Albrecht Schmidt is a professor at the University of Stuttgart. His main interests include novel user interfaces and innovative applications for ubiquitous computing. His blog, Albrecht Schmidt - User Interface Engineering, serves as his note-pad, full of ideas, deep musings, and great links, including links to good scholarly papers. Below are a few of his posts:
RELATED PD-NET "The PD-NET project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet. The goal is to explore the scientific challenges and to assess the new technologies required to enable the emergence of large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors. This display network will be designed and implemented to be open to applications and content from many sources and thus provide the foundation for work on a new global communications medium for information access and interaction."
Robert Kosara is a professor at UNC-Charlotte, responsible for opening my eyes to the world of information visualization and visual communication when I was a student in his graduate course a few years ago. He is a deep thinker and his blog/website, Eager Eyes, is well worth taking the time to explore!
Here are some links to his posts:
You Only See Colors You Can Name"While color is a purely visual phenomenon, the way we see color is not only a matter of our visual systems. It is well known that we are faster in telling colors apart that have different names, but do the names determine the colors or the colors the names? Recent work shows that language has a stronger influence than previously thought."
"A wireless square with sensors and a simple web app to set rules, Twine tells you what your things are doing by email, text or Twitter." I want one!
This project was developed by David Carr and John Kestener, the designer-engineers behind Supermechanical. They are passionate about creating connectable objects.They honed their skills in the interdisciplinary MIT Media Lab.
More information about Twine can be found on the KICKSTARTER website. Here is a bite of info from the site for the tech-curious:
"Twine is a wireless module tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. The module has WiFi, on-board temperature and vibration sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors. Power is supplied by the on-board mini USB or two AAA batteries (and Twine will email you when you need to change the batteries)." "The Spool web app makes it simple to set up and monitor your Twines from a browser anywhere. You set rules to trigger messages — no programming needed. The rules are put together with a palette of available conditions and actions, and read like English: WHEN moisture sensor gets wet THEN tweet "The basement is flooding!" We'll get you started with a bunch of rule sets, and you can share rules you create with other Twine owners." "Because the hardware and software are made for each other, setup is easy. There's nothing to install — just point Twine to your WiFi network. Sensors are immediately recognized by the web app when you plug them in, and it reflects what the sensors see in real time, which makes understanding and testing your rules easy."
One of my favorite blogs is FlowingData, Nathan Yau's labor of love for the past several years. Nathan is a UCLA PhD candidate in statistics with a focus in data visualization. He shares interesting tidbits of information on his blog, including those that relate to his main interests, social data visualization, self-surveillance, and data for non-professionals. He supports accessible and useful data visualization.
Below is information about the video posted on Vimeo: "Google Street View stop motion animation short made as a personal project by director Tom Jenkins.
Story: A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View. All screen imagery was animated - there are no screen replacements.
One of the blogs I enjoy following is Innovative Interactivity (II). Here is the description from the "About" section of the blog:
"Innovative interactivity serves as an open forum for multimedia producers, interactive web developers, and new media professionals. Content focuses on the dynamics and theory of how people receive and react to different forms of information on the web, both through visual, multimedia storytelling and interactive information design."
"The goal is that this blog will provide an outlet for those in the online realm, whether you are interested in learning about multimedia storytelling, interactive web development, programming languages, software tools, data visualization, or all of the above. Hopefully you will be inspired from what you read here to surpass your current standards in order to develop highly effective multimedia interactives for the digital community."
Tracy Boyer Clark is the founder & managing editor of Innovative Interactivity. She is finishing up her MBA/MSIS dual master's degree at UNC-Chapel Hill.
