Hasta La Ideas

Imagine a wearable device that lets you physically interact with interfaces that appear in front of you on any surface, where and when you want them. You can watch a video on your newspaper’s front page, navigate through a map on your dining table, and flick through photos on any wall. The “Sixth Sense” system from Patti Maes’ Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab does all this through a prototype built from $300 worth of off the shelf components. You can even take a photograph by simply holding your hand in the air and making a framing gesture.

Though the system appears to be in a state of “frankenstein”-type assemblies of webcams, projectors, mirrors, fingertip color markers and helmets it’s not hard to imagine a streamlined device that could be easily donned.

(more…)

The BakerTweet Box sends updates on every fresh tray of cakes and pastries as they come out of the oven, so you’ll know when to time your visit to the bakery. Proving once again that necessity is the mother of invention, the team at POKE’s London office built BakerTweet for the Albion, their favorite bakery across the road from the office.

Everyone knows the best time to get your baked goods is when they’re fresh out the oven. So we figured that this could be a killer use of Twitter. Letting followers know that fresh goodies are ready right now. But bakeries don’t want laptops or phones lying around in the kitchen. Flour, eggs and technology don’t mix so well.

The prototype was built using open-source electronics platform Arduino and the interaction is minimal, to send a message to local customers following the twiiter feed, you turn the dial to select what’s just been baked and press the button. Simple. POKE will publish a ‘how-to’ in the next days if you want to make one. Given the popularity of the Tweet-a-Watt in the recent Greener Gadgets competition, we’re sure there’s going to be a lot more single-purpose twitter powered devices in the coming year.

(more…)

Sur une superbe bande son de Sigur Ros, voici cette installation intitulée Guten Touch et conçue pour le Red Bull Music Academy 08. Elle met les spectacteurs au centre d’une double projection multi-touch dotée d’un système de visualisations.

Portfolio de Multitouch Barcelona

The Open Cloud Manifesto was launched this week with the support of some very large computer companies including Cisco, AT&T, Sun Microsystems and Telefonica as well as over 50 other players in this growing market, all under the leadership of IBM.

It outlines a set of principles that should underpin the growth of online services and utility computing as we shift from running software and storing data locally to an approach like the one we have developed for electricity, generated at large power stations for use wherever it is needed.

Though this sounds good, Bill Thompson, whom I just quoted from, is very critical:

What we need at this stage is a statement of principles that will resonate with the vendors, the users and the standards body.

We need a document that conveys the excitement of the new computing model while offering a clear path towards future standardisation around agreed principles. Only that way will we ensure that the cloud computing market is characterised by open competition, diverse offerings from multiple players and a commitment to customer service, with a clear path for future development based on open standards.

Sadly the open cloud manifesto fails on all of these grounds, offering only a collection of principles that almost anyone would consider obvious and written in the sort of language that graces too many corporate websites, opening with the claim that “the buzz around cloud computing has reached a fever pitch”.

(more…)

Moleskine, that beloved notebook of so many so far and wide, has just relaunched their website with a new “MSK” format that lets you print your own pages (including a wizard that helps you along–why do things always need a “wizard”?!) It also boasts a gallery of special projects, user-created artwork, and a line-up of special editions. Things are just getting populated, but let us know in the comments how you like the printable pages and links to your favorite (or your own!) artwork.

Too rich for your blood? There’s always this old standby.

(more…)