I’m at a conference organized by Kevin Kee called Playing with Technology in History. I am writing my conference notes at, philosophi.ca: Playing With History. The theme of the conference is gaming to teach history.
The first day is an unconference where we first decided what we wanted to do. Bill Turkel brought all sorts of fabrication stuff. We had sessions about different types of games.
Sean pointed me to a video (abvoe) explaining the working of a real Turing Machine built by Mike Davey in Wisconsin. It is worth noting that Turing didn’t (to my knowledge) every try to make the machine he described for theoretical purposes. Also worth noting (as is clear in the video) is that there are actually 3 settings for each position: nothing, 0 or 1.
Some Humanities Computing and Industrial Design students put on an Arduino workshop on Saturday. Once again I’m struck by how much fun it is to get simple things working with an Arduino. There is something integrative about making physical interactives that appealed to everyone at the workshop – you have to program, you have to wire things, you have to understand a bit about circuits and you have to fiddle. How can we weave such learning into our humanities computing courses?
The Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2010 has started. We have folk in Australia blogging.
This year we have over 150 participants – lets hope nothing blows up.
I was just sent an invitation to IconoTag by an old friend, Jame Turner. It is a multilingual image tagging research project where you choose a language and tag 12 images in that language. I’m not sure what the research is, but it reminds me of the Google’s Image Labeler which seems loosely based on Luis von Ahn’s work – projects like CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA.
Seamus pointed us to a great animation on YouTube, Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster. They nicely dramatize the challenges and need for digital preservation.
Scott Smallwood came to talk to our interactives group about his work on musical instruments. Scott was involved with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and demonstrated one of the hemispherical speakers that they designed so that laptop musicians could join and play with others. The idea was that a laptop musician, instead of plugging into a sound system (PA), should be able to make sound from where they are just like the analogue instruments. I wonder what the visualization equivalent is? Will these new pocket projectors we can begin to imagine visualization instrument that are portable. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry’s demo of SixthSense at TED is an example of creative thinking about outdoor interface.
From Sean I found out about the Parrot AR.Drone which has to be the coolest iPhone accessory around. You control a drone over wifi and see through it’s camera on your iPhone. They apparently have gaming modes where you can duel layered bots or other drones. I can’t help thinking this is too cool to be real. See their video channel on YouTube.
Gizmodo has a short article on Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them. The article showcases graphic designs by Mark Coleran who did work for movies like Mission Impossible 3, Mr & Mrs Smith, and Children of Men. There is a screen reel that summarizes his work and he responds here in his blog. Thanks to Stan for this.
Thanks to twitter I’ve discovered the future of robots and they are tweenbots. The tweenbots is a playful project by Kacie Kinzer who let loose simple rolling bots with a flag that identified where they were going. She then videotaped people helping the little robot on its way.