Monday, March 30, 2009

Microsoft Surface Physics demo



I just fell instantly in love with the soft white rim feedback when you touch an element. So often, in physics simulated environments there is no proper visual feedback.

It doesn't show in this video, but they also have gravity in their demo. Perfect if you want to learn juggling in slow motion.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Pseudo-3D Video Conferencing with a Generic Webcam



Chris Harrison has made something I rather like. Read his paper on his webpage.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

iPhone OS 3.0 Preview - Cut, copy, and paste, and Undo



Bringing cut, copy and paste into a touch phone is hard. Your choices are to use long-press, double tap, or use an extra button somewhere. Long-press and double tap are kind of secret, so they are really hard to discover by accident. An extra button has the drawback of cluttering the user interface.

Traditional text selection, where the entire text goes blue, has no affordance for dragging the edges to expand or contract the selection.

I think this is an excellent design. I'm also looking forward to try out "shake to undo". I think shaking the phone from side to side maps well to shaking your head when something goes wrong.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Zen Bound Review



In this game, Chillingo, has a fabolous 3D-list about 1 min into the film.

You could think of this list as a one dimensional list, where items are arranged from top to bottom. However, you have the opportunity to arrange items on the same level around the tree. So this makes it possible to group items, which they do. You can see that they group flowers close to lanterns.

The objects respond in a physically pleasing way, both to inertia when you spin the tree around, and to gravity, when you roll the phone to the side.

I think this is a great template for immersive 3D lists.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

The Holodeck, As Re-Imagined in 2009


World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

This thing, by Bruce Branit, is lovely. Nicely dreamed.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Microsoft Office Labs Vision 2019 Montage



I believe Microsoft has the most well funded labs in the industry. So it's allways worth the time to check out videos like this, where they cut their ideas together.

Do you have any favorites? Comment!

Samsung MBP200 Projector Phone



The projector isn't used until right at the end of this movie. There, it is used to project a movie on a wall. This is the most obvious way to use a projector in a mobile phone. Although this seems very nice, it looks like we're going to have to wait until these phones hit the street before we see some really interesting usage.