‘Designing for Convergence’ panel archived at Adobe; includes Wii remote discussion
Events, Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Wii
2/17/08
Adobe has posed a Connect archive of the ‘Designing for Convergence’ panel I was on with Dmitri Siegel of Urban Outfitters and Peter Lunenfeld of Art Center College of Design back in November. I enjoyed this panel—Dmitri showed a selection of his recent projects with Urban Outfitters and Peter spoke about some the ideas in his forthcoming book The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading. I showed some recent work, including Swing, SpringGraph database visualizations for Vectors, and a sneak peek at the Wii remote-enabled interface for Blood Sugar, the follow-up project to Public Secrets I’m currently working on with Sharon Daniel. We also got into some interesting discussions about professional vs. amateur creative output on the web and ways in which the Wii remote could be used to make experimental interactivity more accessible in installation or gallery settings. Take a look at the Connect archive here; there’s also a page featuring archives from other discussions in the series.
I got to play a Theremin!
Some pure geeky fun today. A few weeks ago I was at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego, and was psyched to find a Theremin included in their new audio-related exhibition (which is quite good). I’d never seen one in person, much less played one, so I immediately ran over and launched into my best rendition of Bernard Herrmann’s theme from The Day the Earth Stood Still. I’m sure I embarrassed myself mightily, but who cares! I got to play a Theremin!
The Theremin I saw was the classic “piece of furniture with antennae” form factor you see in the image of Leon Theremin himself to the right, not the sleek Moog version you can see below in a performance of the Zelda theme.
This may qualify as a geek singularity: using the Wii remote to simulate a Theremin playing the theme from Star Trek. Enjoy…
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“We get to decide” what is next-gen
Games, Interactive Design, Wii
8/20/07
This is so right on, I couldn’t pass it up. In a speech at the GCDC in Germany this afternoon (covered in this article at GamesIndustry.biz), Stormfront Sudios President and CEO Don Daglow made some excellent points that deserve to be repeated far and wide.
“If it changes the player’s view of what interactive entertainment is; if you think differently about it; if you have a new perspective after playing the game that you didn’t have before, to me that’s next-gen,” Daglow said in a refutation of conventional wisdom that you can’t create a next-gen experience without dramatic increases in processing power. I couldn’t agree more.
The most significant innovations waiting in the wings for interactive art and entertainment are absolutely not about processing power, better algorithms, or any form of rocket science, though they may be enabled by technological innovation (as with the Wii remote). They are simply smart design, inspired thinking, artistry, and most importantly, perspective—an actual point of view on the world that arises from one’s personal experience.
Another Daglow quote: “We’ve spent a quarter of a century saying ‘the machine is holding me back’… The only problem is that now the machines are so powerful, we’ve lost our excuse.” This became really clear to me in the waning years of the last console generation (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), when I started to get bored with gaming in general. Everything was a retread; new versions of old games with upgraded graphics. I was shocked out of my complacency, however, when the Wii controller was first announced (evidenced by the fact that as soon as I heard the announcement I immediately estimated the dimensions of the remote and built a Duplo version the same size to start imagining what was possible...)
Daglow defends the Wii as a next-gen platform from the skeptics who doubt that it’s lesser-powered processor qualifies it as such with a blunt truth that should be remembered and repeated:
“Nobody gets to tell us what we think is next-gen - we get to decide for ourselves.”
Amen to that.
The Wiimote and transitional space
Interactive Design, Wii
7/30/07
Wired recently featured a piece about new work being done using the Wiimote as an interface for real-world training simulators running in Second Life. Surgery, hazardous chemical handling, nuclear plant operations—all are fair game for WorldWired, a consultancy run by David E. Stone, who calls the Wiimote “one of the most significant technology breakthroughs in the history of computer science.”
Well, obviously I think the Wiimote’s pretty nifty too, but it’s only partly for the reasons given by MIT professor Eric Klopfer in the article: “People know intuitively what to do with it when they pick it up because we use it like devices we are familiar with—bats, rackets, wands, etc.”
So much Wiimote boosterism is about where the remote takes you—the mental models it so seamlessly helps you to adopt. All true, but I would argue that of equal significance is what the remote helps you leave behind. Imagine that the Wiimote comes into widespread usage as an alternative PC input device. Not something you use every day, but something you keep next to your work machine, since you can use it as a PowerPoint or iTunes remote, as well as for those all-too-rare moments when you stumble across a Flash game, online comic or art piece that shows you the delightful message: “If you have a Wiimote, pick it up now.”
Instantly, you’ve left behind the world of work and its input devices, and you’re prepared to experience something unusual—the more unexpected, the better. Even if the piece doesn’t make use of the remote’s motion sensitivity at all, the device itself has still managed to carve out headspace where software art and entertainment no longer have to compete with every other application to remap the meanings of your mouse and keyboard. We’ve got transitional space now; we’ve got a lobby to ease people out of the workaday and into alternate realms.
Calling it a technological breakthrough just doesn’t do it justice, does it?
Swinging with the London Flash Platform User Group
Announcements, Events, Flash, Wii
7/25/07
Word comes from across the pond that Swing is going to be shown at tomorrow’s London Flash Platform User Group meeting. At a one-hour session called “Fwii Style” (all these Wii puns remind me of the early days of the Macintosh, when all software had to have “Mac” in the title) Adam Robertson of Dusty Pixels will hold forth on the wonders of Wii and Flash:
Forget your PS3’s and 360’s, the Wii is officially the coolest console ever, all thanks to its innovative Wiimote controller. And now you can get in on the motion sensing goodness using Flash.
In this session we’ll take a quick look inside the Wiimote to learn a bit about how it works, then discover how you can use it to control your own Flash projects, both through the official Wii browser (with the Wiicade API) and on your desktop (with FWiidom & WiiFlash). Much arm waving guaranteed.
The followup session, called “Make Things Physical” and taught by Leif Lovgreen, sounds pretty great too:
An introduction to physical interaction. Adobe Flash, the Make Controller Kit from MakingThings and a handful of analogue sensors. This session covers the basics of getting started with analogue input as an interface to Flash.
Expect strange things like ice cubes, food, flashlights and a boxing ball to be natural ingredients in this session.
Interaction with analog sensors was something I thought was still beyond the capabilities of Flash; glad to hear this barrier’s coming down.
Those in London environs, take note; sounds like an interesting evening.
