers (your entire– and I hate this phrase– social network).

2. Attach tags, data, descriptions or any sort of media to a piece of time. And be able to reorganize and share those blocks.

3. Shift between views based on task. If I’m in a “to do” sort of mood (i.e. at work), then show my calendar prioritized accordingly.

Right now, I’ve got this vision of colored ribbons in space, like the Ace Combat dogfight replay.

Filed under: art, movies, technology

Think outside the bag

So I guess some of the stuff my group has been working on at Microsoft has been ‘released’ to the public. (Demoed by Bill yesterday!) Here’s my boss Ian demo-ing one of our recent projects:

Full Story: http://gizmodo.com/390400/microsoft-touchwall-surface-for-the-common-man

Filed under: projects, technology

Corpus Hypercubus

Saw this video today:

Animation has come a long way thanks to computers. Ever since Final Fantasy (which I had to see in theaters), they’ve been pushing pretty far into the uncanny valley. (Computer have also caused the reverse to be true as well. The future is in the valley, apparently.) Even the kid’s stuff is unbelievably polished.

So it’s only natural that an opposite sort of animation gain in popularity, raw and process-oriented, like this in-situ animated graffiti or whiteboard animations or even (gasp!) sand paintings. Please to enjoy this amination! (ty, Dan)

Campy, yes. (You should see the sand painting set to Vivaldi…) But there’s something so anti-art about it, that it must, in fact, be brilliant– albeit naively so.

Filed under: art, movies

Ferrous Boy

Go see Iron Man. It’s good clean fun.

Filed under: movies

As Pie

Not sure how I missed this. But it’s great.

Images from apartmenttherapy.com

Victor and Rolf’s new store in Milan has just one simple concept, executed perfectly. Designed by architect Siebe Tettero with SZI Design in Amsterdam, the store is just killer.

Recently, I saw this site called geosim philly.

Virtual Philadelphia is a leading 3D online virtual city mirrored off the Center City of Philadelphia, PA, full of historical landscapes and buildings, hundreds of years of culture and one of the most beloved US cities.
Today, Philadelphia is a vibrant city cultivated with restaurants, boutiques, museums, nightlife, modern residences and developed commerce – definitely a premier place to live in or to visit.

GeoSim compiles gigabytes of aerial photos, street images, laser scans and geodetic measurements of Philadelphia to build an accurate 3D city model, capable of providing a genuine life simulation of the physical streets, buildings and urban landscape with the “look and feel” of a real city.

I don’t know much about how this project actually works. I have this feeling that it’s cooked up by the Philadelphia tourist board. After hearing architects get all “schweaty” over Secondlife and having it not pan out into anything that dramatically impacted design, I’m reluctant to call this stuff relevant.

So it may not be relevant… but it seems to be an interesting way to ride the Bilbao effect. I think they’re going for a Digital Bilboa Effect. It’s a less expensive and less risky way to draw tourists into the spaces of the city’s downtown area. I wonder what will happen when a new building is built. Will the proposals be vetted through the digital downtown?

Filed under: architecture, fashion