These digital toy blocks have embedded LCD touch screens which respond to one-another. Users can draw or download pre-made animated designs which can move between screens and respond to user movements such as touching other blocks, shaking, spinning, stacking, etc. The blocks encourage an integration between digital, virtual, and tangible play.

See a brief demonstration of the concept in action below or through this link:

Yesterday’s Engaget featured an MIT project demo using OLED Display Blocks. They concentrated on engineering the actual technology to work with multiple small interactive screens on block faces. Very cool to see! We focused on how this near future (or now current?) technology might be implemented within creative play situations and for entertainment purposes. In their video, they also suggest possible uses for the blocks as interface tools, rather than on the blocks as toys. See the article here!

This sounds like a fun idea, but I’d like to know how the interaction was designed. How are the emotions being read? How are the emotions being translated into gestures of touch? And then, how is this manifest in the patch of fur in such a way that it induces calm?

(Provocative Tribbles)

See some recent commercial applications below:
The winner in this contest from Layar (an iPhone app for creating embedding simple AR), ‘AR Posters’, allows people to watch previews, win tickets, and unlock other information from scanning concert posters.

Battles – IPT2 – 3D Zoetrope Mapping from Retchy on Vimeo.

I’ll be taking a 3DS stereoscopic game development course this Spring. The main questions to consider, addressed in a USC work group yesterday, are what is it about 3D that is better than 2D? What makes it special? What can be done in 3D that can’t be done in 3D? And what is unique about real-time 3D?

What are the Nitendo 3DS competitors up to?
I appreciate Hasbro’s take on the Mattel Viewmaster, but what would make the essence of what the Viewmaster stood for and inspired experientially, relevant to today? Rather than duplicating its look and function, I think an updated design should capture the core wonder of the play experience, which in this day and age, involves a largely glasses-free device.

With my film, The Reality Clock, I considered 3D from a conceptual and emotional standpoint. I read multiple accounts of how depth perception is affected by aging and particularly, by Dementia. With dreams, memories, and hallucinations, there can be both a flattening out and deepening of depth. Rather than replicate ordinary depth perception, I was inspired to explore how these subtle changes in depth might subtly alter emotional associations. In the end, I ended up following a more classical strategy of stereo — opening scene with deep depth, then flatten out for Act 1, deepening for the surreal section of Act 2, and then slowly becoming deeper through the end of Act 3. I spent more time learning how to do 3D technically, than playing with it. Coming up, I’d like to explore 3D in ways more relevant to the questions addressed above, and my original more experimental inspirations for the film.

The film was shot with a Nokia N8 smartphone 12-megapixel camera attached to a 50x magnification microscope called CellScope. Invented by bioengineer Daniel Fletcher at the University of California, Berkeley, the tiny but powerful CellScope allows doctors in poor, rural areas to capture images of blood samples and transmit them via cell phone to laboratories anywhere in the world. In this way, the CellScope should allow doctors to diagnose fatal diseases even when there are no medical labs nearby.” from http://www.physorg.com/news204529465.html

See the film here:

Physorg

Tele-Memory Scape from Amanda Tasse on Vimeo.

The installation, in a narrow hallway, consisted of a series of frames, with timelapse clouds projected on them, and a miniature dollhouse set with a doll looking up at the clouds through a telescope. A full-size antique style telescope could be used to view the dollhouse. In the documentation, the fabric obscuring the dollhouse was removed, but in the actual piece, the telescope is was the only way that the dollhouse could be viewed. The theme explored multiple dimensions and layers of framing as memory tracking devices.

Coral Reef LED Prototype from Amanda Tasse on Vimeo.

The Coral Reef LED prototype was designed by Amanda Tasse & Kyla Gorman. We programmed LED’s to flash at different patterns. When light was flashed on various photoresisters, the LED light patterns changed, to mimic a coral reef being stunned. The idea was to build a small model of what could be a larger installation, where a participant mimicked exploring an underground coral reef with a flashlight.

Kyla concentrated on the programming, while I fabricated most of the light sculpture.

TELEPHONEME | MK12 from MK12 on Vimeo.

Retro-futuristic Screen-print Anaglyph Style, tons of particulate effects. Gorgeous.