We live in an age of touch-screen interfaces, but what will the UIs of the future look like? Will they continue to be made up of ghostly pixels, or will they be made of atoms that you can reach out and touch?
At the MIT Media Lab, the Tangible Media Group believes the future of computing is tactile. Unveiled today, the inFORM is MIT’s new scrying pool for imagining the interfaces of tomorrow. Almost like a table of living clay, the inFORM is a surface that three-dimensionally changes shape, allowing users to not only interact with digital content in meatspace, but even hold hands with a person hundreds of miles away. And that’s only the beginning.
What would a city designed for the blind be like? Chris Downey is an architect who went suddenly blind in 2008; he contrasts life in his beloved San Francisco before and after — and shows how the thoughtful designs that enhance his life now might actually make everyone’s life better, sighted or not.
No matter what you think of Windows 8, it’s certain that Windows is both iconic and significant in the evolution of personal computing. It’s a series of operating systems, of course, but it’s also been a concept, a way of thinking, an influencer, and a touchstone for 30 years since Bill Gates introduced it on November 10, 1983.
The “Interface Manager” that would become Windows went into development in 1981 and finally had its public release as Windows 1.0 in November 1985. This first stab wasn’t actually a full OS, but more of a “graphical shell” that extended MS-DOS to have a user interface, as it is known today.
But Windows 1.0 had many defining OS features, like a calendar, clock, Microsoft Paint, a text editor, terminal, and clipboard. Windows allowed users to view multiple program windows at once, yup, though they couldn’t overlap at all. The early days of tiles! And 1.0 enabled data transfer between programs. Plus, it came with drivers for things like keyboards and the Microsoft Mouse, which had debuted earlier in 1983.
30 years seems simultaneously like an incredibly long time and a quick blur when you consider how Windows has evolved and spread to dominate between 80% and 90% OS marketshare. Windows 8 made it clear that Microsoft views interactive touch integration as crucial to a PC operating system going forward into the fourth Windows decade. Too bad hyper Ballmer ads won’t be the face of the next era.
Ramona Pringle’s life was like a sitcom — one of those cheesy, too-good-to-be-true shows about finding love and success in the big city.
She had a good job at Frontline; a number of smart, successful friends; and a boyfriend — “a fantastic one!” — whom she planned to marry. Things were perfect.
With a quick roll of the dice, though, everything changed. Her mother was diagnosed with a life-changing illness, and Pringle left her job in New York and moved back home to Toronto to take care of her. A week later, Pringle’s boyfriend broke up with her.
The dream, the city, the perfect life — gone in a flash.
“It was absolute rock bottom,” she says. ” Here I was, back in my childhood bedroom — and it was so quiet. It was so eerily quiet Here I was, back in my childhood bedroom — and it was so quiet. It was so eerily quiet.”
It was the type of situation in which some might turn to alcohol, drugs or even religion to cope. Pringle was looking for some kind — any kind — of answer. But her mother was sick, and she needed to be with her. Leaving wasn’t an option.
“People get these ‘pilgrimage moments,’ you know? When something happens to them and they trek across Europe or India in search of some kind of wisdom,” she says. “I couldn’t do that.”
Instead, she turned to the virtual realm of World of Warcraft (WoW), where she found an unexpected community of support and camaraderie. She was so inspired that she went to work on an interactive documentary, Avatar Secrets, about the lessons she learned. It’s set to be released in the spring of 2014.
A really inspiring story. I think many of us can empathize with her dramatic change in circumstances directing her life down a completely different path. The content above is only half the story…read more following the link: How One Woman Grappled With Grief Through Gaming | Mashable.
Researchers from all over the world can use DETER, a practice Internet, to discover the best ways to combat hackers and prevent a “Cyber Pearl Harbor.” Host David Pogue met with cyber security experts at DETER, who taught him about a common attack called the Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack.
Humans are clever: what sets us apart from the rest of the creatures on the planet is our ability to think about the world around us—and shape it. But in making all the technological advances that seems so smart, are we making the world better, or just different?
This video takes a pretty lofty view of that poser. Considering ideas like super intelligence, super longevity and super well being, it asks some pretty fundamental questions about whether those kinds of technological accomplishments are actually a good thing or not. What do you think? via Can Technology Ever Make Us Truly Happy? | Gizmodo
The New York Public Library is a stunning piece of architecture. Its Rose Reading Room has 51-foot ceilings and measures the length of a football field (that’s more than a Manhattan block), yet it has no columns, making it one of the largest open interiors in the world.
If you’re Nate Bolt–Facebook design researcher, amateur filmmaker, and friend of the NYPL’s skunkworks team–you get invited to fly a drone through the space. Bolt shot the video you see here using an ultralight setup–a DJI Phantom quadcopter drone loaded with a GoPro and aniPhone. That’s roughly $1,500 in equipment weighing just a bit over two pounds. It allowed Bolt to film with a god-like perspective as the camera floats over shoulders and through doorways to explore the nuance of such grand architecture.
There comes a moment in most of our lives when we realize that some secrets of the universe will remain hidden from us–not because mankind hasn’t discovered them, but because those secrets are encoded in complex math and physics problems that few of us have the talent or patience to understand.
But Beauty of Mathematics, a new video by Yann Pineill & Nicolas Lefaucheux, gives the mathematically challenged a peek into living equations. The animated triptych shows an equation on the left, its quantified schematics in the center, and its real world manifestation on the right. The video is like academic X-ray vision, but in reality, its inspiration was never math or science. It was beauty.
infophile 