hci

The Human Odyssey - going live at the Academy of Sciences

The Human Odyssey gallery is going live on February 6th, including a series of interactive exhibits and upgraded content better conveying the narrative of human evolution and our migration out of Africa. The biggest exhibit is the Human Odyssey Migration map: a pair of 32" touch screens running an interactive app I've developed in pure HTML5 / CSS3 (with canvas and svg drawing the game in realtime) that allows the user to trace our species's historic and prehistoric milestones, climate events, and interaction with neanderthals through time, and an 85" plasma display playing a prerendered walk through our journey out of the trees 200,000 years ago and through the next 20 years of future influence over our environment.

Additionally, some friends have made other, interesting interactives employing electroluminescent panels, holographic "Pepper's Ghost" effects, proximity sensors, sonar, articulated bones, and more.

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Miniature Earthquakes and Confusing Robots

With any luck and some very messy hacks, on October 18th Tosh and I will be showing off a mini shake-table, some competitive robotics, and giving you a chance to injure your closest friends at Nightlife at the California Academy of Sciences.

Have a drink, fight a robot, and check out the mixed-media performance by multimedia artist J-Walt Adamczyk.

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EARTHQUAKE - New exhibit live at the California Academy of Sciences, powered by my electronics / code

From the Academy: "Our new Earthquake exhibit and planetarium show open this Saturday! Here's a sneak peek from SFGate.com (edit: you can see my calculator in the last picture.) What are you most excited to see? The return of an earthquake simulator? Live baby ostriches? The planetarium show?"

I'll upload pictures and code to the usual place if/when/where it's allowed. Obj-c, Perl, Python, Assembly, Max/MSP, rear projections, old-school Happ arcade-controls, and more.

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Meet my robots at Stanford VAIL during National Robotics Week

I'll be presenting some of my robot friends at the amazing Robot Block Party hosted at the Volkswagon Automotive Innovation Lab at Stanford.

There’ll be wonderful robots on display ranging from Mars Rovers from The Tech Museum, to middle school robot projects. Cutting edge robotics companies represented at the Block Party include industry leaders like Adept, Bosch, Willow Garage and researchers from SRI International and the Center for Automotive Research. Smaller startups are also on display, like MLB drones, the Robot App Store and Beatbots, who created the lovable dancing robot toy ‘Keepon’.

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Microsoft Research Nightlife - Kinect WWT

I'll be presenting my Microsoft Kinect powered interface to World Wide Telescope at Nightlife on September 29th at the California Academy of Sciences. The theme of the night is Microsoft Research and uses of its products at the Academy. There will be live tours of the Earth, satellite and rover data, DJ's, booze, and you can fly through the known Universe using Minority Report style gestures, throw a planet, and possibly control an animatronic mimic-bot.

Warning: commanding the Universe after a few cocktails can induce being awesome. And vomitting. Win a date with me if you can find the easter-egg in our solar system.

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New HCI Mailing List and Discussion Group

I've started a new HCI mailing list, at http://groups.google.com/group/hcie . Please join to discuss topics spanning data manipulation. Immersive media, stereoscopy, crowd immersion and multiple-user input, cybernetics, speech-command, VR, passive input, emotional computing, data visualization, rapid prototyping and AI.

The list will be moderated, but don't be discouraged -- posts about anything non-spammy, either real prototypes you've developed, or research subjects you're developing, or things you've read about, will get through. Technical skill should be pretty wide on the list, despite its engineering slant.

We look forward to collaborating with you.

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HCI / CHI site added

I'll be adding information, links, and development with human-computer interaction on a new page and blog, but with a slight twist from the usual blather: a more futurist standpoint, slanted toward the engineering side of data manipulation. Immersive media, stereoscopy, speech-command, crowd immersion and multiple-user input, cybernetics, rapid prototyping, VR, data visualization, etc, are all fair game. I'll likely include code and frameworks of projects I'm involved with offline.