Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that on the surface looks like a fairly ordinary bluetooth-enabled, battery powered speaker system. The interesting bit is that this is the first appliance (that I can buy in a shop) that does things when touched with a mobile phone: The NFC interaction is demonstrated first-hand [...]
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Depth of field: Film in design research
We’ve just had a new article (pdf) published as part of a Research by design issue at Form Akademisk. What follows is a summary of some of the key points, alongside the embedded videos that form the central arguments in the research. The article is called Depth of field: discursive design research through film written [...]
Two new articles on RFID interaction
Touch project PhD researcher Kjetil Nordby has just published two journal articles on interactions with RFID and NFC. These articles pull together concepts from ubiquitous computing and HCI, integrated with high-level interaction design practice, alongside analysis from activity theory, and come up with novel theories for the field of design research. In the Journal of [...]
Designing with film
We’ve compiled a short sequence of some of the design experiments and tests in audiovisual media in the Touch project. Here we show some of the ‘behind the scenes’ tests and processes where we used cinematic/video/filmmaking tools as a means to uncover potentials and constraints around an emerging technology. In these experiments we designed and [...]
Rendering immaterials into 3D
Our Immaterials film, that visualises the spatial qualities of RFID, inspired architect Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu (from the Architectural Association) to explore the three dimensional representations of fields. These are some of his lovely experimental renderings of a three dimensional interpretation of the RFID symbol that we developed from the immaterials visualisations.
Skål: playing with media
Skål (Norwegian for bowl) is a product that has emerged from the Bowl project. It is a media player designed for the home that acts as the interface between physical objects and related digital media on a television. This video shows Skål in action. A bowl sits on the living room table and a range [...]
Visual representation of tangible interaction
In the design of the interactive elements of Sniff, Sara had to use visual diagramming as a way of exploring, understanding and prototyping with non-visual feedback such as sound and vibration (haptics). Sara developed a speech bubble approach to annotating physical objects, so that they look like they are ‘saying’ the audio and haptic feedback. [...]
iPhone RFID: object-based media
This is a video prototype of an iPhone media player that uses physical objects to control media playback. It is based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) that triggers various iPhone interactions when in the range of a wireless tag embedded inside a physical object. RFID is becoming more common in mobile phones (under the term [...]