Nastypixel is a design collective, composed of people associated with Interaction Ivrea in Italy. As a contribution to open-source learning, they have published a a series of excellent step-by-step tutorials, or “recipes”, on how to make various DIY interactive projects. The first project, Soundpad, teaches you how to take apart a computer keyboard and appropriate the internal logic to your own needs. This way you can connect four button pads to your computer, where a Flash software component plays different sounds depending on the pad you press.
As a note on gestural interfaces, previously mentioned on Intwo, SmartRetina is a platform for computer gesture recognition, developed by Yaniv Steiner of Nastypixel. It has a camera component and a software component, forming the base for touchless gestural interfaces.
Feedr is a concept I am working on. The name is a play on “News Reader” – just like a reader makes your favorite blogs and online news available from within one interface, feedr allows you to search newly blogged-about videos. The idea is that you enter a search word/term, and the software searches blog posts tagged with those words that include videos. What you get in the feedr player is a continuous stream of videos. There are controls to pause, skip ahead and back, and there is a link to the original video.
I am posting this to get some feedback on the idea. I want to keep the interface extremely minimal – the inspiration is a TV, but instead of a predetermined set of channels, you ‘zap’ by entering search terms, and the channels are ever changing – reflecting the current online trends and discussions. As soon as I get a working prototype up and running, I will post a link here.
The developing world is catching up with the industrialized world faster than most people realize. The idea of a clear division between poor and rich, and a great divide between them, is a concept of the past that has survived since the 1950’s. The reality is much more nuanced, something Swedish global health professor Hans Rosling demonstrates in this now classic TED talk.
