Hasta La Ideas

La résidence d’artistes Urban AU à Berlin, a exposé un projet collaboratif appelé « Just Like Swimming » et créé par des artistes et architectes australiens : ZAP, JUMBO, RusselL Isaac-Cole, Ben Milbourne, Tanja Milbourne et BiLD Architecture. Le concept était d’imiter l’eau d’une piscine vide par une lumière bleue diffuse.

Eone a conçu une collection de montres en différents coloris pour aveugles appelées « The Bradley Timepiece » qui fonctionnent avec une petite boule magnétique qu’on touche pour savoir l’heure. Le nom « Bradley » est un hommage à un gagnant des Paralympics qui a perdu la vue au combat en Afghanistan.

World Backup Day was yesterday, and the day’s motto is: “Don’t be an April Fool. Be prepared. Back up your files on March 31.”

This is good advice, but, of course, you should back up your files all year round, not just on March 31. Hard drives fail. Computers (and smartphones and tablets) get stolen. Phones get dropped into water and become unusable.

If I lost everything on my computer, I’d be awfully unhappy about that. My computer has precious photos, lots of contact information, my calendar, a monstrous collection of website bookmarks, lots of documents I’ve scanned and shredded, etc. But I’m not worried about losing these valuable items, because I’m protected.

The following is what I do for backup, just to give you some ideas about how you might want to backup your digital life.

Incidental backups

My contacts and calendar are synched to my smartphone and tablet, so I have a backup of sorts there. I have some photos on Flickr, but these are just a select few I’ve chosen to share publicly. I also have some files in Dropbox, so I can access them from everywhere. While these are all fine duplications, I also wanted some true backup solutions.

Backups to hard drives

I have a MacBook, and I use SuperDuper to create a bootable hard drive with all my files. This is a Mac-only solution, and for Mac users I think it’s terrific. I’ve restored my entire computer from a SuperDuper backup, when Apple needed to replace a bad hard drive, and everything went just fine. There are plenty of other backup programs for both the Mac and the PC, but I don’t know if they provide quite the same functionality. If you’re a PC user, please leave a comment about your favorite SuperDuper equivalent.

I use LaCie rugged hard discs (with a Firewire connection) for my backups, and I’ve been happy with them, but there are certainly many other choices. I like the LaCie products because I often carry a hard drive in my purse, and so I appreciate the external protection built into these hard drives. It’s also one of the drives tested for compatibility with SuperDuper. I rotate through three different drives, so if one of these fails, I’m still protected.

Why carry one in my purse? It’s a form of off-site backup, and it’s easier to put one in my purse than to take one over to my safe deposit box. If my house were robbed, or if there were a fire, I wouldn’t want to lose both my computer and my back-up. (Yes, I know this may be a bit over the top.)

Backup to the cloud

I also wanted automated, all-the-time backups — and I believe in what organizer Margaret Lukens calls the “belt and suspenders” approach of having multiple types of backups, so you know you’re covered.

My choice for cloud backups is CrashPlan, but, again, there are many such services to choose from. I picked CrashPlan because people I knew used it and successfully restored files when they needed to, and they were very happy with the service.

CrashPlan and other cloud backups are great in that they run continually, and they provide off-site storage. But, if I needed to restore a computer drive quickly, my cloud backup wouldn’t be nearly as useful as my SuperDuper backup.

What about you? If you’re not doing backups, I highly recommend you start — you don’t want to be an April Fool and lose your valuable data. If you are backing up your data, I’d be interested in hearing your backup strategy in the comments.

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Pour leur projet Street Eraser, les artistes Tayfun Sarier et Guus ter Beek (travaillant tous les deux dans l’agence Wieden+Kennedy) ont créé des autocollants géants qui imitent l’outil d’effacement de Photoshop et servent à effacer les rues, les publicités, les graffitis et les affiches des rues de Londres.

Feature: as Facebook buys virtual reality headset maker Oculus and Sony reveals its own VR device, Dezeen explores what the resurgence of this old school technology means for designers.

Oculus VR was already big before Facebook bought the virtual reality headset maker for $2 billion. A resurrection of dead technology from the 1990s, Oculus Rift had previously been branded as a gaming device, but with Facebook’s acquisition VR’s progression into the digital world in general has been accelerated.

“Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a call to Facebook’s investors, while his announcement post painted a picture of the world donning headsets to watch tennis, study in classrooms and consult with doctors.

Facebook sees Oculus Rift as a chance to profoundly transform communication, and to the gaming industry it’s a generational leap in electronic entertainment. But there’s more to virtual reality. It’s as much a creative tool for designers and architects, as it is a new medium for designers to explore, and a close and personal way of experiencing the creations of others.

And good god it’s difficult to explain why to anyone who hasn’t tried modern virtual reality devices. Rewinding to the Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco just last week, Sony neatly illustrated this fact in its reveal of its own prototype virtual reality gaming headset, Project Morpheus.

Sony’s president of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, called the peculiarly powerful effect of being sensorily immersed in virtual reality “presence”, acknowledging just how hard it is to relate its effect of “being there”. Seeing it formatted in double vision on YouTube doesn’t cut it at all.

Outwardly you look dorky, with a bulky headset strapped to your head, swinging it around to see things that aren’t really there. But inwardly the experience is remarkable, your virtual gaze mapped exactly and immediately to your real one. The ability to crane around obstacles, lean close to study objects or track an enemy starfighter as it loops over your cockpit is enveloping. And it clearly has further application than games.

At its Morpheus announcement, Sony saw it complementing Google’s ongoing 3D interiors mapping project Indoor Maps, which allows you to sample hotels and shops before you visit. Indeed, Oculus Rift has already been used for a sort of viral tourism from its earliest demos, taking users on a visit to Tuscany, Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, and the EUseum, a virtual gallery that presents high resolution paintings to study.

It therefore isn’t much of a leap to seeing it being used as an architectural visualisation tool, something that both architects and technologists have actually been exploring since virtual reality’s advent. Importing from CAD into 3D game engines like Unity is relatively easy, allowing companies like Arch Virtual to spring up to offer walkthroughs of prospective projects along with environments for military training, medical simulations and advertising.

Instead of the all too familiar glossy render, with virtual reality you get to examine the details: the weight of a wall, the expanse of a void, the shifting sightline as you freely move across an aperture. Clients can experience their commission before they sign instead of just pore over abstract plans.

There are applications in product design, too. Ford uses virtual reality to sample new car designs, allowing the chance to inspect an interior from the perspective of the driver or passengers. Ford argues that it allows the company to assess designs far earlier in the process than before, from material finishes to colour schemes, in different light conditions and environments.

As well as sampling designed objects and spaces, virtual reality also has an application in creating them, whether in CAD or ZBrush, breaking beyond the perceptive confines of 2D displays. As an idea of how easy the new generation of virtual reality software and hardware makes manipulation of objects in 3D space, there’s MakeVR. It uses wireless motion controllers similar to those popularised by Nintendo for its Wii console to make interaction seamless. Shorn of the complex menus found in a lot of design software, virtual reality helps to democratise 3D design – in terms of skills and knowledge if not financially. Spool the 3D models out to a 3D printer and production is further pressed into the hands of the many.

On the other hand, it’s possible to use 3D sensors like Microsoft’s Kinect to map fully textured environments or objects for use in virtual reality. Through a confluence of breaking technologies, 3D as a medium for creatives to work in has become a reality.

There are many hurdles ahead. A major one is that virtual reality in its current iteration is insular, highjacking your senses and removing you from the real world. Whether you’re in a living room or a studio, you don’t get to share glances with those around you. Moreover, wearing a headset for extended periods is less than comfortable and has a tendency to make people fall over. Aside from its weight (which isn’t exactly heavy but it’s an unaccustomed bulk), nausea and dizziness can result from a lag between head movement and seeing the result, how quickly the screen refreshes and the speed at which things are moving in the virtual space.

But still, Facebook’s just bet $2 billion on virtual reality, a discarded tech from the mid 1990s, finally making a comeback. We’ve experienced enough Hollywood visualisations of a computer-vision based future, and increasingly the confines of the 2D – and even 3D – TV screen are becoming suffocating, failing to express the richness of the virtual things and places that creatives are making. Virtual reality might be yesterday’s future, but that isn’t making it feel any less fresh.

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to change the world of design appeared first on Dezeen.