Hasta La Ideas

March 25th, 3:40PM EST

Haiyan Zhang, an interaction designer out of IDEO’s London operations, has mapped radiation levels around Japan with crowdsourced data from Pachube, a realtime data infrastructure platform that has aggregated geiger counter readings from across Japan. These feeds come from a mix of local councils, official government and motivated individuals who have connected geiger counters to the internet. They’re constantly being updated to give the most recent information.

Haiyan’s map provides a color-coded, at-a-glance view, updated in real-time. Measurements above the Japanese government recommended dose limit of 1000 µSv per year (equal to 0.114 µSv per hour) are tagged in orange. Those measurements above the recommended limit are tagged orange.

From a user experience point-of-view, I wanted the numbers to be at a glance, avoiding the extra clicks that these mashups usually ask of the user. So you see the readings highlighted in yellow on the map. The orange circles are coloured based on the severity of the reading (the darker the orange, the higher the reading). Clicking on these circles will also bring up more details about the reading (location, timestamp, millisievert).

Read more about Zhang’s geiger map on her blog here.

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A Finnish company called Microtask has struck upon a novel way to use crowdsourcing to complete extremely dull tasks. It’s a simple concept and brilliantly executed: They take something that needs to be digitized—the archives of the National Library of Finland, to use an actual example—and break the scanned documents up into millions of little bits. Then those bits are seeded within a game called Mole Bridge, where players read the bits—which are just images of individual words—and type what they say into a window, thus creating data. Each word they type helps them build a bridge in the game, and the data flows back to Microtask, who puts it all back together into a cohesive document. Redundancy is built in to weed out errors.

So far their National Library archives project is working like gangbusters:

Volunteers from around the world have completed over 2 million individual tasks, totaling 100,000 minutes, or 1,700 hours of work in just one month. The games are a great way to keep volunteers interested, says Ville Miettinen, CEO of Microtask.

Games are one way to go about this, and here’s another idea: The company that should really be looking to partner up with Microtask is Captcha. You know how you have to type in a random, gobbledygook “Captcha” word when posting a Craigslist ad, blog comment or similar to prove that you’re human? What if that word was an actual word from an actual document that needed to be digitized? Thousands of people are already doing this every day.

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So freakin’ brilliant: The Junkyard Jumbotron is a project developed by Rick Borovoy at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media that lets you take a bunch of cell phones, tablets, iPods and what have you, arrange them in a layout of your choosing, and turn the whole thing into a singular display:

Junkyard Jumbotron from chris csik on Vimeo.

Is it just me, or does the guy kinda sound like Steve Jobs?

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Put yourself in the virtual driver’s seat with the latest tech-enabled racecar toys

In 2010 Mattel put kids in Barbie’s shoes when they introduced a built-in camera. Now, with their Hot Wheels Video Racer, amateur car racers can put themselves in the driver’s seat too. Equipped with an LCD screen on the bottom and a built-in memory chip, the car functions as a low-res camera, capturing up to 12 minutes of footage at 30 frames per second.

The cameras mount to any computer via USB port and, using Hot Wheels software, kids can choose from a range of music, scene transitions and special effects when editing. The cars also come with adhesives and Velcro mounting straps so that budding filmmakers can attach the car to any surface—such a helmet, skateboard or remote control helicopter.

The Video Racer is track compatible, a feature that will be even more fun with the launch of Hot Wheels Wall Tracks, a mountable system coming out Fall 2011. With the car camera offering a 1:64 scale point of view, taking the car from the floor to the wall as it rounds loops and zooms down straightaways will allow kids to safely engage with the thrill of racing first-hand.

Hot Wheels Wall Tracks span $17-30, and the Video Racer will sell for $60. Both will be available online and in toy stores Fall 2011.

Top image via Engadget

Une oeuvre intéressante avec cette paire de Nike Air Force 1 entièrement customisée par l’artiste anglais Alex Nash (Nashmoney), pour la transformer en un double haut-parleur. Un projet dans le cadre du concours lancé par Havana Club : Inspired Ingenuity, autour du détournement d’objets.

Previously on Fubiz

• Excellence in Title Design
• Orange Open
• Nike Better World

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