BERG, a London-based design studio, has just announced 2 new products: Little Printer and BERG Cloud. Little Printer is a thermal printer with a wireless connection to the Web. Each time you press the button, a neat little personalised package will be printed immediately. You can configure the messages with your smartphone, this is the part where the BERG Cloud will shine. Just watch the video and see how beautiful the graphic design is.
Unfortunately it will only be launched as a “beta” product in 2012. Can’t wait to get one.
“PING! Augmented Pixel” is Niklas Roy‘s latest project.
“PING! – Augmented Pixel” is a seventies style video game, that adds a layer of digital information and old-school aesthetics to a video signal: A classic rectangular video game ball moves across a video image. Whenever the ball hits something dark, it bounces off. The game itself has no rules and no goal.
You could say that it’s just an augmented reality version of Pong. But Niklas just did a little more than just that. PING! – Augmented Pixel doesn’t use a computer to process the video signal and display the game. Niklas made a read hardware box with its own micro-controller. Impressive work!
The Hong Kong musician/producer/composer Gaybird Leung asked Henry Chu to create a music app for his show Digital Hug. He wanted an instrument that could respond to body gesture like a theremin. So Henry developed Squeal which is based on his other app SoundGyro. With Squeal you’ll be able to trigger sounds by tapping on the eyes, nose, and cheeks of a face. And if you tilt the iPad you’ll be able switch between 3 octaves. The app will be available in the app store from July on, but you can still submit your own portrait to be part of it.
DataBot Mouse is very interesting experiment by Jan Barth and Roman Grasy. They’ve developed a computer mouse which can give data physical properties, to make the communication/interaction between man and data more human and easier to understand.
The mouse is able to communicate three different properties of data. It can show you the weight of files and folders, by braking with different force, according to the file-size. Or you can set a custom weight for files, just like the color marking function in MacOSX. So you can find important files more easily.
The third property, the mouse can show you, is the activity of files and folders. By “breathing” with different intervals, it shows how much a file was opened or how busy a folder has been recently.
Form Art is a project made by Alexei Shulgin in 1997. In 1997! He used formal elements of the HTML language, without adding anything to them, to create compositions, animations, images, … The website is packed with little pieces, but make sure to check out the animations and the game.
“The Future Piggy” Bank is project made by Wang Chao, Maggie Kuo, and Jordi Parra, at the Umeå Institute of Design, in Sweden. In just a few days, they made this mock-up of piggy bank that accepts credit cards. By using very simple components like an arduino board, a sensor and an iphone as a display, they were able to create a piggy bank which behaves like a Tamagotchi. If you don’t feed it with a credit card it will become sad and the other way around. Very nice work!
This a preview of “Dead Drops“, a project by Aram Bartholl which he started off during his ongoing EYEBEAM residency in NYC. It is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. Aram “injected” 5 USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody. You are invited to go to these places to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your files and date. Each dead drop contains a readme.txt file explaining the project. I guess the most prominent location is right next to the New Museum, the other 4 locations are listed on Aram’s website.
