Our Taco Lab projects have been in hibernation mode as Dave, Jeevan and I focus our energy on Sifteo, developing Siftables into a commercial product. You can keep up with the latest Siftables news on the Sifteo Blog, or follow Sifteo on Facebook and Twitter. We recently moved into a sweet, light-filled space in the dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco (photo above by Dave).

As part of our work on the SPUR opening exhibition, we wrote some code sketches using some live NextBus data (thanks NextBus!), who gave us the GPS coordinates of all the buses and trains in the San Francisco public transit system, MUNI.  We goofed around with an interactive 3D visualization – the white cubes are buses or trains – that was fun. These videos are played back faster than real time – sadly our public transit vehicles don’t travel this fast.

We also built a 2D visualization with a tracing effect.  In both sketches, it’s fun to note how you can see the main streets and arteries of the city traced out by the movement of the vehicles – Market Street is prominent as it cuts its diagonal through the eastern half of the city, and we can see the fast buses zipping across the Bay Bridge to and from Treasure Island in the Bay. You can also see the Golden Gate Bridge and Presidio sparsely outlined in the upper left.

One interesting outcome – in the 2D visualization, there’s a point at which all the buses seem to start floating away, leaving the grid of the city and clustering in strange locations.  We thought this was a bug at first, but really it’s an outcome of the data.  At the end of the day, the buses seem to turn off the GPS as they return home.  We simply interpolate their positions as they float back to (what we think are) their depots.  And when they day starts anew, they quickly being zooming about, retracing the grid of the city as the morning commute begins.

Jeevan and I will be giving a short talk tonight as part of the SPUR Young Urbanists Salon night. We’ll be talking about our interactive urbanization installation, on display now as part of the current exhibit. We’ll be there with REBAR and Michelle Tea. It looks like it requires Young Urbanist membership to attend.

(semi-unrelated but lovely BART planning map we found in SPUR’s amazing archives)

A couple weeks ago we put the final touches on our urbanization visualization piece for SPUR’s opening exhibition: “Agents of Change: Civic Idealism and the Making of San Francisco.”

We hooked up with SPUR about 8 months back as they were mid-construction on their their new Urban Center. Working with GIS expert Mike Reilly, we began designing a visualization to support the SPUR opening exhibition theme, examining the rich urban development and planning history of San Francisco and the surrounding region.

After brainstorming a variety of installation formats, we selected a projector plus podium, such that a few people could walk up to the podium and collaboratively explore the history of bay area urbanization using simple physical controls. In particular, we liked the idea of using a slider to view a specific year of interest.

We then started work on the software, using Processing with a heavy dose of jogl/OpenGL. We actually spent some of this time looking at the amazing NextBus data feed as well, hoping to integrate it into the “present” portion of the display, but eventually decided to save it for another project. We received a ton of help and support from Mike Reilly, providing us with a bunch of historic urbanization data, back to 1850, and right down to the hectare. He also gave us the topo data. Here’s a screenshot from an earlier version of the interface:

Jeevan wired up and wrote some code for a Seeeduino to handle the interface controls. We used a slider for year selection, a playstation-style joystick for translation, and three knobs for scale, x-rotation, and z-rotation. And with help from Anton Willis at Civil Twilight, everything went inside a quality podium.

It’s kind of hard to capture the whole system in one shot, but we were happy to hear positive responses and to get a lot of usage from the elite crowd at the grand opening event. There were a few technical details we didn’t fully solve, but overall we were quite happy with the resulting interaction.

Special thank you to David Riess, our fantastic intern++, who has been working with us for the past few months on some very tricky stuff. David hooked up with us via the Stanford Cool Product Expo where we were manning a Siftables booth. A week or so later we had him here in TLHQ, getting down to real work on an aggressive project plan. We’re happy to say that he executed with fantastic discipline, delivering well beyond our expectations. Along the way, he also led a renewed Taco Lab interest in weirdo sketchy energy drinks; our budget for 2010 now calls for a dedicated red bull mini-fridge.

In recognition of these accomplishments, and for his bravery as the first Taco Lab intern, yesterday we awarded David the prestigious Yellow Dart Bandolier. We then shuffled him through a celebratory dinner of schnitzel and large boots of beer, and a final drink at our everyone’s favorite local establishment, Club 93. Thanks David, and good luck down at Stanford this summer!

TL friend and super early adopter Anita sent us a photo of herself modeling the latest in digi-taco mascot fashion. Thanks Anita!

Also on sale for a limited time: the Mr. Pink button set and Earnest Wheelman “sleeper” style pajamas, from TL affiliate Professor Engd.

Students who are coached to make the “v” gesture when solving a math problem like 3+2+8 = ___+8 learn how to solve the problem better. But students also do a better job even if they were coached to make the “v” shape under the wrong pair of numbers. The very act of making the “v” shape introduces the concept of “grouping” to the student, through the body itself.

(Full article: With a wave of the hand)

The research suggests that gesturing helps children learn new math concepts, even if the gesture is a rule artificially created by the researchers. The article connects this research to the increasingly prevalent Embodied Cognition theory of mind, which was an early inspiration for Siftables.

We’re very happy to see continued research in these areas, as it further informs our efforts in developing learning applications for Siftables.

If Taco Lab moves to Santa Fe, we will set up shop here. The Santa Fe Complex is an art gallery / project workshop / technology incubator / education space next to the Railyard Art District. I was invited to visit the SFC by Irene Lee of Project GUTS to give a talk about Siftables and some of my earlier research projects. The Complex feels like a mashup of the MIT Media Lab, Eyebeam, and the Alamo; when you walk through the front door of what used to be a railway-car maintenance building, a cavernous space presents itself, full of chaotically arranged tables and chairs and bathed in natural light from skylights that run the length of the ceiling. A projected-graphics installation art piece greets visitors in the lobby, and a tabletop covered with lovely lasercut geometric forms flanks the door. A giant square robot sits in a far corner, and a hallway peels away to the right, opening up into a series of semi-private work carels, with tables covered full of robotic toys, webcams and other computational miscellania.

I felt immediately at home. Stephen Guerin gave me a demo of Simtable, a Sandscape-esque user interface system that he and Chas Curtis are incubating at the SFC for commercialization. They have developed a structured light approach to map camera pixels to projector pixels, and Stephen showed me a simulation that they have built for firefighter training; he sculpted the sand by hand into the topology of the Santa Fe basin, then map graphics were projected onto the result. He started fires and played with the wind direction using a laser pointer. A particularly cool aspect of this application is that it builds on the “sandbox” setups that firefighters use for training (literally, tabletop sandboxes); Stephen and Chas are augmenting this already-familiar tool with sensing, computation, and graphics. It’s a nice example of the “thick practice” argument that Klemmer et al. advance in How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design: a good way for user interfaces to enjoy the benefits of physicality is to allow real objects to participate in the interaction. Before I left, Stephen and his colleague Josh Thorp also showed me a bunch of other neat multi-agent simulation-visualizations they’ve built using processing.

Another highlight of my visit to the SFC was meeting Jared Tarbell, who showed off some of his algorithmic artwork. Jared was a founder of Etsy (he is currently on sabbatical), and has created a huge portfolio of gorgeous flash and processing-based pieces. One of my favorites is Darkside, a graphical score of a musical performance with a geometric shape for each note that glows and drifts away once the note is played. Another cool piece is Substrate, an ever-growing network of rusty-looking straight lines that sprout at right angles from each other whenever they reach a boundary; the end result reminds me of a cartoon birds-eye view of a Moroccan casbah.

The SFC’s ambition is to be bustling with projects, events and community outreach; they’re off to a good start, and it seems that there is some room to grow. In this sleepy, comfortable city of traditional fine art galleries and souvenir shops, the SFC’s offering seems like a vital contrast; the future of art and technology will emerge from places like this. I hope Santa Fe embraces this opportunity, turning this gusty experiment into a lasting institution.

Our dear friends at Distilled have created a wonderful pair of pants.  These finely crafted trousers take special precaution to ensure mankind’s continued survival in the 21st century – RF-proofed material around the child bearing regions of a fellow.

This is the kind of subtle geeky flair that we can buy into – scrolling LED belt buckles are awesome, but actually stylish and well-made clothing is what we really need.

Distilled makes all kinds of amazing men’s clothing – check them out – they have an online store too.  You can find them in your local Bloomingdale’s and other fine retailers in the US and abroad.

To order these pants or for fit questions call 415 558 8395.  The other clothes are also wonderful. We can’t say enough good things about this company. Buy their stuff.

Tomorrow evening after Stanford CPX, Taco Lab will be heading over to Adaptive Path to participate in Beyond the Desktop: A Panel Discussion on Emergent Interaction Paradigms.

The discussion will include folks from Mozilla Labs, Tellme’s Mobile User Experience group, Stimulant and Kicker Studio, and will be moderated by Adaptive Path’s Rachel Hinman. It’s free and open to the public, and goes from 6pm – 8pm. RSVP on Upcoming. Hope to see you there!

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