recently it’s been theorized that robots are easier to get along with if they have real faces, so what if cookware could do the same? maybe cooking would be more fun, and food might taste better… i spotted a number of sociable pots, pans, cups and bowls in tokyo this week: a sign of things […]
Category Archives: livingbreathing
dinner demons
do you ever feel like things are out of control? the virtual reality laboratory at tokyo institute of technology (no acronym) have discovered one reason: tiny ‘brownies’ called kobito are pushing stuff around. you can finally see them at work through the newly developed “kobito window,” a screen that shows them pushing your tea around […]
Also posted in evil robots, furniture, possessed products, product design, tangible
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high-wire sculpture
whereas alexander calder‘s stoic mobiles and stabiles are fit for office lobbies and college campuses, his toys are where the sculptor expressed his whimsy and his magic. today on the top floor of the whitney museum you can find calder’s circus, a groups of tiny wire figurines the artist carried with him in suitcases from […]
Also posted in art, fabrication
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the first music videos
we may think of music videos and motion capture as recent technologies, but they were all pioneered in fleischer studios‘ seminal betty boop cartoons of the 1930s where popular musicians were incorporated into surreal and suggestive musical cartoons. Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, a technique whereby live-action footage was traced to make hand-drawn animations. the […]
Also posted in animation, marketing, visualization
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squishy robots
in the late 1990’s cynthia brezeal pioneered (wrote the book on) ‘sociable robots,’ based on her work with kismet. in reality, robotics was (and remains) far behind special effects houses and toy designers, who for years have been making expressive, emotive puppets specifically for engendering social bonds with animate machines. so it’s no surprise that […]
Also posted in evil robots, fabrication, perception, product design, soft/glowing
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robot love
jodi forlizzi conducted an ethnographic study about vacuum cleaners called a ‘product ecology,’ essentially an object-centered analysis of how people adapt to new types of things, in this case robotic vacuum cleaners as compared to conventional ones. she gave some families roombas and others regular stick-type vacuum cleaners, and she observed significant differences in how […]
Also posted in evil robots, marketing, product design
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xray vision
augmented reality describes the application of computer interfaces onto the real world, usually by overlaying objects with computer graphics either through projection or a head-mounted display. popularized by x-ray glasses, this idea has actually had few popular applications because it’s really hard to accurately map the real world with digital information. one of the most […]
Also posted in 2d, open objects, soft/glowing, visualization
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life is a game
the mixed reality lab at the national university of singapore built a new kind of video game that you play in real life: human pacman. the system works through a very ungainly wearable computer that overlays everyday paths with yellow spheres that you pick up to collect points. there are also cookies, for energy, and […]
Also posted in conviviality, hyperexperience, perception, visualization
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