ZeroTouch is an optical multi-touch technique using infrared sensors. It can be mounted over a desktop, computer screen, or hang in the air.
With the ability to detect 20+ fingers and track objects in free space, this opens up a whole new world of interaction possibilities!
Contributed by Collin Whitehead
Apple recently released an iAd gallery to the App store where you can get some examples of the latest and greatest iAds to interact with & show creatives.
And if you’re on Android, AdMob has an app for you too.
A great tool for viewing design comps on your iPhone—take the mystery out of mobile design and view it real-time.
via konigi
Innovative furniture design that adds a new kind of flexibility and touch capability to the workspace, created by the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany.
Via Laughing Squid
On July 24, 2010, YouTube invited people from all over the world to capture glimpses of their lives on camera and upload them to YouTube. The resulting Life in a Day project, directed by Kevin MacDonald and produced by Ridley Scott, weaves together about 1,000 snapshots of people’s lives — out of over 80,000 total submissions — to create a completely user-generated and powerful documentary of daily life.
Tonight the 90-min feature film premieres at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and streams live on YouTube simultaneously (8 p.m. EST). Google Creative Labs also developed a massive touch screen installation featuring all of the videos, including the thousands not shown in the film, that’s currently on display at Sundance in Park City, Utah.
Via YouTube
Projeqt aims to enable people to share their stories by providing a simple way to create a website viewable on any device. TBWA created the publishing tool and used it to build their own website.
IDEO’s vision of the Future of the Book.
via Laughing Squid
TAT has produced another video demonstrating the potential future of screen technology has surfaced. This one does a good job showing how any surface can be turned into a touchscreen.
At its recent conference, Google threw its hat into the ring in the Internet-enabled TV space with Google TV:
Google TV is a new experience made for television that combines the TV you know and love with the freedom and power of the Internet. Watch an overview video below, sign up for updates, and learn more about how to develop for Google TV.
(Via Google)
Here’s a demo:
The new product will be getting a boost from hardware innovator (and GSP client) Logitech. Ashish Arora, Vice President of the Digital Home Group, explains:
To help bring Google TV to life, Logitech will offer the first retail companion box to work with the platform, which will deliver Google TV to the 60 million HDTVs already in U.S. living rooms today. The Logitech companion box will leverage our Harmony remote technology to give you seamless control over how you interact with your content. In addition, the Logitech companion box will include a controller that’s specifically designed to optimize the Google TV experience – combining a compact keyboard, remote control and touchpad.
Google TV = seamless discovery of content.
Logitech + Google TV = seamless control over how you experience the discovery of content.(Via Logitech Blog)
[Note: Get the latest updates on the Logitech-Google partnership here.
All of these developments suggest that the future of television will be a lot more personalized and engaging, empowering users to control both the pace of programming (start/stop/replay) and the depth of content (pausing a show to play an associated game or read a Wikipedia page about a character).
Recently Acquired by Google, Anand Agarawala presents BumpTop, a user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3-D extreme, transforming file navigation into a freewheeling playground of crumpled documents and clipping-covered “walls.”
Since its introduction on TED Talks, BumpTop has evolved and now features a unique touch interface.
It will be interesting to see how Google integrates this technology into their offerings (part of Android OS? a competitor for the iPad?).