Just a little over a year ago the Walker launched its first blog – this one! It was soon followed by several departmental blogs and the behind the scenes grab-bag known as “Off Center”… In this first year we’ve seen our blogs grow from an unsure project (”Let’s just start blogging and see what happens! Who wants to write?”) to a pretty important part of the Walker’s web presence (”Hmm, maybe we need to draft some guidelines for these blogs…”). It’s been a fun road from my side: WordPress was hacked once because I was late with an upgrade, we lost some posts and had to scramble with the backups to recover them, and the battle with comment spam is ongoing (but we think we’re winning finally).
I think two people deserve an extra shout-out for their incredible impact on bringing this project to where it is today: Eric, for his design work, incredible WordPress wizardry, patience in teaching staff how to blog, and actually posting when the rest of New Media just talks about it, and Paul, for his total commitment to the blogs, great (frequent!) posts, and for raising the bar on what we want them to be.
Here’s to one year down, many more to go!
Some new touch screen research has gotten good deal of coverage in Tech/Art blogs recently and I’d feel remiss not mentioning them here in light of our continuing interactive table research.
Jeff Han has posted his Multi-Touch Interaction Research. I’m a bit unclear if this technology is similar to the Entertaible that Brent posted about earlier. This surface senses touch by sensing a disruption in the path of light from an LED placed inside of a hollow film. Pressure on the film blocks the light.
As quoted from the website.
…These go far beyond the “poking” actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based interactive interfaces. It is a rich area for research, and we are extremely excited by its potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. It’s also just so much fun!
It looks like they took the video on the NYU site down because it was too popular. Until the official mirror gets set up you can see the project here.
We pulled a video from the archives. This shows people using Dialog at the Walker’s opening weekend celebration. Near the end of the video two visitors sum up their experience better than I ever could, so I just transcribed it here.
Adult: It’s like picking up ants.
Boy: Yeah!
Girl: But they won’t get on your hands.
In our constant effort to bring the best and bravest blog experience to our loyal readers, I’ve just finished upgrading the Walker blogs to WP 2.0.1. Those WordPress kids have been keeping busy! As always, let us know (leave a comment) if there’s anything that looks funky.
Our current installation of the projected signage on Hennepin Avenue has been up and running since the opening but again we didn’t have any sort of complete documentation for it online. Brian Dehler and Eleanor Savage of the Walker’s Events & Media Production department had put this video together that shows the projected signage in different circumstances. In twilight when the letters are ghostly but mostly legible, the small letters seen on the interior, and at night when the Walker’s lights are off and the projection displays most vividly.
Small Quicktime:Hennepin Signage(6MB)
Large Quicktime:Hennepin Signage(~30MB)