Augmented Reality based on FlarToolkit

A wonderful experiment in augmented reality.

FLARToolkit makes this possible. It will detect the marker from an input image and calculate the camera position in the three dimension space. Really fun!

Light Bulb

Saw this beautiful artwork on todayandtomorrow.net. Back in June 2007 I wrote a post on wireless power conduction. The levitation of the lightbulb is new and magical.

Apologies to Adobe

I have ranted and raved on this blog about Adobe CS3. Then recently I my computer acted like it wanted to die on me. Turns out my hard drive was fried and had been for a while. After installing a new hard drive my laptop feels like new. All issues with CS3 have since disappeared. I am little ashamed of my emotional outbursts. My deepest apologies to Adobe, CS3 is a fine product!

Trash Recycling

German's are holier than thou when it comes to separating trash for recycling. Their trash bins exhibit labels such as "Glass", "Paper", "Bio", "Packaging" (metal, plastic packaging) and "Restmüll" (remaining trash that can't be recycled). While this is descriptive for the content, it doesn't conjure up a larger conceptual model. Adaptive Path's Information Architect Leah Buley's trip to the California Academy of Sciences prompted the essay of the company's current newletter issue.
In the article she showed a picture of trash bins at the academy and came to the conclusion that labels matter after all! I couldn't agree more. The image in Leah's essay inspired me to do a little Google Image research on trash recycling.

trash bins at the California Academy: Image by Leah Buley

Spanish trash bins

German trash bins

Maltese trash bins

Palmer/Obama

Life is truly immitating art. Would Senator Obama been able to win the democratic nomination without TV's "24"? It seems like a ridiculous question and yet, other blogs have been wondering about the same thing ("markmeynell", TV Blog "Remote Access").

In this article Dennis Haysbert says his role paved the way Barack Obama.

Photoshop CS 3 - worst Photoshop version ever!

Ok, ok, ok... I bitched about it before...

Adobe CS Blues
Abobe CS3, OS X Installation Problems
Adobe Flash CS3 Unstable Crapware

... but I can't get over it because as a designer Photoshop effects my life every single day. I am miserable, angry and frustrated. If you actually use many layers and organize them folders - be warned! Even though my work is screen based with file sizes around 20 MB PS crashes and hangs and f***s up daily. You WILL restart your computer often. You WILL lose work and waste time.

I used to run PS on a Mac Quadra 605 with 20 MG of ram and "Ram Doubler" installed. I expected to sit and watch progress bars. Get used to it again.



I should have never updated to CS 3. This suite is a sham. It's a memory hog (MBP, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of ram).



If you would like to avoid a lot of this....



... and haven't bought CS 3 - save your nerves and don't buy it! It's not worth the money.

That was fast!

Wasn't it not only a few months back that we first heard of multi touch technology, the iPhone and Jeff Han? I recently gave a lecture on touch technology at the University of Salzburg, Austria. I wanted to start my talk by going back to the roots. So I (image-)googled the word "touch" expecting to find images of mothers with babies or perhaps pornography. Instead my search returned pictures of devices equipped with touch technology - over 58,000,000.00 of them!! Has the word "touch" become synonomous with "touch technology"?

I am surprised how fast it trickled into the public conciousness, especially since touch technology only uses a small fraction of our actual sense of touch. The abilities to sense temperature, shape, degrees of softness, texture, pain or the position of your muscles and joints are not playing any part in touch technology so far. A slick surface provides little haptic feedback which for example makes typing difficult.

At this year's Cebit convention, T-Mobile had an multi-touch installation, that was part Minority Report, part Jeff Han Screen and part vertical MS Surface "wall". In this video people seem so bored with the content itself. In fact they are not dealing with the data at all. How long will it take for the novelty of scaling and turning objects to wear off? What kind of interesting public application could this offer?

Service Efficienista

I've been buying my coffee at Starbucks for 15 years. I think that outs me as a fan of the company. Yesterday I strolled into Starbucks at Astor Place and was greeted by a member of the staff wearing a "Janet Jackson Mic". He asked for my order. I was bothered by the experience, because instead of looking at the face of the person greeting me, I stared at his microphone and wondered who he was talking to when he dispatched my caffein craving. I couldn't see his collegue at the receiving end. Instead of talking to me, his attention was with somebody "out there". Headphones indicate privacy, because we usually listen to something like music or a phone conversation.

The experience became technical and distancing, rather then personal. Since I associate Starbucks with hours of hanging out over a cup of coffee (and maybe a refill..). I wonder if other customers felt rushed as well. And what happens if you don't know which coffee drink you're in the mood for today?

A few years ago I helped creating the technical service scenario at the Prada Epicenter Store on Prince and Broadway in New York. My Job was building the user interface for the store's "staff device", a hand held computer that could do everything from reading RFID tags to pulling up stock information and customer history. In my opinion it was a gigantic flop, because nobody researched the experience of what it would actually feel like to use the device in a customer/sales rep relationship. I walked into the store many times over the years and talked to the people working there about the staff device. I watched them and not once did I see an employee using one.

We have to be very careful when adding technology to a sales scenario. The experience can be off-putting - at least to the customer.

No Flash Player for iPhone Anytime Soon!

(Sound of expelled breath...)

At the shareholder meeting two days ago Steve Jobs spelled it out: no Flashplayer for the iPhone! The reasons? Flash Lite, Adobe's Flash Player for the mobile platform is too weak, the desktop version too slow on the iPhone. The iPhone, in other words, needs a new Flash Player!

(not holding my breath here...)

Since Safari on the iPhone is the real thing, a Flash Lite version of the player wouldn't help anybody. Most Flash sites for the internet simply can't be transported to the lite player. More then ever it is best practices to have an html version of your Flash sites to avoid user frustration.

User Driven Design is NOT User Centered Design!

Today I participated in a study conducted by the University of Basel – http://phpserver.psycho.unibas.ch/websiteexpectation

It asked to wireframe a typical online shop, online newspaper and company web site by dragging and dropping UI elements like "main navigation" , "company logo", "contact link" onto a screen. What exactly does this study hope to accomplish?



If you want to improve usability on websites you need to look at each specific case. There is no generic online-shop which works for *all* situations, products and users. Leave the improvement of usability to designers who will apply user research results and combine them with their own skills and creativity. This kind of study does not lead to more usable web sites. Just to innovation-free same ol'-same ol'.

I believe in a designer's work experience, the knowledge of what works and what doesn't. I believe in creativity, breakthroughs and revolution. I believe in the intricate knowledge of human behavior and desire. Stop praying at the altar of the-user-knows-best!

Two days ago the Mac Book Air came out. If it will turn out to be a visionary product remains to be seen, but the omission of an optical drive, driven by the goal to create a truly wireless machine, is bold. It wouldn't have happened if you had ask typical laptop users if they wanted that.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
Steve Jobs May 25, 1998

Applelujah!

Wal-Mart Sells Universal MP3s without DRM Restrictions. No Mac Support!

Wether Universal is truly interested in selling DRM free music online remains to be seen. Starting yesterday, they made a selection of albums and song available at walmart.com until January 31st. Each song can be purchased for 94 cents. Other vendors, including Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Google Inc., Best Buy Co., RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody,..., were chosen for this test-run. Interestingly Apple‘s Musicstore was excluded, despite the fact that it is the largest platform for music downloads. Although MP3s are completely compatible with any music playing device – including the iPod and iPhone platforms, Mac Users are not welcome on Walmart‘s site. Instead they presented with this message:

We‘re sorry, your operating system is incompatible. .....visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP.

Incompatible with DRM free music downloads?? Somebody willing to upgrade their system to download some crappy MP3s?

Then I asked a collegue with Parallels and WIN XP installed to load the site, I was curious to see the interface Walmart came up with:

Why is all type on the page so tiny?



Songs can be previewed, but there is no „player“ functionality. You have to listen to a song to the bitter end, even when you don‘t like it. Sad...

Typing on the iPhone, Practise Makes Perfect?

The first order of the day after my arrival in New York was to visit a store that sold the iPhone, in my case the Union Square location of AT&T. The store was almost empty and got access to an iPhone immediately. After studying the device exstensively online, I felt pretty comfortable using it right away, until I tried to enter a URL in Safari‘s address bar. Using the virtual keyboard is incredibly tough!! I mistyped constantly and everything. Forget about a two thumb approach. Thumbs are less of a pointing device, they hit the keyboard on an angle and force you to compensate for it, which is a hard thing to do. A few days later I met my friend Dave Carroll, associate professor at Parsons School of Design's graduate degree program Design and Technology. Dave is a notorious early adopter and has some great iPhone tips to share on his blog mercurious.com. He convinced me to trust the iPhone spell correction feature. So I tried to plow through writing text without regard to spelling. After a little while I was able to produced text fairly fluently.



However, the spell correction does not come into place when typing URLs. Get used to bookmarking URLs as fast as possible! I was disappointed that the iPhone doesn‘t have any other dictionary but the english one. Don‘t look for international keyboard layouts. They are not implemented with this first version. This iPhone is strictly for the english speaking market, which is weird because the States are so diverse as far as spoken languages go. Dave showed me javascript based keyboard layouts online, but their small button sizes are not suited for the iPhones finger-pointer approach.

Wholefoods Cuts the Dispatcher Person

Observe a new implemetation of interaction design: Already famous for their well thought out dispatch system that allows Wholefoods to get 100 customers through the registers in about 5 Minutes, they automated (improved?) the process. The store got rid of the dispatcher person in favor of a computerized service. Customers line up in up to 8 colorcoded ailes. A monitor overhead displays corresponding color bars that sequentially display as well as „call out“ the next available cash register. The system senses faster then a person could when a register has become available again.



Apparently the usefulness of the system is up for debate. The next day the dispatcher guy was back to work in „tandem“ with the system. In my personal opinion the system is clear enough, speeds up the waiting in line and relieves a person from a tedious dispatch job.

Adobe CS 3 Blues

I am soooo frustrated with Adobe CS3. I've complained about it before. This is another warning! Photoshop sucks up more resources than my entire system. I am working on a MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of memory and I am here to tell you: It's not enough! You will experience lags of 3-6 minutes(!) while Photoshop collects data from the hard drive instead of memory. It will feel like PS died on you. (My work is all screenbased, my files are tiny). You will endure frustrating crashes, especially when using "Save for Web and Devices". The whole application often feels like a beached whale. I hoped for speedy and elegant and bought CS3 the day it came out, because I so wanted my tools to be optimized for the Intel chipset. Well, keep hoping!



Flash is not much better. Adobe opted to create an annoying fade-in-all-windows-when-switching-between-apps effect that accomplishes first and foremost a laggy response. Don't ever try to use the debugger before saving your work FIRST, you will experience crashes!