A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
Last year at the TED conference, Jeff Han demonstrated his uber cool new technology, high resolution multi-touch interface.
Wired News has a great piece, including video footage of the technology in action: “TED: Jeff Han, A Year Later“.
Also for your viewing pleasure, here’s another clip:
Related to the post about eye-tracking for usability, you might be interested in eye tracking research that shows artists look at things differently.
A couple of guys from down in California, Justin Ridge and Mike Roush, decided to have a contest where they would both animate the same 20 second clip of music. The results are beautiful. They plan to make it a regular event and I can’t wait to see the next submission—but in the meantime here are the results from round one.
I started my own little animation project, but after an unrecoverable hard drive crash, it looks like the project is toast.
Luckily I emailed a friend an early version so at least I have something, but after seeing such an early version again, it breaks my heart that it’s not even remotely close to what it had become. When the hard drive crashed, the project had triple the amount of frames and a more completed look and feel. For what it’s worth, here is my unfinished animation: The Jumper (220k animated gif).
Have you ever noticed how some websites are just easier to read than others? The New York Times comes to mind as a good example of a site that creates an enjoyable experience through its use of columns that are not too wide, tight writing, lots of white space, and jettisoning unnecessary imagery.
The Online Journalism Review recently ran an extremely interesting article about the science of good page layout. It explains how using eye tracking software, it is possible to create more efficient pages that help uses read pages faster and retain more information at the same time.
Among the different information that can be gleaned from eye tracking, I found the differences between the sexes eye moments to be the most interesting. (Though I will add, I’ve never found myself staring at other guy’s crotches — so that makes me wonder, is this for real?)
From the article:
Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed. Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.
It would be interesting to delve a little deeper into this finding. If it is true, I imagine there may be some evolutionary reason for the differences.
(via Kottke)
Every year for the past 3 or 4 years I have been disappointed that I’m not in a position to fly down to the South by Southwest Conference in Austin Texas.
However, I still enjoy following along with some of the interesting presentations such as this fabulous look at typography for the web by Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton.
Also to check out from SxSW 2007, Will Wright’s fantastic keynote address.
More than just a simple puzzle game, Sprout features beautiful charcoal drawings as the basis for its graphics and style—a flash game that thinks it’s a children’s storybook.
Scribd is like YouTube for books, except that watching videos online is better than reading books online. Don’t get me wrong, I did find a couple of posts to download that I quite liked.
Check out Jason Scott’s rather humorous and very astute first impression of Scribd.
Last summer, Ray Keim of Haunted Dimensions released an extremely cool paper model of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion in New Orleans Square.
My brother and I started working on it as a summer project, but since he was only here for one afternoon, we didn’t get very far. Lately he’s been back visiting and it got me back working on it again. Today, it’s finally finished and it looks great!
Better than the light traveling through time experiment, is Tom Van Baak’s experiment in which he outfitted his family minivan with high-precision cesium clocks to demonstrate to his kids that they gained 22 nanoseconds of vacation time on their mountain road trip, compared with readings on clocks left back at home. Time travel in action.
As a collector of vintage and modern atomic clocks, I discovered it was possible, using gear found at home, to convert our family minivan into a mobile high-precision time laboratory, complete with batteries, power converters, time interval counters, three children, and three cesium clocks. We drove as high as we could up Mount Rainier, the volcano near Seattle, Washington, and parked there for two days. The trip was continuously logged with the global positioning system; the net altitude gain was +1340 meters.
Given the terrestrial blueshift of 1.1 × 10-16 per meter mentioned by Kleppner and integrating our altitude profile, we predicted the round-trip time dilation to be +22 nanoseconds. This is remarkably close to what we experimentally observed when, after we returned, the ensemble of portable cesium clocks was again compared with atomic clocks left at home.
I was first introduced to the game “You Don’t Know Jack” by my high school physics teacher almost ten years ago. On the last day of classes he let us chill out and play the addictive flash based game where high culture and pop culture collide; I’ve been a fan ever since.
Now you can play a single player version of You Don’t Know Jack online. You can also browse their older “Dis or Dat” games via their blog or after you finish the 7 question game.
