For those of you who don’t know what Avatar is, have you been living under a rock? …at the bottom of the ocean? …on another planet? Avatar is the latest (and apparently greatest) film directed by James Cameron. You may remember him from such other great films as Titanic, Alien and Terminator. Currently he has the next Terminator film and a remake of Forbidden Planet in production. Read more…
Today is the final day of preparation for the New Designers exhibition tomorrow. This includes finishing the website http://raveinteraction.com and picking up the trump cards. That’s right, we have trump cards.
The theme of the show for Ravensbourne Interaction is ping pong. We have a ping pong table, 600 ping pong balls, 15 paddles, 1000 A3 folded portfolios to take away, 2 bound portfolio books and 9 different trump cards each with us all dressed in table tennis gear making aggressive poses as if we are pros.
It should be highly entertaining as I think a few people are dressing up in that table tennis gear for the exhibition. Not me however as I feel that it is inappropriate to take it that far even though I do love the theme. Read more…
The initial idea was to find new and innovative ways to organise data. This then evolved into organising and navigating photos which in turn mutated into a new approach to photo sharing. Throughout the whole process there has never been one ‘big’ idea until researching future technologies and the future of the internet. Reading into web 3.0 or ’semantic web’ (as opposed to the current ’social web’) provided some insights into what may be possible in the future due to the restructuring of the information on the back-end of the internet. Read more…
There is a new blog in town!
For the collaborative major project this term, a new blog has been set up hosted by those kind people at Wordpress.com.
It will contain most of the information relating to the project progression.
http://0wallpaper.wordpress.com
I have been offered a work placement at ITV Future Technologies in Camden. Great! I’m not writing about that now but I’m sure I will post about what I can while I’m working there. It has got me thinking about my future though. What do I want to do? Who do I want to do it for? Will it make me any money?
I am talking about employability of course, and not just getting a job after my BA Honours but ‘being all that I can be’. I am concerned that my BA may not be enough let me reach the heights that I want to in my career. Fate could deal me some great cards in terms of working for the right people and being in the right place at the right time but if there is something I can do now to give me the edge over my competitors then I owe it to my future to do it. I have learnt from my father’s experience when he reached a point from which he could not ascend because of a piece of paper (or lack thereof) regardless of experience and being the best in his field. I don’t want this to happen to me, so any qualifications I can get now, I won’t have to struggle without later and may open doors for me sooner than would have otherwise opened. Read more…
After searching YouTube for a while today looking for new and interesting things and stuff, I came across an advert for Microsoft Surface technology. The Rio in Las Vegas has recently installed Surface and the ad demonstrates a few ways in which the technology can be used. The usual things appear such as seeing what is on at the Rio, what there is to do in Vegas and ordering drinks from the table. The main focus of the ad however is flirting.
The video shows girls using Surface to control ceiling mounted cameras above other tables to ogle men, then it allows them to send a message to that person or table. The guy then orders a drink and has it delivered to the girls’ table, all without leaving his seat. I like the integration of an instant messaging system and the new slant on the technology but I feel that the sexual undertones the voice-over suggests are far too optimistic. Now you don’t actually have to stand up to order a drink you don’t have worry about staggering over to the bar, falling flat on your face and embarrassing yourself.
No more is Surface simply resizing and moving around images and video (which is what you normally see in touch screen demos) and the premise of social interaction seems to be a good one, especially in an environment where everything is to excess.
I am going to be in Las Vegas in August so I will definitely be checking this out first hand and let you know what it is actually like to interact with.
As they say, sex sells. So why not use it to sell Microsoft Surface technology? Now it seems like there may be a use for it after all.
So who broke Facebook? Come on, own up.
I’ve noticed recently that Facebook is having a whole bunch of problems that are quite serious isues with regard to users.
These include:
- Photo tag requests are not displayed correctly – when you click to view the tag request it appears people have tagged the search button, go home and then click the request again and all is ok.
- Videos that are uploaded run far faster than they should but keep the audio running normally. Makes for some interesting viewing.
- People tag you in some photos or video and Facebook notifies you, you click to view the photo and it takes you to a random photo – it appears the album does not exist.
I think it is possible that Facebook has become too big, with so many people adding hundreds of pointless applications it seems likely that it has put unexpected stress on their services. Imaging how much storage and processing power they need when you consider how many photos you upload and how much you pay for that. Its free, exactly.
I read recently that Facebook was broke and running out of storage space so were approaching a series of venture capitalists for funding to buy more servers.
So could all this mean the end for Facebook? Only about a quarter of my friends lists actually update it now compared to pretty much all of them 6 months ago.
Google… are you interested? They are building their own social networking applcation to run on 3rd party websites as a means of seeing what your friends are up to and collaboratively reading web pages. I can’t remember off-hand what that was called or exactly what it does but I am keeping my ears close to the ground to find out more. Would Facebook be a nice addition to this? After all Google did buy YouTube, why not Facebook?
I was browsing around YouTube to find some videos about Microsoft surface to post about the actual point of it all as I was discussing today that the only thing you can do with most touch screens is look at photos, resize them and have a really cluttered desktop. Anyway, I came across the promotional video here which I recommend you watch but then I came across the video below which is a parody of the ad.
…and so you don’t think I just hate Macs, I also hate Microsoft… I am doomed.
This is a really cool use of touch screens and interactive visuals in a DJ music environment. This would have been great for Rave On Air and it seems to show great use of new digital media taking over again from the ‘analogue world’.
It seems everyone is getting on this paperless band wagon these days. Only yesterday I wrote about the new A4 sized E-paper developed by Epson.
Well today folks its Wacom (made famous by their drawing tablets) in partnership with E Ink announcing they have made a pen input e-paper.
They are describing it as “the ultimate version of an interactive piece of paper” and I agree, its all very well to be able to read books or newspapers on e-paper but its the scribbles that make paper what it is. The ability to take a pen and paper and create anything you like is why we love it so much. Paper is one of the most versatile piece of kit that we have and so can’t be easily replaced.
I can’t help feeling that while we have the illusion of moving forward with this technology we are in fact taking two steps back. Is it not the goal of technology to make improvements on the past, to make more things do… well more things? At the moment it seems that when we finally hit the paperless society, instead of having one piece of e-paper that can do everything actual paper can do, we’ll have a huge range of e-papers for specific tasks.
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