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UPDATE: It’s by the moment only a concept video:

Children often take their car around crazy paths, creating shapes and patterns. Sketch-a-Move offers a new way of exploring this. Create short or long lines. A closed set of lines makes the car move in a loop while an open ended line will allow the car to do the track only once. Change the track as often and as many times as you like.

To explore the idea we decided it would be most effective to focus on the play possibilities for the car rather than trying to build a working prototype. The car in our videoscenarios is not technically working. The car is purposefully plain to illustrate our ideas. We imagine the car to look like any regular HotWheels cars incorporating the new “sketch” surface.

The words of one of its creators, Anab Jain.

Nice inspiration for future hydrid table top interfaces. Remind me other interactive artworks that play with physical drawings like Drawn form Zachary Lieberman.

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The downside of the chroma, unlike Emilio Ruiz “old” technique is, as director Fernando Trueba commented in “El último truco” documentary, that magic does not happen while you are filming and in front of the camera, but after inside a computer, and all the team suffer from this, specially actors. The filming experience should be colder so you are not seeing physically with your own eyes a true “real time” virtuality.

Via garry’s posterous.

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Directors like David Lynch, Richard Lester, Charlton Heston, Enzo Castellari, Fernando Trueba, Guillermo del Toro told him … as well known for titles like Dune, Conan, The Girl of Your Dreams, Pan’s Labyrinth … creating a filmography that earned him, among others, three Goya Awards.

I was lucky enough to know his work thanks to the documentary El último truco (The latest trick) and I could not wait a day to share it here. I was fascinated by the technic and the hability of this magician to add anything to the scenes that the scripts wished with very low budgets. His cinema literally painted on glass is the missing link between the optical techniques that painters began to squeeze in the Renaissance and virtual reality technologies. His particular hybridization between real and unreal is a lesson for those fascinated by new techniques such as augmented reality and other visual methods of intervention in public spaces.

The full documentary can be seen here and here .

I liked this exercise of summarising the key abilities that any serious interactive development should involve, and since I have to assume most of them into my single head for my thesys I’ve created this image that groups all his presentation slides:

Finally I’ve tried to translate this team oriented approach to a research or conceptual oriented context:

I’m not sure if this quick research translation is valid but I fell it practical. Anyway I hope to come back regularly to this diagram while I complete my UX readings and see what updates requires, if any.

You can also download an editable version of these images in Powerpoint format.

Added value, social experiences, real-time information delivery, user experience, interoperability and openness – those are the problems of the web! So too goes the development of Augmented Reality, the web of everywhere.

Concerns over freedom and privacy (intrinsically linked to its accessibility) deserve special attention:

It’s a lot of Wow and skepticism right now, but in the future it could be a thriving ecosystem of rich information about the world around us. Or it could be a closed, proprietary (literal) lens through which we view the world – unable to change the way we view that world or see it as others do because our accumulated knowledge is trapped inside one platform and inaccessible from others. Or there could be a plague of spam that overwhelms our view-finder into our physical surroundings.

This web of everywhere should not fail to be anything other than the web itself, and therefore use the same standards, protocols and requirements. TwittAround shows that we do not have to use anything other than a mobile web browser to experience this new dimension of the Internet. It is therefore very likely that the money that are generating some companies now is the result of the unavailability of equivalent web tools, which however will soon be published under GPL license by any of the many developers who take care of the net neutrality.

If we think AR as a coming and conventional web browsing feature other questions arise, for example, from what sources will the contents be downloaded and how will we filter them? Currently Layar or Wikitude allow you to select the sources in a similar way that in Google Earth, activating “layers” from a limited list. But in the web of everywhere and everybody, there will be so many layers as web pages. How to select or look for them? Probably we will use our favorite local search engine, using a quick gesture to turn from the map view to AR view.

Augmented reality as a new browsing mode has a great future ahead, but these specialized applications will soon become isolated when browsers and popular content providers will cover this feature as Google Maps already does with Street View.

As in other battles of the web, the core are the contents, that is, the ability of each browser to display them properly and the ability of the search engines to filter them for each user. But in the spatial web, the search engine also serves as browser, allowing us to freely move and explore the map without having to predefine a specific search. The browsearchs of the world (with or without augmented reality) must fulfill both tasks effectively and get an AR browsing feature if they want to be perceived as advanced or modern environments.

I’ve been able to meet them in a proactive environment in which others with creative affinities have wanted to go through the conceptual and experiential paths that currently make up much of my vital curiosity. Before the seminar-workshop, the first I directed in this area, I  could not imagine that at the end I could read in the eyes of participants a load of excitement, which I found in your gratitude.

My thanks go to the participants now, the workshop has been fortunate to count with people who have got to achieve a week of intensive observation, reflection and criticism.

I hope we’ll see the best photos and videos of the seminar on Flickr with the tag ‘mymapisnotyourmap‘. Thus we’ll start to see them all in: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mymapisnotyourmap/

By the moment you can see my ones in this album. Later a page will be published in the Arteleku website with all the videos form the talks, presentation files, photos and other material from the workshop.

The ideas and experiences I have lived over that week begin to be put in order and it is already obvious the impact it is having on me for the generation of new ideas. Do not let to send me yours.

Note: Last week I’ve realized that my feeds were not working. Too bad.

Update 6-oct-09:  Published one of the mediascapes developed in the workshop: Take Away

Faced with the many published articles pointing to another initiatives, now the blog will increase the reflection, criticism, and especially unanswered questions that seek conversation with you here and in other blogs and forums, so I’ll also try to boost my participation in your websites if you pass me the link.

In recent years I’ve followed the blogs of other PhD students, artists, designers and researchers with related research topics, some with an extraordinary frequency update. I won’t go so far, to not contribute to information porn and for not believing merit such attention.

Keep in mind that this blog is written in Spanish and English (the English version is not a machine translation). Preparing WordPress for bilingual publication has been a challenge the past two years and I have to thank Anthony Petitboys his recent great plugin. Write in English is essential to feel part of a written conversation held by many different voices that join in the web. But I did not want to renounce my native language, with wich I better think, and with which I can approach as close as possible to the Ibero-american (Iberian peninsula + South America) scene.

As I complete the projects page, you can download the latest articles I’ve published, focusing particularly on GVAM, Accessible Virtual Guide for Museums, a project still in progress wich, if the Spanish investment in R & D permits, I’ll keep while working with my thesis and other stuff in CESyA.

Note 1: The image of the article is taken from the book cover of  Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi.

Note 2: Why Lemon lines? … mouse over the top green sign.

Microsoft explains here the operation of its project Natal, derived mainly from the use of two cameras and the principles of the stereoscopic vision to recreate with a high detail 3D geometry the real environment perceived by both cameras:

Compatible with any Xbox 360 system, the “Project Natal” sensor is the world’s first to combine an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor

running proprietary software all in one device. Unlike 2-D cameras and controllers, “Project Natal” tracks your full body movement in 3-D, while responding to commands, directions and even a shift of emotion in your voice.

In addition, unlike other devices, the “Project Natal” sensor is not light-dependent. It can recognize you just by looking at your face, and it doesn’t just react to key words but understands what you’re saying. Call a play in a football game, and players will actually respond.

At the same time another  interface to recognize the movements of the player has been presented in E3, which also tries to go beyond the Nintendo Wiimote:
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via: The Cosmonauts

The CASBLIP project is a development platform financed by the European Union to aid the navigation of the blind and people with visual dishabilities. A large group of experts in different areas have analyzed and developed a set of 4 tools.

The main tools of CASBLIP are called M1 and M2, they integrate data acquisition systems and its 3D representation positioned in space, so the system can represent 3D sound readings of a linear distance measure (M1), and the possibility of incorporating stereoscopic analysis systems for detecting obstacles and hallways (in M2); and on the other hand, the third tool is based in the analysis and use of complementary systems as GPS. The latest tool is an improvement of vision in persons with different types of residual vision.

The entire M1 and M2 system is at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, at its Center for Research in Graphics Technology and aims to be the basis for developing specific tools for blind people and other visual dishabilities.

This development will be useful for any kind or people, with or without visual dishabilites, allowing us to percieve information without the need to look down to our mobile screens and stop walking.

Via: Las provincias

Note: The new theme is still in development, hopefully will be soon release it. The promised number of posts in english has been finally raised