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

The light’s handled by the aforementioned green LEDs wrapped around a wooden core, and controlled through an Arduino and my laptop.

Where to go next?

• cut silhouette patterns for the shade with Ponoko
• carve designs into the wooden frame
• use a BlinkM RGB module (or a MaxM – 445,000mcd?!)
• going wireless with an XBee is really tempting for when I have multiple objects around
• the next one won’t be a box. It’ll be… something else.

• SCRAP (San Francisco)
• Urban Ore (Berkeley)
• HSC Electronics (Santa Clara / Santa Rosa)
• Building REsources (San Francisco)
• Weird Stuff (Sunnyvale)
• East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse (Oakland)
• San Jose Scientific (Santa Clara)
• Mythbusters’ Shop ‘Til You Drop episode

Remember, the Maker Faire‘s this weekend in San Mateo – I plan on going Sunday.

I like the diffuse look of paper lanterns over the point-light intensity of bare LEDs so I’m playing with different shapes and materials. Most of the work now will be sculptural, and I’ll be going for a ‘luminous origami’ feel.

Check out the Crochet Coral Reef Project and their hyperbolic crochet blog. Margaret Wertheim gave a TED talk on this intersection of geometry, environmentalism and handicrafts. She says about modeling these sea slug & coral shapes, it’s “almost impossible to do it on computers.” 

Althea Crome did the remarkable miniature knitting in Coraline – read an interview or watch this feature:

Urban knitting adds a nice coziness to the city, no?

• MAKE filmed a wonderful artist profile on Reuben Margolin, who builds these floating wooden waves with an amazing sense of lightness. Watch full screen! 
  
• Hoberman Transformable Design creates expanding domes and architectural shells and originally turned me onto transformable (or deployable) structures. Here’s an interview.
• Daniel Piker’s Space Symmetry Structure blog covers, among various spatial curiosities, computer-simulated foldables and rigid origami. 
  
• The Hyposurface – a mesmerizing, undulating, triangulated wall
• Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests – creatures whose wind-powered frames majestically roam the beaches. His mechanics have inspired many others: e.g. cross it with a Segway for the creepy crawler, a car for the mondo spider, and the Arduino for this walker.
• Arthur Ganson – wires, cranks, walking chairs
• Tim Prentice – like blankets, wind, or wiggling microorganisms
• Ben Hopson studies movement in industrial design to give objects personality