Interactive Light and Sound Installation Plays Like a Guitar

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Resonate, an interactive sound and light installation, entertained audiences in Frankfurt, Germany at the opening party for this year’s biennial festival of lighting culture known as Luminale 2012. The responsive structure is the combined efforts of students studying master programs — “Interior Design - Spatial Communication” and “Sound Art - Composition” at University of Applied Sciences Mainz and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, respectively. Using digital LED light and sound, the collaborative piece allows visitors to interactively transform the sculptural light installation into performance art.

The audiovisual project presents an intertwining stretch of white elastic strings forming morphed cylinders that seem to mimic cooling towers in an alternate, digital universe. The complex string structure illuminates in the dark and reacts audibly when plucked, similar to a musical instrument. Like a wildly responsive rave, Resonate playfully invites spectators to do more than simply observe. This is one exhibit that doesn’t have a “Do Not Touch” sign.

Photo credits: Thomas Wolf, Martina Pipprich
Resonate website

3Gear SDK Demo: Add gestures to your applications. Our technology enables the Kinect to reconstruct a finger-precise representation of what the hands are doing. This allows us to build simple and intuitive interactions that leverage small, comfortable gestures: pinching and small wrist movements instead of sweeping arm motions, for example.  Source

Digits Hand Tracker: Freehand 3D Computer Interaction Without Gloves. Digits, a wrist-worn gloveless sensor developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, U.K., enables 3-D computer interaction in any environment and is practical beyond computer gaming. More technical details.  Source

How many original iPhone screens can fit into an iPad 3 display? Source

Where the internet lives [Google Data Centers]

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Click Here for Google Data Center Street View

Look around on the web, and you’ll find plenty of photographs of Google’s colorful offices in Mountain View (AKA the Googleplex) and around the world. Finding images shot from inside the company’s tightly-guarded data centers is much harder, since only a handful of employees are allowed to roam the spaces where the “web lives.” However, Google recently invited photographer Connie Zhou inside a number of its high-tech data centers. Gorgeous photographs resulted — images that show incredible scale, mind-numbing repetition, and quirky colors.

The massive server rooms house tens of thousands of servers that handle your searches and all of the services offered by the search giant.

Google says that the rainbow-colored pipes aren’t just for show; the colors help the employees quickly determine which is which.

Wired’s Steven Levy was also invited to tour the data centers, and has written up a fascinating piece on his experience. In an interview with Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep, he states,

What strikes you immediately is the scale of things. The room is so huge you can almost see the curvature of Earth on the end. And wall to wall are racks and racks and racks of servers with blinking blue lights and each one is many, many times more powerful and with more capacity than my laptop. And you’re in the throbbing heart of the Internet. You really feel it. [#]

Want to roam around the buildings yourself? Check out this Street View page that provides a virtual tour of the buildings:

You can see high-res versions of these photos and many more over at a new website Google set up, called “Where the Internet lives.”

Read more at http://www.petapixel.com/2012/10/17/google-lets-photographer-into-secretive-data-centers-beautiful-photos-ensue/#ZwDv8uPoGbE061JR.99 

Read more at http://www.petapixel.com/2012/10/17/google-lets-photographer-into-secretive-data-centers-beautiful-photos-ensue/#VguWMV5ZMrPVrFFj.99 

What are the most important emerging user experience themes right now?

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Skeuomorphism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ske…)
More interfaces are starting to integrate seemingly useless visual cues that we’re accustomed to seeing in real life. The iPhone, for example, is full of them. The “slide-to-unlock” behavior or “on/off switches” in iOS are examples of skeuomorphism.

Media-aware
More applications are being designed for use across different platforms and resolutions. Even staples like the 960 grid system are falling out of use as fluid width and browser-specific styling become more popular.

Shorter web forms
Thankfully, we’re finally graduating past forms with 20 required items. Designers are now picking up that asking for a lot of information up front is terrible for conversion rates and wastes a lot of time. We’re moving toward asking the bare minimum now (email) and slowly asking for more as the relationship grows stronger. Profile-completion sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are leading the charge here.

Everything is a link
I think we’re starting to see an increase in clickable content. On more developed websites, you can click on nearly everything to gain more information on that object. On Quora, for example, you can click on nearly any image or blue text to learn more about that underlying object. On news websites, you can double-click on a word to look up the definition. Information about nearly anything on the page will be readily available when you want it.

Guided tours
Seemingly complicated applications now come with sequential tooltips that serve as a step-by-step walkthrough. This, in my opinion, is the live, interactive version of the “setup wizard.” Rather than showing you a set of diagrams with some text, applications are now giving you the real application, annotated with overlays, tooltips and buttons to help you move through it. The new ux overhaul by Google has done a great job of this.

Psychology: Many of the themes that we have mentioned above rely on in-depth knowledge of user behavior, user motivations and what influences users. We can see the psychology and behavioral studies are popping up in blogs and books across UX, and that is because UX, as Ronnie mentioned, is at a critical point in our existence. We are looking to be more than just usability experts and are instead needing to be the user behavior experts. Understanding more about Psychology and how we can apply it to UX will help us get there. It is also involved in gamification (what motivates people to act), Data Visualization (how does the brain take in an view information) and many other points mentioned above.

Logos why the change?

The logo choices of Fortune 500 companies the past year has gone to shit. Everything is the same font and boring. To the point I have become so annoyed with some of the mistakes companies are making that I had to create a post about it. 

It honestly looks to me like these tech companies are just following in Apple’s footsteps.

Big Screen Smartphones

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When it comes to smartphones, the day of the 3.5” screen may be coming to an end. As more manufacturers, including Apple, decide that bigger screens are better.

• Of all the Android devices sold in the last 3 months, nearly one-third (29%) of them had a screen size of over 4.5 inches. (source)
• On these devices, the larger the screen the more likely a consumer will use that device for different services. For example, only 19% of consumers with a screen smaller than three inches download and watch videos, compared to 65% when the screen is five inches or more. (source)
• Samsung’s Galaxy S III, which features a 4.8” screen, sold 20 million units 100 days after the handset launched in May 2012. (source)
• Samsung’s Galaxy Note, which features a 5.3” screen, sold more than 10 million units since its debut. The Note II will feature a 5.5” screen. (source)
• Apple sold a record 5 million iPhone 5 devices (with a larger 4” screen) the first weekend the device was on sale. (source)
• New flagship Windows 8 smartphones will feature 4.5” screens on the Lumia 920 and a 4.3” screen on the HTC Windows Phone 8X. (source)