Like most people with an interest in Interaction design and its peripheral fields, I’ve been consuming Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge with gusto. One of the featured projects is The Glass Engine, designed by Mark Podlaseck, a researcher at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. A project to provide a meaningful way of sampling and browsing the works of Philip Glass, its a wonderful illustration of how empowering interaction design can be when done right. Each of Philip Glass’s tracks is tagged with some standard metadata (Work title, year released, track length, track title) and then five “mood” attributes as defined by the composer’s producer - Joy, Sorrow, Intensity, Density, and Velocity. By providing 9 simple sliders for each of these attributes, you can browse by all of these properties. As you modify the current slider, each of the other sliders rearranges accordingly, affording you great freedom to explore the large collection of music. This is a design that I’m sure would work extremely well on your iTunes library (if you could be bothered to tag those thousands of songs with mood attributes that is). Anyway, have a play - its the only way you can really appreciate it.

See the the interview with Mark Podlaseck here. View the Glass engine here. I had some problems running in Firefox - you might want to try IE (ugh).

3D on the web has always been a peculiarity. Since the early days of VRML there has been a great desire from content creators to make 3D environments, games and interfaces. The first real mainstream attempt was Shockwave3D, which provided a solid authoring environment, physics, cross-platform, decent speed and engine features, great exporters for Max and Maya - yet this has been left to die for years with almost no improvements to the engine that now seems archaic. There have been many, many alternatives that have come along since (virtools, blitz, wildtangent) each of which have failed to really capture all the requirements an have not really taken off online (although Virtools is certainly very capable for creating executable content).

While having a look at the old Shockwave 3D list, there were a few posts discussing the defection of Tom Higgins to Unity, a company that creates a interactive 3D / game engine product - the engine used to create games such as Gooball. Tom was the Product manager for Director and worked tirelessly to support the community and worked very hard to get the Shockwave 3D engine updated. His departure is significant in that it suggests that the 3D side of Director is effectively abandonded.

Anyway, Adobe’s loss is Unitys gain, and having had a brief look at their product it looks rather nice. The biggest pecularity is that the authoring environment is OSX only. Very odd decision given the game developer base on windows. That said it can be easily published to a windows/OSX executable, web page (again, plugins for windows and OSX) and even a widget (perhaps pointless). It certainly looks like it has a lot going for it - a very modern graphics engine (Pixel Shaders, render-to-texture, blend modes etc etc), the integration of the Ageia PhysX physics engine, very fast code execution (it uses Mono) and more. Its a bit pricy (1500 dollars for the full version, although only 250 for the ‘indie’ version).

Theres a nice bunch of demos online here that show off what it can do - or just download the trial version here.

My first bit of freelance work went live today, a project I worked on at Milo Creative, called “Every Picture Tells a Story” for BBC RaW (reading and writing). Aimed at parents that lack confidence in their reading and writing skills, it encourages them to create a story pictographically by providing graphical elements to drop onto a stage. Each element comes with a suggested description or action, to oil the creative cogs of the user. Its designed to be fun and engaging to play and all text is reinforced by the soothing voice of the narrator.

After playing through the first half of the activity, you enter more free-form writing section allowing you to compose your story and ultimately print out the cover and pages. These can be cut out and glued together to create a charming book to give as a present or mount on your wall with glowing pride. Perhaps you could even sneak into your local library like a provincial Banksy.

Have a look/play here : Every Picture Tells a Story.

I’m fortunate enough to be one of the first beta testers for The Venice Project (TVP) - a new TVIP service developed by Skype founders and others. The official description goes:

We’re working on a project that combines the best things about television with the social power of the internet - a project that gives viewers, advertisers and content owners more choice, control and creativity than ever before.

Apparently we are now cleared to blog (with the exception of content screenshots for now) - I am slightly wary of the fat NDA I clicked, so I won’t delve into too much detail, though if I don’t disappear I’ll add a more in-depth review. So far I’m impressed - and I have to admit to being quite (well if I’m honest….very) cynical about watching TV shows on the computer…. the 3 minute attention span target of Youtubeis about right for me and any time I see the Youtube show length indicator hit 30 minutes, something similar to disgust washes through me. I am an advocate of the lean-forward vs lean-back school of thought when it comes to device use and can rarely sit watching a device with as many buttons as a keyboard without needing to press something or find a suitable tangent to explore.

So… why is this any different? (more…)

Once again, Microsoft has launched a bizarre and ill-thought-out attempt to topple Adobe Flash from its dominative position of the browser space. Its answer is the catchily titled WPF/E (from the codename of Avalon). Nice huh? Its a simple premise - a plug-in that uses its own proprietary file format (this time its called XAML) that can be controlled by your browser using Javascript.

As an entity its a weirdly bastardised version of the full WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) that is much more interesting. The big brother can do genuinely intriguing things such as full support for 3D objects. As the presentation layer for .NET 3, its being geared up to provide interesting, quick-to-develop interfaces for desktop applications, much like Adobe’s Apollo. The big brother will run in a web browser too, but only if you are running IE 7 on Windows Vista or Windows XP.

The little brother will provide “a subset of WPF features, such as hardware accelerated video, vector graphics, and animations”. Sound like anything? What I don’t understand is the strategy that they are employing here to encourage uptake of this product. Looking at the landscape of online application development, you currently have two real options. HTML or Flash. Assuming that WPF/E is attempting to take on Flash in the rich-media internet application space, the only way it is going to win ground is by providing something better than what is already there. If you are going to get the many thousands of designers, developers and customers to adopt an entirely new platform there has to be a compelling reason. Yet there appears to be absolutely no advantage to switching, certainly none that MS have publicised. MS has also made number of mistakes with its launch that are just utterly confusing. Not only does it appear to offer nothing new, but there are very few demos online of what it CAN do. Theres no OSX versions of any of the Microsoft Expression design packages. There seems to have been almost no effort to court the “big names” of the new media industry, unlike Adobe/Macromedia’s efforts of past years.

Bizarre. That said, maybe I am missing something? Theres some MS sanctioned examples here, and a community site with examples here (best to only go there if you have IE7, mind).

Its been in Beta for a few months now, but with the final release of XNA Game Studio Express, you can now launch your games on a retail 360, provided you pay £50 a year to join the creators club. The software allows you to target both Windows PCs and the 360 with the same code, using a combination of the .NET framework and the new XNA framework, and you have to be willing to write in C#. For now there are a number of limitations - while you can share a windows executable with anyone you care to, the only way you can share your 360 version is to release the entire source code for your game. Peter Moore’s soundbite “Youtube for games” would only really apply if sharing a video on youtube involved sending Youtube all of the people, props, background music, lights and script for your little movie. On top of that, only people paying the £50 subscription can actually boot your game up. That said it has the potential to grow into exactly what he suggested.

Personally, I think this is a particularly interesting move by Microsoft. Xbox live arcade has had some success, but is let down by a lack of quality content. There is a huge community of talented people out there that love games and are drawn to creating games on consoles (look at the efforts some go to in order to get homebrew running on various devices). By dramatically lowering the barrier to entry and (siginificantly) making it easy for those with more of a visual eye to get their content into their own creations (the XNA content pipeline) they’ve done well to sow the seeds for the sprouting of the “next big thing” on their platform. Combine that with the huge appeal to universities currently running games development courses and the fact that a lot of people in a couple of years will leave their courses utterly familiar with the 360, it will be an interesting one to watch, and certainly one that I’m already having fun playing around with.

Update: Gamasutra have an interview with Dave Mitchell discussing the future of XNA GSE, worth a read.

Pretty much what it says on the tin. Reminds me a lot of the Jeff Han demo using Nasa World Wind. Plugging together GlovePie (drivers for the Wiimote on windows) with Custom drivers written by J Coulston, its a nice example of the kind of possibilities that are out there for those wanting to get there hands dirty with mashups like these, or their own creations from scratch. Its a shame that its not Analogue yet - its just mapped to keypresses for the meantime, and it doesnt use the pointer system, just tilt control. The sweet-spot for me would be pointing at the earth and dragging it to spin, much like a globe, leaning forwards and back to tilt the earth.

The fact that its been so easy to get the wii remote working on other systems makes me wonder if this was an intentional move by Nintendo to encourage people to experiment with wiimote based interaction without needing their own devkit?

Not had a chance to try this yet, but there are folks out there already trying to use the Wii remote for their own invention. Fortunately, its a straightforward bluetooth device and the communication seems to be unencrypted, so some people such as those behind Darwiin-remote have begun creating drivers and software to let you use the controller on other platforms (in this case OSX). It seems IR pointing and motion (accelerometer) are already supported. Makes for a very cheap mouse for presentations or installations

Download Darwiin-remote here.

Last Friday, being the official launch day for the Wii in the UK, naturally led to a pod of Nintendo fanboys descending on Oxford St for the big launch. For the first time in my life, I was so anticipating the the launch of the new console that I took unprecedented steps to cement my fanboy credentials: I went to the midnight launch, I preordered from TWO different outlets and I took the Friday off work to wallow in a sea of beanbags, wiimotes and zelda.

And its a beauty. Its tiny, unassuming and of an entirely different aesthetic to its cousins. Taking the DS tenets of design and running with it, its exceptionally simple to use and packed with subtle features to make the setup simple and provide the basic features that most of the target audience will need.

The first thing that really struck me after powering up was the wiimote, and in particular the way that they have implemented rumble when used in conjunction with the system software. Whenever you roll over a button with the wiimote, it makes a subtle vibrating pulse. Its a simple inclusion, but hugely powerful, and significantly increases (and solidifies) your sense of connection between the screen and the wiimote. Its inclusion really does suggest that the move to drop rumble from the PS3’s SIXAXIS controller was a distinctly unsound one. Without it, it could feel like quite a loose connection between the screen and wiimote - the controller does not point like a light gun (which you might assume when first using it) but simply uses relative movement to determine position. It takes a while to adjust to this method - there really isnt another like it. Nintendo has wisely decided to pack in Wii Play with an extra controller - a series of minigames designed to familiarise the player with different styes of wiimote interaction that games will expect you to be familiar with. While some of these games are very simple (such as a where’s wally style game), some of them are wonderful (fishing and laser hockey) and really do illustrate what the wiimote will offer in the coming months.

Another standout factor of the system software is the Mii channel. This area lets you create avatars to represent you, your family and your friends. These can then be added to emails (wiimails?) sent from the message centre, and more significantly can be used to represent you within compatible games. At the moment this is limited to Wii Sports (included with the wii) and Wii play. Offering a reasonable number of possible elements (but not really enough to offer a really personalisable avatar), the novelty of watching yourself bowling or playing golf is certainly fun. The real joy, however, comes when you can interact with other wii owners - if you allow them to travel, you will see them wandering in and out of friends’ ‘Mii Parade’ randomly, and you can bring them over to play in your games. This is clearly something that Nintendo plan to use extensively so it will be interesting to watch where this goes.

The game that has been absorbing most of my time, is quite obviously the new Zelda - writeup coming soon.