Cultural Technology Lab

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[culturaltechnologylab]

We brought the museduino to ASTC and you’ll never believe what happened next! I’ve always wante...

A post about our new hardware venture released into the wild.

[pbsdigitalstudios]

Do we live in the future? 

[culturaltechnologylab]

More press! In conjunction with the Media Arts department, our SSD students helped overhaul the visitor’s center at Coronado Historic Site. Featured in the article is one of our student’s iPad interactives with physical markers.

Read the full article

Come by and check it out this Saturday (5/30) at the anniversary opening, or any other time they are open.

Hours and directions

[culturaltechnologylab]

One of our students made it into the Journal.

Read the full article

[chideas]

How Google Taught Itself Good Design

Google and the shift to beautiful, invisible design

[chideas]

Apple Skeuomorphism Reconstructed In 3-D

“USING PAPER MODELS A TEAM OF ANIMATION STUDENTS CREATES AN ELEGANT CRITIQUE OF APPLE’S IOS. META!”

[darienlibrary]

Mr. E, one of our young adult patrons, printed out an old school Nintendo console using our 3D printers. He then added a Raspberry Pi to finish his project. 

[prostheticknowledge]

Bug

iOS app for children by Linked By Air turns colours into sounds, a toy version of Synesthesia

Kids observe the world around them in imaginative ways that most adults gradually forget. Bug is a musical instrument you use to look at the world. Bug is completely simple to use. Point it at the world, tap the screen, and walk around. Bug turns what you see into pure color, and color into music. For kids and grownups.

You can find out more and download the app here

[prostheticknowledge]

Level-Ups

Proof-of-concept VR peripheral are mechanical stilts which provide a sense of elevation when standing on a virtual object:

We present “Level-Ups”, computer-controlled stilts that allow virtual reality users to experience walking up and down steps. Each Level-Up unit is a self-contained device worn like a boot. Its main functional element is a vertical actuation mechanism mounted to the bottom of the boot that extends vertically. Unlike traditional solutions that are integrated with locomotion devices, Level-Ups allow users to walk around freely (“real-walking”). We present Level-Ups in a demo environment based on a head-mounted display, optical motion capture, and integrated with a game engine.

Link

[flavorwire]

Inspiring Illustrations of Awesome Female Scientists

[culturaltechnologylab]

8 Next-Generation User Interface That Are (Almost) Here

When we talk about user interface (UI) in computing, we’re referring to how a computer program or system represents itself to its user, usually via graphics, text and sound. We’re all familiar with the typical Windows and Apple operating system where we interact with icons on our desktop with our ... Continue reading »

[futurescope]

Surrogates: Direct brain interface between humans

Researchers from University of Washington have successfully replicated a direct brain-to-brain connection between pairs of people as part of a scientific study following the team’s initial demonstration a year ago. In the newly published study, which involved six people, researchers were able to transmit the signals from one person’s brain over the Internet and use these signals to control the hand motions of another person within a split second of sending that signal.

The research team combined two kinds of noninvasive instruments and fine-tuned software to connect two human brains in real time. The process is fairly straightforward. One participant is hooked to an electroencephalography machine that reads brain activity and sends electrical pulses via the Web to the second participant, who is wearing a swim cap with a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil placed near the part of the brain that controls hand movements.

Using this setup, one person can send a command to move the hand of the other by simply thinking about that hand movement.

Impressive. What’s next? Science Fiction:

With the new funding, the research team will expand the types of information that can be transferred from brain to brain, including more complex visual and psychological phenomena such as concepts, thoughts and rules.

They’re also exploring how to influence brain waves that correspond with alertness or sleepiness. Eventually, for example, the brain of a sleepy airplane pilot dozing off at the controls could stimulate the copilot’s brain to become more alert.

The project could also eventually lead to “brain tutoring,” in which knowledge is transferred directly from the brain of a teacher to a student. “Imagine someone who’s a brilliant scientist but not a brilliant teacher. Complex knowledge is hard to explain — we’re limited by language,” said co-author Chantel Prat, a faculty member at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and a UW assistant professor of psychology.

[read more] [paper]

[culturaltechnologylab]

Fright Night at The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science

Come check out our Arduino based haunted hallway tonight during adult Fright Night if you dare.

Also featuring:

Space Monsters 2: Son of Space Monster Planetarium Show

Cash bar

Night sky viewing from the Observatory

Exhibit gallery tours

Cocktails with a curator

[prostheticknowledge]

Hacking Households

Project exploring ideas related to coding and open-source principles and bringing them to product design - video embedded below:

What if objects were produced the way open source software is developed?

Creating software has become a flexible, collaborative, and adaptable process: projects develop as code is openly shared, reviewed, adapted, and distributed. Simultaneously, home appliances are increasingly dependent on inflexible standards of production leading to a lack of reparability, less adaptability, and more waste. With affordable technologies of digital manufacturing and electronic platforms, translating code into matter is becoming possible for everyone. Programming object thus seek to bring open source software practices into the world of (open hardware)appliances. Moving away from a top-down approach from corporation to consumer, to one where objects are designed, developed, and produced democratically within open communities.

More here and here

[engadget]

Google finds that teens use voice search more than grownups

[prostheticknowledge]

Programmable Materials

Project by Skylar Tibbits for MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab explores materials that can alter their shape under certain conditions, from carbon fiber and fabric to woodgrain:

Programmable Materials consist of material compositions that are designed to become highly dynamic in form and function, yet they are as cost-effective as traditional materials, easily fabricated and capable of flat-pack shipping and self-assembly.  These new materials include: self-transforming carbon fiber, printed wood grain, custom textile composites and other rubbers/plastics, which offer unprecedented capabilities including programmable actuation, sensing and self-transformation, from a simple material.

Nearly every industry has long desired smarter materials and robotic-like transformation from apparel, architecture, product design and manufacturing to aerospace and automotive industries. However, these capabilities have often required expensive, error-prone and complex electromechanical devices (motors, sensors, electronics), bulky components, power consumption (batteries or electricity) and difficult assembly processes. These constraints have made it difficult to efficiently produce dynamic systems, higher-performing machines and more adaptive products, until now. Our goal is true material robotics or robots without robots.

A couple of examples - here is a proof-of-concept adaptive airfoil which does not require any additional mechanical parts:

Here is a proof of concept demonstration of ‘programmable wood’:

More about this project can be found here

[prostheticknowledge]

WirePrint

Prototyping 3D printing method from HPI reduces construction time of model making by a tenth creating wireframe versions of forms - video embedded below:

WirePrint prints 3D objects as wireframe previews. By extruding filament directly into 3D space instead of printing layer-wise, it achieves a speed-up of up to a factor of 10, allowing designers to iterate more quickly in the early stages of design …

Even though considered a rapid prototyping tool, 3D printing is so slow that a reasonably sized object requires printing overnight. This slows designers down to a single iteration per day. With WirePrint, we propose to instead print low-fidelity wireframe previews in the early stages of the design process. Wireframe previews are 3D prints in which surfaces have been replaced with a wireframe mesh. Since wireframe previews are to scale and represent the overall shape of the 3D object, they allow users to quickly verify key aspects of their 3D design, such as the ergonomic fit.

More Here