I was invited to play a Valentine’s Day party and thought I’d conjure up some hearts for it. These functions at Mathworld looked suitable for some parametric sweetness so I grabbed one.

And shortly had them floating around…

…at the Red Party.

]]> http://lemonary.com/2010/02/heartbeat/feed/ 0 http://lemonary.com/2010/02/interfaces/ http://lemonary.com/2010/02/interfaces/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:11:28 +0000 larry http://lemonary.com/?p=456

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…

They remind me of John Langdon’s ambigrams, calligraphic creations that have extremely clever rotational or mirror symmetry.

Here’s an interview with him, and a whole magazine (Ambigram) with articles, galleries, and automatic generators.

• Datasf.org collects data sets like the NextMuni bus arrival feed, land use, street sweeping schedule, zoning, terrain elevation & seismic hazards.
• The SFViewer utility showed me I was about to get a parking ticket without leaving the comfort of my easy chair.
• A collection of interesting shapefiles from sfgov.org
• BART feeds for developers

• Random Rab – not techno, but beautiful, smooth, midtempo and genre-defying. Listen to live sets at Synchromystic, Onomotopoeia, and on WNUR.
• Jamie Kidd
• The Glitch Mob – Crush Mode. West coast acid crunk / glitch hop
• Henry Saiz at Transitions
• Cell Abrasion from Phidelity. Minimal.
• Nature One – with sets from Extrawelt, Deadmau5, & more
• Deadmau5 Essential Mix & at Wonderland
• process 172 & 173 (& lots more) at modyfier

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.

(Also see the making of video)