Interactive installation talk at Auckland Museum

Angela Main, an interactive installation artist, will discuss her new work for Auckland Museum, "Metazoa", on Wed, February 20th, at 7pm. According to the release, the work explores the evolutionary tree of life, and Main will "position this in relation to her experience of electronic art museums in Europe and recent contemporary art events." For Metazoa, she collaborated with HITlabNZ, the promising but problematic augmented reality (AR) technology we've blogged on in the past (Pushing and Pulling the Interface). This specific installation looks interesting however, and I'll be there on the night to give a full review for Window:Scene. Entry is $10, or $5 for members.

Building a better laptop

On Tuesday, the One Laptop per Child project started production at a factory in China, mass-producing an initial run of 250,000 models that will go out to children in nations like Nigeria, Thailand and Peru, where they've already been trialled. The bright green casing looks like a rugged alien. The stylized interface is friendly and playful. It's designed for the ground-up for kids. But the team behind it are dead serious.

The OLPC project harnesses and coordinates a large network of volunteer programmers, who refine aspects like security applications which protect against large-scale attacks, compiler optimisation to speed up code-building, remote display for projectors and memory usage minimising.


Because a hard-drive is one of the top items to break on traditional laptops, the XO model features a tiny flash-drive instead. For programmers, this means a return to 80's era coding - building highly functional software in as few lines of script as possible, ditching huge 'code libraries' with big filesize footprints for tiny utilities and more custom work.

In Abuja, Nigeria, the nearest powerpoint could be a long walk away. So it makes sense that the OLPC are pedantic about electricity usage. "For us, every joule matters, and a simplistic 'oh, we mostly have most of a chip turned off, maybe' isn't good enough." The default display mode uses 1 watt of power - 1/7th of the average laptop display. Run out of power? Charge it up again with a hand crank on the side.


In the last few months, the team have put the XO through it's paces: developing hour-long 'smoke tests', tracking down obscure bugs in the kernel, localising keyboards for West Africa and Nepal, optimising rendering, and refining to stabilised builds. The prototype hardware has been tested to destruction in the factory, as well as the acid test - children on playgrounds in Peru, jungle field trips in Thailand, and the dust of Maharashtra, India.

Images from OLPC Project, available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

Sound as art - art as sound

Toshio Iwai stands on the stage holding a translucent digital panel rimmed in steel. Dressed all in white, with a wireless headset, he appears to have stepped from a pure, utopian future. Quickly he generates a rhythm of electronic pulses, then adds a simple melody over the top. He moves sound sources around on a grid, phasing tones in and out, building them to a resonant crescendo. As any electronic musician will tell you, his performance isn't technically difficult. Software sequencers - where the computer triggers a note or sample if a grid node is turned on - have been around for years. The difference lies in the execution and aesthetics. Instead of a performer hunched over a mysterious laptop, Iwai's Tenori On instrument moves with the player, glowing and pulsating, communicating the sound visually.



We enjoy connecting the visual and the aural: the whip crack of a snare as a drummer's stick comes in contact, the tensed face of a singer reaching for a high note. So it's fitting that recent projects seek to bring that connection to the sometimes cold black box of electronic sound. Instruments like Iwai's, visual programming software like Max or Pure Data, and Bjork's recent use of the 'reactable' instrument in her live shows try to address this lack.


A 'tangible music interface', the reactable is essentially a tabletop which senses specially tagged blocks put on top of it and overlays graphical data on them. The typically invisible tempo which lies behind a song becomes a very visible digital ripple, triggering sounds as it touches blocks. Difficult concepts like signal paths are made clear - we can see the original signal emanate out, then become squelched and agitated as it passes through a filter block.

Of course, the type of visual feedback can also take a lo-fi bent. At the last experimental sound night known as Vitamin S, dancer Christian Larsen and a fellow dancer reacting to a looped, overdriven guitar performance.

Pushing (and pulling) the interface

A bespectacled, slightly overweight man stands in front of a massive flat screen. With a few ‘pull apart’ motions of his fingertips, he zooms from the continental US into downtown Boston, moving from satellite imagery to a detailed roadmap in a few seconds. He flicks into a photo application, flicking thumbnails around and drawing a selection with his index finger before copying and pasting it. With a throwing motion, he sends a couple shots over to a colleague working on another area of the board. It’s Minority Report, come to life (video).

The unlikely hero is Jefferson Han, a previously unknown researcher at Cornell/NYU before making a presentation on his multi-touch interface at a tech conference last year. Since then, he’s been featured in Wired, sold units to the CIA, and helped Apple implement some touch behaviours into the iPhone.

And while the CIA might find spying faster with Hans interface, many people have responded that it looks fun. Alternate interfaces have abounded in the last few years.

Locally HitLab (Human Interface Technology) New Zealand have been hard at work pushing alternate reality interfaces. Mixing the real world with the virtual, they're an attempt to provide a natural way to work with objects, while overlaying CG elements or feedback. In principle this is fantastic - urban developers move and rotate virtual skyscrapers the same way they'd normally use wooden or plastic blocks - only the work environment now allows them to scale, create roads, and view the whole scheme in the context of a geomapped overlay. In practice the interface is a little glitchy and slow - 3d models stutter around the stage or the interface hesitates when manipulating objects (is that a move or a scale?).

Just yesterday New Zealander Julian Oliver posted about an experimental AR interface he and Simone Jones had created at the Interactivos conference at Media Lab Madrid. "The idea was simple, augment a solid cube with 6 little rooms such that the cube becomes a tangible interface for navigating through an architecture: a mind-game - 'How are the rooms connected?'" The result is a tiny Escheresque cube that seems filled with possibilities. One idea to extend the concept is to develop a mini-game/interactive where the user would guide a tiny avatar through a world by flipping a series of cubes to expose exit points.