Algodoo physics app. for the SMART Board 800 series, supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction!

A few years ago, I came across "Phun", a free, hands-on application designed for use in science education.  I was impressed, and had the chance to use it with a few students.    Phun was Emil Ernerfeldt's MSc Computer Science project, created at the VR lab at Umeå Universityin Sweden, under the supervision of Kenneth Bodin. 


Phun is now known as Algodoo, and is part of the family of applications offered by Algoryx, a company that develops multi-physics and 3D simulation software.  As you can see from the recent video below, it has improved over the years.  The most recent news is that the application was transformed for use on the SMART Board 800 series, and supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.  


One of the reasons that I like Algodoo is that it supports social interaction during learning activities, something that can enhance deeper learning among students.  It allows students to move and work in a "hands-on" fashion.  In schools that have invested stimulus money on technology and now have limited funds for upgrading traditional science equipment, applications such as Algodoo will most likely provide a good "bang for the buck".


Algodoo: Science education for a new generation

"Algodoo is a totally unique program. A program that gives you the opportunity to play with physics - using your own hands. Apply a constructionists learning paradigm, learning by doing. Use simple drawing tools to design, construct and explore with. Sounds like an interesting idea? Watch this video and learn how!" -Algoryx


Algodoo demonstration on a SMART Board 800 multi-touch/multiuser interactive whiteboards:





RELATED
Alogryx Simulation integrates Algodoo application with the SMART Board 800 series Smart Technologies
Algodoo website
Algoryx Multiphsyics and 3D Simulation website


Information about Phun, an earlier version of Algodoo:

You can download the music used in the videos and the Phun application from the following URL: http://www.phunland.com/download/Phun_theme.mp3

Video of original version: Phun - 2D physics sandbox:


Interactive Physics: Algodoo, the educational version of Phun, optimized for the Classmate PC (Interactive Multimedia Technology, 1/16/09)



Engaged Learning and Social Physics: Phun, an Interactive 2D Physics Sandbox
Interactive Multimedia Technology, 6/08/08

April 25th Release Date: Play and Experiment with Music on your iPad/Phone/Pod with NodeBeat iOS Music Sequencer by Affinity Blue, by Seth Sandler and Justin Windle

If you love music and have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, you'll have fun exploring and experimenting with NodeBeat. As soon as I get my iPad, I plan to get this app! 


"NodeBeat is an experimental node-based audio sequencer and generative music application for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. NodeBeat is designed to let you create a variety of rhythmic sequences and ambient melodies in an intuitive fashion. It is scheduled for release on April 25th." -Affinity Blue


NodeBeat - iOS Music Sequencer from AffinityBlue on Vimeo.

NodeBeat is a collaboration between Seth Sandler and Justin Windle. It was developed using openFrameworks, with PureData for audio synthesis.  According to the NodeBeat website, "Octaves and Notes make up the two types of nodes. Octaves pulse and send messages to Notes within proximity. Each Octave is assigned a random octave and each Note, a random note; therefore, a Note will play in several octaves depending on the Octave it's connected to. Pause nodes to create your own beats or let them roam free to have them generate their own." Features include adjustable node physics, node add/remove, pitch shift, adjustable pulse rate and beat sync, adjustable echo, attack, decay, and release for creative sound sculpting, and for the iPad, audio waveform display and landscape/portrait views.

RELATED
NodeBeat website
Seth Sandler's posts about music
Seth's posts and videos about AudioTouch, and interactive multi-touch interfaces for computer music exploration and collaboration.
Soulwire (Justin Windle's blog)


Cross-posted on The World Is My Interactive Interface and TechPsych blogs.

Pervasive Retail Part I: Web UX Meets Retail CX - Screens Large and Small at the Mall, Revisited

If you follow my blog(s), you know that I have a passion for interactive displays in public spaces, and that I enjoy watching how various technologies converge, jump across platforms and devices, inter-operate, and re-purpose over time.  

The best places for watching this unfold, in my opinion, are airports, malls, shopping districts,  and larger "big box" establishments, where the Web meets Digital Out of Home (DOOH), old-fashioned kiosks morph into multi-touch screens and gesture-based windows, and visual merchandising meets technology, digital culture, architecture, and consumer metrics.  At the center of it all is the user/consumer - regular people, moms, dads, kids, teens, the elderly, the disabled, the hurried and the worried. Adding to the complexity is that an increasing number of people who are out-and-about are tethered to various mobile devices.

In scholarly tech circles, the concept of DOOH is known "Pervasive Retail".  The explosion of mobile devices and ubiquitous screens has fueled the fire for research, and is the focus of the current issue of IEEE's Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.   

Despite the influx of technology, no-one is exactly sure how to do it quite right.  (I have some ideas, which I'll save for a future post.)

If you are interested in learning more about concepts related to "pervasive retail", the Retail Customer Experience website is a treasure trove of information related to DOOH, digital signage, multi-channel retailing, in-store media, kiosks, interactive touch screens and windows, related metrics, and more, with stories about real-life technology implementation.

Mall Video

The following video, taken with my handy HTC Incredible, provides a quick sampling of the screens I encountered during a recent visit to South Park Mall, in Charlotte, N.C.  The last screens in the clip were taken in the Brookstone store, and will be included in another clip that focuses solely on all of the screens that were scattered about the retail space.  

I have a hunch that some of the smaller displays in the Brookstone store were iPads.  iPads and tablets have great potential for use for shelf-level in-store interactive visual merchandising deployments, given the right apps and mounting systems. (See iPads as Cheap Digital Signage, by Tony Hymes of DOOHSocial and the video about Premier's iPad mounts, for more information.)

Much of what you'll see in the following video, taken at the same mall in December of 2009, wasn't around during my most recent trip:

Screens Large and Small at the Mall

Interactive Coke Machine and Kid at the Mall

I was sad to see that the interactive screen on the Coke machine  had been replaced by an ordinary one.  Part of the problem, I think, is that the interactive display was too busy and as a consequence, made the goal getting a quick drink a bit too complicated for the average thirsty customer, as seen in the video below:

Touch Screen Coke Machine at the Mall: 90 seconds to get a coke!

RELATED

Previous Posts:

What is DOOH and Why Should We Care?

Quick Link:  Bill Gerba's Updated Graphic of the Digital Signage Ecosystem

Digital Signage and Digital Out of Home (DOOH), via The Digital Signage Insider, Digital Signage Today, and more

Interactive Visual Merchandising, Interactive Window-Shopping at Nordstrom, Downtown Seattle:  "Writing with Light"

Window Shopping in the Web Outside:  Interactive Window Displays (videos and links)

Close Encounter with "Best Buy On": Example of a multi-channel marketing approach using in-store media and an online magazine 

Video: Gesture Interactive Window Display at Repetto Store in France, by the Marcel Agency
Interractions (ACM) Cover "Proximic Interactions: The New Ubicomp?"; Plus - Close encounters with displays at the airport and JC Penney. (Briefly touches on the topic of accessibility/usability/universal design of displays in public spaces, an area in need of further research.)

The World Is My Web Browser: Interactive Technology in Public Spaces

References and Resources (Partial List)

Fujitsu's Pervasive Retailing (pdf)

Ron Brunt, InTouch with Retailing Whitepaper, 1/15/06

When all the world is a screen

Brian Monahan, IPG Emerging Media Blog, 4/15/11

When all the world is a screen (The video is worth taking the time to watch.)

Narayanswami, C.,  Kruger, A.,  Marmasse, N. Pervasive Retail, IEEE Pervasive Computing

April-June 2011 (Vol. 10, No. 2) pp. 16-18 1536-1268/11/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE 

References from the Pervasive Retail article:

Mobile Retail Blueprint, Nat'l Retail Federation; www.nrf.commodules.php?name=Pages&op=viewlive&sp_id=1268 .

G. Belkin, Pervasive Retail Business Intelligence, Aberdeen Group, Apr. 2010; www.slideshare.net/AxiomConsultingAustralia pervasive-retail-business-intelligence .

R. Wasinger, A. Krüger, and O. Jacobs, "Integrating Intra and Extra Gestures into a Mobile and Multimodal Shopping Assistant,"Proc. 3rd Int'l Conf. Pervasive Computing (Pervasive), Springer, 2005, pp. 297–314.

A. Meschtscherjakov et al., "Enhanced Shopping: A Dynamic Map in a Retail Store," Proc. 10th Int'l Conf. Ubiquitous Computing(UbiComp 08), ACM Press, 2008, pp. 336–339.

C. Stahl and J. Haupert, "Taking Location Modelling to New Levels: A Map Modelling Toolkit for Intelligent Environments," Proc. Int'l Workshop Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA), LNCS 3987, Springer, 2006, pp. 74–85.

Cross-posted: The World Is My Interactive Interface blog

Interactive Visual Merchandising, Interactive Window-Shopping at Nordstrom, Downtown Seattle: "Writing With Light"

Please DO Touch the Glass: Our Interactive Window
Nordstrom Blog, 3/25/11


Nordstorm's Interactive Development, Visual Merchandising and Operations Teams worked on this interactive visual merchandising project, outlined in the following video:

Nordstrom Downtown Seattle: Writing with Light


FYI:  I will be exploring the topic of Pervasive Retail over a series of posts.  Here are some tentative blog post titles:
Interactive Visual Merchandising, Screens Large and Small at the Mall Revisited, Large Displays in Public Spaces (preview of CHI 2011 workshop),  Privacy and Security Issues in Interactive, Cross-Platform/Device Pervasive Retail,  Accessibility and Cognitive Load Issues in Pervasive Retail,  Overview of Retail Customer Experience's resources, and more.

Revisiting Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, an on-line publication (includes links)

Aether is an on-line publication that focuses on the emerging and converging field of geographic media.  Given my interest in interactive multimedia technology and the fact that Social Science was one of my undegraduate majors, it makes sense that many of the topics covered in Aether would appeal to me. I discovered Aether about a year or so ago, and shared some information about it in the following post: Aether- The Journal of Media Geography (A Convergence of Disciplines).  

Aether  is hosted by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Northridge.   In addition to the on-line publication, Aether has a blog, "Aether, The Blog of Media Geography", which is a great resource about workshops, events, and resources related to the focus of the publication. 

Since a good number of the readers of this blog are graduate students, I decided to take the time to include in this post information and links that might be helpful to someone gathering information on a deeper level. 

"Aether offers a forum that examines the geography of media, including cinema, television, the Internet, music, art, advertising, newspapers and magazines, video and animation. It is our goal to provide a space for contributions to current issues surrounding these media, beginning with constructions of space and place, cultural landscapes, society, and identity."

"We invite inquiries into the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of all types of media and thus we will offer critical, pedagogical and discursive content that views the world in new and exciting ways. We welcome submissions from anyone wishing to publish material that extends the boundaries of the traditional academic journal. We encourage work that is highly visual or aural, including video, and will actively promote material that makes use of our digital technologies."

I appreciate the fact that Aether's editors value the importance of using multimedia representation in scholarly research, embodied in the following quote from the introduction of Volume 3:

"All too often we remain wedded to textuality when it comes to presenting our research.  However, as we move further into a world of advance capitalism driven by new information technologies and spaces of flow, streams of innovations, knowledge and ideas are increasingly circulated in non-textual formats. Academic geographers have long dabbled in video technology and the production of documentaries...We strongly encourage and support the use of multimedia productions in our journal and we hope we can offer an acceptable venue for those seeking to transcend (and even transgress) the knowledge-limiting restraints of traditional academic publications." - Jim Craine, Jason Dittmer, and Chris Lukinbeal, Aether, Volume Three


One of the good things about Aether is that all of the volumes can be freely downloaded from the website.  For the convenience of knowledge-junkies,  I've posted links to the past seven volumes, along with information/links about the editors and editorial board of Aether.  

Volume Seven | Fall, 2010
Theme: Space and Sound: "Geographies of Music, Geographers Who Play Music"
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_07/volume_07.pdf


Volume Six | October 2010
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_06/volume_06.pdf

Volume Five a | March, 2010 (Edited by Tristan Thielmann)

Theme: Locative Media

"This special issue of Aether, edited by Tristan Thielmann, explores the spatial turn in media studies and the media turn in geographical studies, providing a sketch of the subject area “geomedia” from a phenomenological perspective and the field of “media geography” from a disciplinary perspective."

http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_05a/volume_05a.pdf

Volume Four | March, 2009

Theme: The Geography of Journalism (Edited by Mike Gasher)

"This special issue of Aether brings together six papers that address news geography on a range of scales. Each speaks to the question of how the news media position the people and places that constitute their particular communities."

http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_04/volume_04.pdf

Volume Three | June, 2008

"One of the main reasons Aether was developed as an ejournal was to offer authors alternative publishing outlets– something that went beyond the textural format of both traditional hard journals and text-based ejournals. Volume Three presents the first articles that justify these editorial goals."

http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_03/volume_03.pdf

Volume Two | April, 2008

Theme:  Imagining Geography Through Interactive Media

"This special issue of Aether offers an examination of the utopian and dystopian representations of digital landscapes including narratives of colonialism, gaming as social space and the influence of historical ideologies on social game space plus much more."

http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_02/volume_02.pdf

Volume One | November, 2007
"The premiere issue of Aether consists of a series of short essays by members of the editorial board. Each explores the author's personal interests in Media Geography and discusses the future direction of the field."
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_01/volume_01.pdf

Aether's "Who's Who"
Review Editor

Giorgio Hadi Curti

San Diego State University
cedarboot@gmail.com

Editors

Jim Craine

California State University, Northridge

jwc53531@csun.edu

Jason Dittmer

University College London

j.dittmer@ucl.ac.uk

Chris Lukinbeal

The University of Arizona

chris.lukinbeal@arizona.edu

Contributors
Shawna Dark, Director
Center for Geographical Studies

Department of Geography

California State University, Northridge

shawna.dark@csun.edu

David Deis

Staff Cartographer

Department of Geography

California State University, Northridge

david.deis@csun.edu

Editorial Board
Paul C. Adams • University of Texas at Austin

Stuart C. Aitken • San Diego State University

David B. Clarke • Swansea University

Christina Dando • University of Nebraska, Omaha

Deborah Dixon • Aberystwyth University

Marcus Doel • Swansea University

Colin R. Gardner • University of California, Santa Barbara

Ken Hillis • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sarah F. Ives • Stanford University

Ed Jackiewicz • California State University, Northridge

John Paul Jones III • University of Arizona

Christina Kennedy • Northern Arizona University

Minelle Mahtani • University of Toronto

Susan Mains • University of the West Indies, Mona

Kevin McHugh • Arizona State University

Christopher M. Moreno • San Diego State University

Wolfgang Natter • Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Joseph Palis • University of the Philippines

Brent J. Piepergerdes • University of Kansas

Rob Shields • University of Alberta

Amy Siciliano • University of Wisconsin

Paul F. Starrs • University of Reno, Nevada

Dan Sutko • North Carolina State University

Jonathan Taylor • California State University, Fullerton

Stefan Zimmermann • University of Mainz

Leo Zonn • University of Texas

Aether's "Special Thanks"
Stella Theodoulou, Dean • The College of Social & Behavioral Sciences

California State University, Northridge

stella.theodoulou@csun.edu

Darrick Danta, Chair • Department of Geography

California State University, Northridge

darrick.danta@csun.edu

Paul Adams, Communication Geography Specialty Group

Department of Geography and the Environment 
University of Texas, Austin

Cross-posted: The World Is My Interactive Interface

Interactive Tweet Topic Explorer, by Jeff Clark

Thanks to Nathan Yau (FlowingData) for the link!


If you use twitter, you might like exploring Jeff Clark's on-line interactive Tweet Topic Explorer to get a new perspective of your tweets, or the tweets of others. (Just enter the twitter ID in the search box in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.)  
Here is a screenshot of my tweets.

Jeff Clark created this application using Processing.js. According to his blog post, it works well in the Chrome browser, and doesn't work in IE. Jeff is a programmer with an academic background in Applied Physics and Mathematics, and is interested in data mining, statistical analysis, and visualizations. You can learn more about Jeff Clark's work, and visually-inspired thoughts/communication on his Neoformix blog.

RELATED
Tweet Topic Explorer
Jeff Clark, Neoformix 4/19/11
Word Cluster Diagram
Jeff Clark, Neoformix, 4/18/11
See what you and others tweet about with the Tweet Topic Explorer
Nathan Yau, Flowing Data, 4/20/11