today and tomorrow

After seeing many research projects about touchscreen interfaces (Sony CSL, HyperPalette, SmartSkin, DataTiles, HoloWall, Pick-and-Drop, and the demo’s by Jeff Han, the technology is finally coming available to the broad audience … the Apple iPhone. So what are they doing in Redmond? Well, they just launched ‘Microsoft Surface’. Don’t get your hopes up, it will cost between $5,000 and $10,000, so the people in the demo movies must be very rich.

UPDATE:

Did you ever wonder how designers and architects come up with those crazy shapes? Well, here is the answer: they script them! Yeah it’s just some math and formulas fed to 3D software like Rhinoceros. So now you know why you pay that much …
Ok, that’s a little exaggerated, but still.

This coffee table called “Polytop” by Marc Fornes is a perfect example. Every table is unique, which is easily accomplished with scripting and modern production techniques like CNC.

This pattern probably took hours in Photoshop or Illustrator … I guess not, it was done with Apple’s build in graphics engine called Quartz Composer and a webcam by TODAY, CREATE.

Did I already mention that I really like the name of that blog?

If google finds this post, it will be the 9,300,001st iPhone article …
Now I can start saving for this beauty as it will only become available the 4th quarter this year in Europe.

Wrap is a small tool to create your own wrapping paper by Douglas Edric Stanley. You can change the pattern by clicking the randomize button, then you select the right paper size and hit the print button, a few moments later you’ll get a pdf ready to print out.
I know it’s too late for this holiday season … maybe next time …

These are the new logo’s for Adobe’s software products. Simple & clean … I like them.

Clearification is part of Microsoft’s campaign for Windows Vista and it’s nothing like you have ever seen from Microsoft.

I’ve posted Daniel Shiffman’s sudden motion sensor processing library for apple’s powerbook/macbook pro before.
Andreas Nicolas Fischer did something amazing with it, he made a digital marionette …

News from the OLPC front. The first 10 hand build laptops arrived, so those were probably a little more expensive than $100. The real hardware cost will be around $148 and the 5 year overall cost is estimated around $972.

Daniel Shiffman developed a Processing library that works with Apple’s sudden motion sensor. Cool stuff!