I found this collection of interesting human/computer interface prototypes and concepts that I’d drafted a couple of months ago.

• The Mag+ concept design and Kicker’s notes
• Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense project
• MIT gestural screen interface
• Two-handed theremin
• Magic projection
• 3D AR sketching
• Kicker Studios‘ gestural TV remote
• Johnny Lee does amazing things with the Wiimotes
• Microsoft’s Project Natal
• Projection on buildings
• Reactable tangible sequencer blocks
• AR magic
• Emotiv, EmSense, NeuroSky, OCZ’s neural impulse actuator

Today, these remnant parcels represent an essential archipelago of opportunity.

Once each site’s urban performance is maximized its design can be engaged & extended for local benefit. Based on existing models of community design, as well as new research in digital democracy, we propose place-based media to shape opinions, engage communities, and even aggregate finances and funding. The final outcome is a network of urban places and virtual space combined.

I dig the digital overlays on paper maps & on video of the sites (near mid-video), and idea of online community engagement with small urban lots. (Yes, my mind is on Loveland lately, why do you ask?)

And more clustering tendencies…

The empty swath in the middle is a walkway to provide pedestrian access to all parts of Plymouth, as originally taped down on the studio floor in Detroit. (We don’t want visitors trampling the miniature city…)

Some big news this week: early investors’ square inches will become square feet once we reach 10,000 and colonize the next patch of land. For now play with it on the web over at makeloveland. Keen observers will notice that the whole arrangement reshuffles every few minutes – just to keep things interesting…

I’ve been talking with Jerry about how to visualize inches and inchvestors and give people something to explore and play with, using Stamen‘s SFMOMA ArtScope as inspiration with its zoomy grid and magnifier. The viewer I sketched in Processing.js feels like a good start and should be live within a few days!

Over coffee today we talked visual storytelling and map presentation styles, and I remarked how much tiled inch-rectangles resemble fields like these Dutch tulips.

World Builder – a great short film with dreamy immersive interface ideas

The making of Telematics City. Also:

• MxR Architecture, a tangible augmented reality interface
• Pixel City, procedurally generated nighttime cityscape
• TED talk on fractal patterns in African villages
• NY Times on how cities are like organisms mathematically

Projection mapping is a method of painting light onto 3D objects rather than a rectangular screen to give them more life and depth. Create Digital Motion has been covering a lot of recent work, collected under their projection mapping tag. The technique has been taking off like crazy this year thanks to software like the Video projection tools project and patches for vvvv. One of my favorite uses is in the gorgeous film SCINTILLATION created with stop-motion and projection mapping onto orchids.

Back to buildings. I’m digging these because it’s a different kind of augmented reality, one which doesn’t require looking through a video feed. I mentioned previously using decaying cities as canvas; here pictures and information can be superimposed onto large-scale scenery for any number of viewers, and the hardware is becoming increasingly accessible. I’ve seen several light graffiti projects. This performance uses giant arrays of LEDs sequenced and synced with music to turn museum windows into pixels for a light show:

This rendered animation superimposes volumes of digital color onto gray, concrete urban environments (and here’s another).

Not familiar with augmented / mixed reality? It’s a combination of computer vision and 3D rendering. Check out GE’s demo, fireworks, a magic trick, a hole in the head and some AR humor. If you have a webcam and print the right marker, you can play with these toys in a browser yourself. Here are notes from my foray into the recently popular Flash / ActionScript tools FLARToolKit & Papervision3D. 

Thanks to Saqoosha’s great start-up guide, I had sample code running in no time. You’ll need a webcam (thanks Craigslist!) and markers (tags, codes, fiducials, you know the black & white square images) to track.

Lacking a printer I grabbed a Sharpie and notebook, which worked famously (see right – my very own blue cube) and gives me ideas for totally sweet pop-up books. You’ll find lots of resources for making your own 80mm FLARToolKit markers (image + .pat definition file). I recommend this how-to at Squidder, this online generator, and a PDF-from-numerical-ID generator. I ended up pixeling a few in Photoshop.

Initially I had trouble tracking markers against dark backgrounds (and um don’t use a reflective table) , but improved it by adding a white border and taping them to stiffer cards. Check out this adaptive filter to track tags in less-than-perfect lighting. Detecting multiple targets is straightforward but takes some effort to reliably associate each code with a 3D object.

So that’s a geeky getting-started writeup. I expect later posts to focus on the artful side rather than tools.