Sticky Light is a project by Alvaro Cassinelli, Kuribara Yusaku and Stephane Perrin of the Department of Information Physics and Computing at the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory of the university of Tokyo. Indeed, this should already spark you interest.
Sticky Light is a 3d tracking technology using a laser diode (low power), a pair of steering mirrors and a single non-imaging photodetector. The big difference to other tracking technologies is the fact that the Sticky Light doesn’t use a camera or projector. So what could you do with? It can track the contour of objects and even augment real-time drawings. Or you could build games like air hockey or a pinball game. Or … just watch this video, after 2 minutes they show you the games demo.
Daito Manabe visited the lab recently and added some functionality to the system: sound. soundLight can now generate sounds based on the movement of the laser.
I assume that you all know about TED by now and that we all want to go there … Golan Levin, half artist half engineer, was one of the speakers at TED last February. He has done the most amazing projects like Messa di Voce or Double-Taker. Yes, I’m a fan. So I can recommend you to watch his presentation.
“Funktionide – New Promises” is the title of the bachelor thesis of Stefan Ulrich. He researched how new materials and technologies will change the way we will design and interact with products. He believes that product will become alive and will have some sort of own behavior.
This first video shows you his test setup with several, different electroactive polymers. He used an arduino board to control the several experiments. You should really watch it, I guess you don’t see electroactive polymers on a daily basis. By the way the video is very well edited.
The second video is a concept visualisation of such a possible future product.
Pa++ern is a new project by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi. They basically hooked up an embroidery machine with Twitter. A special language was developed to encode designs in the 140 character limit of Twitter. I guess the images below show you how it works.
You can go and see it from this Saturday on at the Beams Gallery in Tokyo.
On the left you can see the tweet: [ <<<^],+[vv],[^],+[>],[v], >>+n[^],[>],vvv[<],vvv+[n>], >>+[^],, >>+[v],, [>^<]>,>n+[>],[v],[<n],[^].
And on the right the graphical translation.
Of course, some more complex designs are possible too.
Hiroo Iwata developed these Robot Tiles. You have to imagine them as movable floor tiles which arrange them automatically in front of you as you walk. They’re covered with KURALON® EC, a textile made of conductive fibers. So when you step on it, it can detect in with direction you’re heading. It was part of the Tokyo Fiber ’09 Senseware exhibition during the Milan furniture fair.
As always, a video will make it clear to you.
Baker Tweet is one of the best Twitter applications I have seen. With this box, your favorite bakery can let every follower know what’s fresh out of the oven. The baker can pick the right pre-written message with the knob on the box and then press a button. Boom, there is a queue.
Made by Poke.
Daito Manabe is up to something new, you know his Electric Stimulus experiments right? This time he doing something with LED’s in his mouth. For now he just moves them around with his tongue. I don’t know what he’s planning but if he can hook them up to his Electric Stimulus … That would be great.
It seems like the LED’s are sound reactive in this second video.
EDIT:
Daito posted some more tests in his YouTube channel. Just keep an eye on it.
“A Study Of Three Mirrors” by rAndom international are not really 3 mirrors. Above each so called mirror there is a small camera which captures the person in front of the mirror. That image is then printed with light (LED’s) on a light reactive surface. After a few minutes the images starts to fade away again. Yeah, I would like one of those.
Impress is actually not really a display, it’s more like a touchscreen. It was developed by Silke Hilsing, a student at the department Design of the FH-Würzburg (Germany). She didn’t use any revolutionary technology, it is just a few force sensors combined with an arduino board covered with foam and processing. The result is quite nice though.
Ze Frank, yeah you might heard of him, made a little flash drawing tool. You won’t need a mouse but a microphone if you want to draw. A low volume tone will make the line curve counterclockwise, a medium will let it run straight and a high volume will turn the line to the right. Somehow he manged to draw this arty face and figure, unfortunately he didn’t post a video of him creating those. You can try it out for yourself here.
I bet he isn’t the first one to build something like this. It actually reminds me of the Sonic Wire Sculptor made by Amit Pitaru, which works the other way around. You can generate sound by drawing lines.
