Walker Blogs

New Media Initiatives

Microsoft Surface

Posted May 30, 2007 at 8:30 am — Filed under:

It is not often I find exciting Microsoft products on Slashdot, but there are exceptions to the rule. /. linked up a Popular Mechanics article on Microsoft Surface. Surface is a fancy multitouch table that Microsoft has been working on in semi-secrecy for a while. In addition to being multitouch, it also features proximity detection so it can talk to your phone (bluetooth) and camera (wifi) and other devices when you put them on the table.

Gattis took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. Instantly, digital pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. As Gattis touched and dragged each picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Using two fingers, he pulled the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. Then, Gattis put a cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it — just like that, the pictures uploaded to the phone. It was like a magic trick. He was dragging and dropping virtual content to physical objects. I’m not often surprised by new technology, but I can honestly say I’d never seen anything like it.

It looks and feels a lot like CityWall and some of Jeff Han’s work, but it does not appear that Han has worked with Microsoft. One of the notable differences between Han’s tables (which are pricey) and Surface is price. Surface is supposedly going to be on sale this year for $5,000 to $10,000. The article mentions commercial applications, but I would think that education and museums would also have a huge interest. While I wouldn’t be able to afford one for my home, $10,000 is a very accessible price point for a museum.

Whiz-bang aside, the table also reminds me a bit of Pac Man. I also wonder if it can run linux. I’m actually sure that when this comes out, there will be a linux distro that includes a Pac Man knock-off.

EDIT: Create Digital Music has some commentary, as does Chris O’Shea.

39% of bloggers write damaging things

Posted May 25, 2007 at 12:59 pm — Filed under:

Ars Technica reported today on some startling statistics regarding blogging from the workplace:

Nearly four in 10 bloggers (39 percent) with a job have written something sensitive or damaging about their workplaces, employers, or coworkers, according to UK human resources firm Croner. The company commissioned a survey that asked 2,000 people whether or not they have a blog, and if so, how many of them have posted sensitive information about work. And despite the seemingly constant stream of warnings saying otherwise, some employees still seem to think that no one will discover their blog transgressions–which could eventually get them fired.

The numbers seem a little higher than I would expect, but perhaps I am not too familiar with the feeling of working for a monolithic corporation. There are two things I take away from this. First, we have a different situation here within the Walker and within the larger museum web. We already have blog guidelines for our own blogs. Many of our employees that are bloggers on their own are also bloggers here and are familiar with our guidelines, which are not onerous. Secondly, unlike a corporation which may depend on secrecy to keep it’s advantage, we in museums and non-profits aren’t so worried about that. We like to share and let people know what we’re doing.

And as an aside, the Powerhouse Museum recently adopted a new blogging policy that draws upon some elements from ours. Share the love.

CityWall: collaborative social exploration space

Posted May 24, 2007 at 10:41 am — Filed under:

City Wall

Continuing my research into multitouch environments, I came across a project I had not seen before. It is called CityWall, and it is located in Helsinki, Finland:

The content displayed on the CityWall is periodically organized into themes or events that are currently taking place in the city such as festivals, carnivals or sports events. The CityWall is designed to support the navigation of media, specifically annotated photos and videos which are continuously gathered in realtime from public sources such as Flickr and YouTube. To contribute content to the CityWall please send pictures and videos via MMS or email to post@citywall.org. Alternatively, tag your media on YouTube or Flickr with ‘Helsinki’ and we will pick up your media and display it here on the CityWall.

It looks like a combination of some of the social networking work the Brooklyn Museum is doing and a beautiful multitouch environment. The video notes that the screen works both during the day and the night. I am a little foggy on how that works with a FTIR screen, but if UIx has worked around the daylight problem, it would be extremely useful. I will just have to go to Helsinki to find out.

Touch: Near Field Communications Blog

Posted May 23, 2007 at 2:57 pm — Filed under:

A Graphic Language for RFIDRFID Form Factors

I found an interesting blog today: Touch. According to the about:

Touch is a research project looking at the intersections between the digital and the physical. Its aim is to explore and develop new uses for RFID, NFC and mobile technology in areas such as retail, public services, social and personal communication.

NFC, or Near Field Communication, in a nutshell is the technology that will some day let us pay for a Coke or pump a parking meeter with our mobile phone. Or, perhaps, wave our phone at a piece of art and hear the Art On Call stop and an image on our phone’s screen. If you’re wondering why a blog about wireless communication is called touch, it is because NFC generally requires very close proximity, often requiring the access card or phone to touch the receiver.

Dig back through the archives, there are some great posts, such as RFID Form Factors and A Graphic Language for RFID. This one is definitely going in my RSS reader.

Photos borrowed from Touch

WebWalker 1.6

Posted May 18, 2007 at 10:02 am — Filed under:

CrazyEgg heatmap Apple Remote QC Patch Edward Hopper MFA Boston

  • Stats galore: Our account of google analytics has finally been updated to the new version and it rocks! It seems very intuitive and a lot more clear than the old adapted from urchin version.

    And another new stats tool we’re liking a lot is crazyegg. The heatmap tool is especially impressive, since it makes it very easy to visualize what visitors are clicking on.

  • Quartz Composer tidbits: Steve Morkis over at fdiv has been doing some very interesting work writing custom patches, so far providing an xcode template, custom inspector how-to, and an apple remote patch, amongst others. I’m interested in seeing a cli patch that would send commands to the terminal and run external scripts. Very exciting, though the QC community is a little unsure about what this means in the face of Leopard.

    I also found out about another interesting app called Millicent that seems like a mash-up of Quartz composer and photoshop, geared towards creating broadcast graphics on a budget. The app is still in beta, feature incomplete and a bit buggy, but it is interesting to see the diversity of work that QC is being used for.

  • Exhibition Website: The MFA Boston has an Edward Hopper show going on now and the website is rather well done, if a bit slim on exhibition info. The design is very clean and lets the iconic work of Hopper speak for itself. Allowing visitors to download images as wallpaper is also pretty nifty. Coudal noted: The ‘sketchbook’ feature is more than a bit clumsy but it’s well worth fumbling around to get at the goods. Why are big museums so consistently stupid about presenting things online? The sketchbook doesn’t seem too bad to me, and I like that I can zoom in and move around. It is a bit slow and small, but the idea is a good one. It seems google maps has set the new standard for image zooming/panning, and that is a tall technical tree to climb.

A new place for net art: replacing ads

Posted May 15, 2007 at 11:48 am — Filed under:

Fox News with AddArt

The New York Times reported yesterday on a nifty net art project called AddArt. The concept is simple: replace annoying online ads with works of art. Here’s a sample of the article:

Steve Lambert, a conceptual artist, plans to add his own twist to one type of software that blots out commercial messages. His add-on will replace the display ads — which are usually papered over with blank windows — with curator-picked artwork from contemporary artists.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Lambert demonstrated a test version of AddArt at the Chelsea studios of Eyebeam, a nonprofit arts and technology center where he has a fellowship. Mr. Lambert opened the Fox News Web site on his computer, and both the banner ad at the top of the page and a rectangular ad on the bottom were replaced with a bald eagle illustration. (He is using stock art rather than original work at this point, which can be downloaded from www.addart.eyebeam.org.)

Mr. Lambert, 30, said he and Evan Harper, an artist, are not starting from scratch, but rather were modifying the program Adblock Plus. “ Why reinvent the wheel when you can insert a gear and make it run backwards?” said Mr. Lambert.

There are a couple things that strike me about this project. Obviously, this isn’t an optimal platform for showing “work”, but it does create an amazing opportunity for satire in places where an opportunity might not otherwise exist. So it isn’t going to compete with the traditional gallery, but like most net art, that isn’t the goal. I think the real power of this is the ability to change the way ads show up on particular sites. The stars and stripes demo is a good example of this, turning the Fox News home page into a Colbert-esqe satire. It reminds me a bit of the Evil Google Logo greasemonkey script.

The biggest hurdle with this type of project is not getting artists to create work for it, because a handful of people can do a lot. The tough part is building an audience to actually use and enjoy it. While viewing more art on the web is a great idea, there might need to be more to it than just a few replaced banner ads here and there. What incentive do users have to use it? For practical purposes, this should really become an option within AdBlock Plus, since that software has an established userbase that is already hostile to ads and may be receptive to something else.

I’m also a skeptical because in some ways the Aat is just as distracting, if not more, than the advertising it is replacing. It is just a different take on what spyware is already doing… replacing ads with those of competitors. This software is just a bit more up front, and the competitors have more of an altruistic intent.

Finally, it is just a little laugh worthy that the NYT reported on a piece of software that could potentially deprive them of ad revenue. That is the name of the game on the web, though, and maybe someone in the NYT gets it.

Add Art

Also, check out The Anti-Advertising Agency. They’ve done some pretty interesting projects, AddArt is just one getting press treatment right now.

WebWalker 1.5

Posted May 10, 2007 at 8:57 am — Filed under:

Web Walkr 1.5Exhibit FilesDecklink IntensityPhotoshop Scripting

WebWalker’s had a bum leg for a month, but we’re on the mend and here’s the proof.

  • Web 2.0 Overboard: If you haven’t had enough of the wired/tired/expired Web 2.0 craze, here’s two gems that will knock you out (for better or worse). Check out the Web 2.0 Logo Creatr for all your missing-e and reflection needs. And if that logo is just a little too flickr-y for you, check out this grid of Web 2.0′d logos from Jean Claude Attituder. (via Fallon Planning Blog)
  • Seb Chan at Fresh + New beat us to the punch discussing ExhibitFiles, a new social networking site for museum pros. Jim Spadaccini explains the concept:

    As a community, we sometimes redesign the wheel as there is no central place for us to find out about the best (and the worst?) practices in exhibit development. This issue is becoming more urgent as many of the exhibit designers who were active in the 1970s and 1980s are beginning to retire. Over the years, important exhibition development information is lost or stored within a museum where it can’t be easily shared with the larger community.

    ExhibitFiles is more targeted at science and history museums, but there is still a large potential for use by certain types of professionals within art institutions as well.

  • One of my favorite blogs, Create Digital Motion, has a great review of the Blackmagic Intensity, which lets you connect one computer’s DVI video output to another machine as a HDMI input. I don’t see any uses for NMI right now, but it is something that VJs are certainly interested in, because mixing HD can be a very expensive proposition. This thing is only , and shows up as a quicktime compatible source.
  • I’ve recently been playing with scripting Adobe Photoshop, which isn’t as daunting as it sounds. I had some experience with scripting Adobe Illustrator several years ago, but at the time Photoshop didn’t have the fancy javascript abilities that Illustrator did. Overall the scriptability is very powerful; there are few things you can’t manipulate programmatically, and with scripts you have far more control than actions. Two useful resources for me so far have been PS-Scripts.com, a great community for photoshop scripting, and the PS-scripts project, which provides an extended library of utilities.

    If you’ve got photoshop CS2, the Scripting folder in your install has all kinds of goodies to learn from (the pdfs in your install are not copy protected like the web versions). And Adobe’s ExtendScript Toolkit app is actually useful for writing and debugging the scripts. I hope to post more on scripting Photoshop (and After Effects?) in the future.