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.
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.
[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?).
Watch the cat play an electronic piano and play with a squiggly worm-like object on the iPad.
You certainly wouldn’t see a cat be able to make the connection between moving a computer mouse and a related action on screen, but when screen and touch are integrated, it’s a world of digital intuitive enough for animals.
A well-rounded presentation from Jeff Blais of Sapient describing best practices when designing for mobile. From IxDA’s Interaction10 titled Designing for Mobile Experiences
With much ado about the state of Flash Player and the mobile web, Adobe has released some compelling videos of what its technologies have to offer here and here.
We mentioned Adobe is collaborating with Wired for a digital version of its magazine:
Android, Palm and Blackberry are working with Adobe to fully support Flash as opposed to Apple which has shut the door.
Here’s an interesting idea – digital board games on the iPad! Yes please
‘The multi-touch display is perfect for moving pieces around a board and because the iPad is a computer it can store thousands of games and add a variety of interactive features. In addition to animated Monopoly playing pieces, for example, you could also use the iPad’s Wi-Fi or 3G to play games with friends and family across the world. There’s even scope to create an iPad board game that works with iPhones.
Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.’
Interactive touchscreen prototype by Hush studios and Uncommon Projects. The experience is intended to allow users to interact with real time HD content in a tactile manner, be customizable for any brand and includes iPhone integration so you can use your phone to control and navigate content.
No strings attached. Misa Digital out of Sydney have developed this Touchscreen guitar that uses touch screen technology and open source software to push the physical limitations of the traditional guitar. Rock on!
Some info from it’s creator:
My design aim was for a minimalistic interface, with configurability at the sound module end, leaving the instrument itself simple and effective.
That being said, the Misa digital guitar software is open source, and powered by the Linux operating system. This means programmers have the flexibility to modify how it works, and even change the interface to provide specific functionality. This is important because collaboration from the users themselves, experimenting and innovating in their own ways, will further improve the instrument.
The Misa digital guitar is a MIDI controller. It must be plugged into a MIDI capable sound module. The sound of this instrument is limited only by what you connect to it.
GML is an open source language for storing graffiti gestural data as text that is then archival and reproducible. Here’s a video overview of GML and its applications:
What’s cooler than touchscreen monitors? Touchscreen projections. Light Touch is a small portable projector that turns any surface into a touch screen.
