Curious Displays is the thesis project of Julia Yu Tsao (Sept 2009), a concept that explores our future relationship with displays in the home. What if our display was ‘alive’, like little swarming bugs? What if your nano display was intelligent, connected to objects in your house and your communications?

Curious Displays is a product proposal for a new platform for display technology. Instead of a fixed form factor screen, the display surface is instead broken up into hundreds of ½ inch display blocks. Each block operates independently as a self-contained unit, and has full mobility, allowing movement across any physical surface. The blocks operate independently of one another, but are aware of the position and role relative to the rest of the system. With this awareness, the blocks are able to coordinate with the other blocks to reconfigure their positioning to form larger display surfaces and forms depending on purpose and function.

Via.

I’m really interested in the effects being achieved where the experience is tailored in real time according to your movement of the device:

In the demo above the tracking is based on pixel detection via the in built camera. It enables you to move your face/tilt your Nintendo DSi to find hidden shapes inside a 3D scene.

HoloToy does it all via the accelerometer:

And if you applied this virtual treatment to the real world, you’d get something pretty like this:

pCubee is made with five flat-panel screens that uses perspective-corrected rendering and real-time physics simulation to create compelling visualization and interaction techniques for 3D content.

Auto Smiley is a computer vision application that runs in the background while you work. The software analyzes your face while you are working and if it detects you smiling it sends the the ascii smiley face letters as keyboard presses to the front most application. Auto Smiley has many uses from just straight up convenience to enforcing honesty in your online communication

There’s something interesting in tailoring creative to mood, or at least expression.

All the projection mapping I’ve seen to date has been about the big event, the 15 minutes of collective experience, the wow factor perception altering techniques that artists play their audience, and the surprise this triggers that leads them to want to record the event and share it virtually.

It’s a recipe attracting the attention of a lot of agencies at the moment and this demo got me thinking slightly differently about the technique:

For me it shifts projection mapping from being only about triggering collective experience, into the interesting space of using the same technique to produce non event based desirable content that people want to share.

And in removing that ‘event’, the technique will be executed in far more interesting settings than just the sides of public buildings.

What a video the original Neurosciences video was (bottom). And damn I wish I’d done it. When it came out we’d just completed a project for Bacardi using Beardyman and it could have been a great alternative way to approach the campaign.

Now, and with even more ‘I wish I’d done it’, (and rather weirdly using Beardyman as well), director Chris Cairns has teamed up with holographic projection experts Musion to create a live performance based on his Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs film, which features a number of disembodied rapping heads…

The film above shows live footage from an initial test performance of the holographic heads, with no post-production added.

The original:

Glance by Andy Holtin

A direct manipulation video player lets users drag items within the video frame to move forward and back instead of just via a scroll bar on the bottom of the video.

It’s an interesting technique that surfaced at the start of 2008 and this campaign for Wrangler, although admittedly simple in its complexity, is the first I’ve seen to harness its beauty.

Thanks Chris for the link.

ASCIImeo is a project by Peter Nitsch. It’s a video player which renders Vimeo videos in ASCII.

Via.

Inspired by the 70’s time delay technique within the recent OKGo ‘WTF’ video (see below), Mehmet Akten created this little open-source demo in Processing. It works in real-time with a webcam.

You can download the source here.

OKGos version:

And here’s a little making of video:

And the original: