Last week was the sold-out Interaction10 conference in Savannah, where Matt presented his project Wooden Logic:  In Search of Heirloom Electronics:

For centuries artisans have had the ability to sketch with wood and hand tools to craft high-quality, precious objects. With digital technology the functionality of objects became less tangible and visible, and their making fell almost exclusively to engineers and computer scientists. It is only in the past decade or so that the community and tools have evolved to the point that designers can sketch with hardware and software. This project seeks to combine seemingly dissonant elements, natural, material and virtual, and explore how they can be crafted to feel as if they were born together as parts of a unified object anatomy that is both singular and precious.

The talk has received some great attention online, from diverse places such as MAKE:blog (who did a great synopsis):

to Fast Company:

Thanks for the mentions!  We’ll post the video of the talk here when it comes online.

Rob Walker wrote an excellent article for the New York Times Magazine about the Real Good Experiment, which we designed technology for.  Excerpt below; read the whole piece here.

The product: Blu Dot’s Real Good chair, a slim metal seat that comes in several colors and normally costs $129. Twenty-five were placed on sidewalks. They stood out visually, and about half of them came with something extra: a hidden global-positioning-system device. This allowed the object’s movement to be tracked and its new owner located and, ideally, interviewed for a video that will be shown in Blu Dot’s SoHo store on Dec. 14, marking its one-year anniversary in New York.

John Christakos, one of Blu Dot’s founders, liked the sound of all this when Mono, a marketing agency, suggested the scheme. “We thought it was cool,” he says. “To me, it felt almost like a performance piece.”

One of our favorite projects has officially launched this week:  the Blu Dot Real Good Experiment.

Blu Dot and Mono, a branding consultancy in Minneapolis, approached us and Supermarche to help with a project to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their showroom in SoHo, NYC.  They would do an experiment on “curb mining.”  25 Real Good Chairs would be placed around New York City.  10 of them would contain concealed GPS tracking technology.  Each would be picked up by a random passerby, who in turn would be pursued on foot and on an interactive online map – all the while being filmed for a documentary to premiere at the anniversary celebration.

Well, who are we to turn down a design-related and secret-agent-like challenge?  We created a website and outfitted 10 chairs with GPS tracking technology, cleverly concealed beneath the seat (along with a notice to defuse potential suspicion regarding concealed electronics).  As each chair was taken by a pedestrian, its journey was tracked live on the website and via hot pursuit – all the while being filmed, stakeout-style, for the documentary.  Chair-taker interviews will be happening this weekend.

Topping things off, this project has been receiving a lot of really good press in the last couple of days.  Yes!  We had a blast working with Blu Dot, Mono and Supermarche and can’t wait to see the film!

Greg Matthews, Director of Consumer Innovation at Humana, recently gave a great talk at the BIF-5 conference in Providence that is now available to stream online.  We’ve done a lot of work with the Humana Innovation Center, which Matthews directs – including the Horsepower Challenge, above.  Thanks for the shout out!

Check out the full talk:

We thought we’d share some pictures from last Thursday, when Tellart popped over to Hasbro HQ in Pawtucket, RI to participate in their 2009 Inspiration Day.  This was a great afternoon of eating, meeting & greeting with folks from creative industries across New England, all set to the tune of some interesting live performances and speakers.  It is designed as a fun, science-fair-like event that lets Hasbro and others explore new technologies and inspire innovative thinking.

We were there displaying our delicious augmented reality cookies, AR memory game, a control-things-with-your-phone NADAmobile demo, and movies of the things that were too big (or too virtual) to bring in person.

Setting up the NADAmobile demo in our office ahead of time – all of these appliances are soon to become WiFi-enabled and iPhone-controlled.

Getting used appliances to match your brand can get messy.

The heart of it all: an Arduino Diecimila running NADAmobile.

A screenshot of the NADAmobile sketch we set up.  A simple push turns on the lamp.

And a nice shake turns the clock radio on and off.

My personal favorite – a quick burst of air aimed at the device’s microphone creates some wind onscreen and in real life (this one activates the fan).

How about creating some iPhone juice?  You can squeeze it as hard as you can, but in case that doesn’t work, there’s a backup – it activates the blender.  Not that we’re implying anything.

And in case all of that gets messy, we thought we’d allow attendees the chance to clean up by pretending the phone is a vacuum – thereby waking up our new fuchsia Dirt Devil.

Once we got to the fair, it was a challenge to configure our booth…

…and we ended up getting ourselves in trouble for pointing our fan at the huge card tower adjacent to us.  Whoops.

Our delicious AR cookie setup.

We had to provide a warning not to eat them (we don’t blame you, attendees).

The Augmented Reality memory game was a hit

Nick explains NADAmobile to interested attendees over the sound of the fan, vacuum, mixer, and radio.  Luckily the lamp was pretty quiet.

The day’s attendees came in all shapes and sizes.

And here are the videos we had playing in the background – check them out for more augmented reality, hacked appliances, and tech installation goodness!

Thanks to Hasbro for having us!  We had a great time and can’t wait to come back next year!

Just a week or so ago, Seth took a day-long bike ride up and down the New England coastline as part of the Rhode Island chapter of Team in Training, the world’s largest charity sports training program (money raised goes to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society).  Tellart loves documentation, so we couldn’t resist the opportunity to outfit Seth with a few extra accessories for his 100-mile ride: we attached his iPhone and some extra battery packs to his bike via a modified iTMP handlebar mount, zip-ties, and Gorilla tape.

The extra hardware and phone were to support a special iPhone app we whipped up for the occasion – one that follows the path of the bike using GPS and snaps a photo every 1/8th of a mile. We ported its results over to the 100 mile photoscape project page, where you can check out the mapped ride, the photos plotted along it, and the 100-mile panorama they created.

The application takes photos without user input – a feature that only became available to developers a few weeks before the ride, with iPhone OS 3.1. Based on either time or distance settings, the app automatically takes a series of photos.  Every photo is stored with GPS location information, as well as a time-stamp, and a velocity profile.  In order to ensure that the phone would run through-out the long ride, we rigged up auxiliary batteries through a regulator and added them to Seth’s already weighty saddle bag (already holding 2 spare tubes, 2 CO2 catridges, and tire levers).

The time settings can be adjusted to take between 1 and 120 photos per minute (somewhat restricted by the capabilities of the iPhone’s camera capture), and the distance settings can be adjusted to take one photo per mile all the way down to one every 3 feet.

We hope to have the application in the iTunes app store soon – we will announce it here when it’s ready!

One of our excellent summer interns, Mike, baked us up a great end-of-summer treat: augmented reality fiducial cookies. These ones throw up a 3D virtual Tellart logo when on webcam – luckily, the cookies themselves are real-life and delicious.

If you’d like to bake your own, Mike has made an easy-to-follow recipe/tutorial that you can check out here.  If you’d prefer to just print out a cookie using paper (less delicious), you can do that here and then proceed directly to the demo!

Source

Photo: Mike Clare & Barrett Hanrahan

Over the weekend Tellart hosted a couple of great events at the first-ever Rhode Island Maker Faire in Providence.  We kicked things off with a workshop on WiiMote hacking, where we taught folks how to write applications controlled by WiiMote gestures.  After that, and then again on Saturday at WaterFire, we installed our special interactive pong game – like the one from your childhood, but projected life-size on the floor and controlled via infra-red LED’s on your head.  Who says video games cause laziness?

Check out more pictures after the jump.  Video and source code to follow later this week!

Check out MAKE issue #18 for Andrew’s article on his Bloog project, a “blog post synthesizer” that pulls in RSS feeds from the internet and allows the user to scramble them to create new paragraphs.  The machine was built using Tellart’s Sketchtools NADA project.

What is a switch? Is there a place for the Army at an art school? How do physical and ubiquitous computing fit in the industrial design curriculum? Is interaction design just 21st Century industrial design? Can designers and engineers play nicely? And what do high altitude and disaster medicine have to do with any of this? In a fast-paced and highly visual presentation, Matt Cottam will discuss these ideas and others, sharing work from his professional practice as a designer and medic, and drawing from experiences as student and teacher.

Link

On Friday, March 27, Tellart and the Umeå Institute of Design will present the Sensing and Sensuality summit.  This will be a day of talks by speakers such as our own C.E.O. Matt Cottam, Matt Jones of Dopplr, Lennart Andersson of Ergonomidesign, Jack Schulze of Schulze & Webb, and Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.  See the full list of speakers on the 2009 Spring summit website here.

Friday, March 27, 2009
10:00 am
Umeå Institute of Design
Östra Strandgatan 30
Umeå, Sweden

In case you were wondering, we have fun at work.

Matt’s contribution to Papercamp London was featured yesterday over on one of our favorite places, the MAKE magazine blog.  The furniture was laser cut and etched from original illustrations in Helen Campbell’s 1890 book, The American Girl’s Home Book of Work and Play.

More info and other high-resolution photos can be found on the blog he created for his master thesis at the Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå, Sweden.

**Update**

The project has also appeared on Craft:

Thanks for the links guys!

Monday saw the successful launch of a new Horsepower Challenge UK, with 90 thrilled students and one Olympian athlete participating in the opening day’s run. By the end of the day each team had accumulated thousands of steps – one nearly reaching 85,000!

There were a few articles about the launch, in E-Health Insider and some local newspapers.

The players have already begun making the most of their customizeable avatars:

More photos after the jump.

A new video of our classic “What is a Switch?” project, from the Fall 2007 RISD Industrial Design studio The Internet of Things.

Tellart now has a Page (yes, with a capital P) on Facebook. Check it out and become a fan!

Link

UPDATE: Get involved in the project and download the software from the Google Code project: http://code.google.com/p/nadamobile (sorry, for the moment it requires compiling some code)

1. Introduction (2008 Demo: 1 of 4)

Tellart’s 2008 Research and Development annual demonstrations. This Introductory chapter picks up where NADA (sketchtools.com) left off and takes Tellart’s sketching and prototyping tools into the mobile realm. This short video is a demo of Tellart’s RunSketch application working with Apple’s Dashcode on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

2. RunSketch (2008 Demo: 2 of 4)

This second of four chapters demonstrates how Tellart’s RunSketch application is integrated with Apple’s Dashcode to quickly and easily create applications that utilize all of an iPhone/iPod Touch’s functionality. Creating these applications is made extremely simple by RunSketch–requiring only Javascript to create sophisticated mobile applications and prototypes.

3. I/O Backpack (2008 Demo: 3 of 4)

This third chapter demonstrates the NADA Mobile hardware and software toolkit by Tellart. The hardware involves a custom designed circuit board that communicates to a computer via a wireless radio link. The board allows for both sensors (light, heat, motion, force, etc.) and actuators (lights, motors, etc.) to be integrated with the iPhone/iPod Touch’s hardware and software. The goal for Tellart in making NADA Mobile was not to extend the functionality of the iPhone as much as to create a sketching and prototyping platform that would empower designers to quickly and easily imagine and test new concepts for interactive products and services.

4. 1/8″ Jack (2008 Demo: 4 of 4)

This chapter demonstrates Tellart’s 1/8″ Jack (Eigth Inch Jack) software and hardware toolkit. 1/8″ Jack allows analog sensors to be connected to an iPhone or iPod Touch without the need for additional circuitry or power source. The system allows for fast and simple prototyping of new mobile concepts and requires only a basic understanding of Javascript to implement.

Try it yourself:

What is going on here?
That was recorded live, including the falling snowflakes. Flash can “see” the pattern on each card–depending on the pattern, the computer plays a different note. The result is that you can use pieces of paper like instruments.

How did we make it?
We put this together using FLARToolkit and Papervision3D.

Read on for more of the technical details.

FLARToolkit is a Flash port by Saqoosha of the computer vision package known as ARToolkit . You can learn more about what ARToolkit is and how it works over at Washington University’s home page for the project.

We were playing with the native Windows version of ARToolkit in the studio back in 2001 and could hardly contain our collective glee a couple weeks ago when a Tellarter dug up Boffswana’s demo of the new system running in Flash. We’d like to thank Saqoosha, Tarotaro.org and Boffswana for sharing their wonderful AS3 classes, and the Papervision crew.

Sometimes it’s a good exercise in paying attention to try to figure out how something strange, like a computer, sees the world.

Download the source code here (GPL)

Peace,
Tellart

“Video games aren’t just for kids and couch potatoes anymore. They’re increasingly being used to motivate people of all ages to move their bodies and manage their chronic health conditions more effectively. …

The Horsepower Challenge gives each student a pedometer, which tracks their movement and sends wireless updates to the HumanaGames.com Web site. Students also receive animated horses that represent them online, where they can see their progress. Teams of school systems compete against each other, and kids who accumulate activity earn rewards they can use to accessorize their horses.

“Our mission is basically to help people play their way to better health,” Darst said. “We want to make it fun for people to get healthy.”

Read the full article here.

Things have not been quiet around the Oakland office. One reason is the recent epic recording session to get some urgently needed musical material finished. As a non-musician, I find it pretty inspiring that people are doing this here. The tracks can be heard in various Tellart projects, including some of the videos elsewhere on this site.

A sneak peek at the newest generation in the Sketchtools line…

*Update: Check out a full demo of NADA Mobile in this blog post or just skip right to the 1/8″ Jack demo.  You can also download the source code for the project at the NADA Mobile Google Code page.

Our favorite new iPhone hack, the duiPhone, will let you know for sure whether you should hand the car keys to a friend after a long night in the bar…

Once you blow into the mouthpiece, the application will determine your blood alcohol level – either telling you you’re good to go, or that you should consider calling a cab.

We built this from a store-bought-and-hacked breathalyzer attached to a 3G iPhone – our first experiment with Tellart’s newest Sketchtool: NADA Mobile.

Yes, this video was taken at our office. Yes, those are real 40s on the table.

No, Jasper was not allowed to drive home.
(no Tellart employees were harmed during the filming of this video.  Photos after the jump.)

[ed: Yes, the video shows an iPod Touch--which is a lot less expensive to test with than an iPhone--but the demo runs over WiFi and works on any device running iPhone OS]

One thing I learned, my serve is ok, but I need to work on my backhand.

Tellart’s Friday office lunch turned into Wii Olympics. Wii, Wii Fit and just about every accessory available now installed at Tellart HQ and all in the name of research.

Holistic Service Prototyping: Sketching Hardware and Software

Matt Cottam (Tellart, Rhode Island School of Design and Umeå Institute of Design), Maia Garau, Jasper Speicher (Tellart), Brian Hinch (Tellart)
9:00am Monday, 03/09/2009
Computing, Mobile and The Web, Objects, Tutorial
Location: Gold Room

The Economist has defined services as “products of economic activity that you can’t drop on your foot.” Where businesses once viewed services as a necessary but inconvenient accompaniment to their product offerings, they now increasingly look to designers to develop holistic, human-centered and innovative service solutions that can help expand profits and cement brand loyalty.

Services are richly complex offerings occurring across space, time and multiple touch points. Their essentially intangible nature presents new and exciting challenges. Designers in this emerging field must expand the toolchest of product and interaction design to develop new approaches for communicating and prototyping service concepts.

This one-day tutorial will cover key concepts and methods through a combination of lectures, demos, and hands-on activities. Though there are countless types of services from air transport to farmer’s markets to medical care, it will focus on services that can benefit from the integration of web, mobile and embedded digital technologies. We will introduce key tools and techniques for prototyping physical computing interfaces and will develop functional sketch prototypes using Flash and RFID.

full event description

Nursing Home of the Future Talk is online

and

Matt is quoted in a Providence Journal article about the NHoF…nice!

photo by Jeremy Withers

The “What is a switch?” project is a Tellart classic.

It takes the form of a workshop or a longer course, and, by using low-cost materials and familiar design tools, is meant to demystify electronics for design students and artists – expanding their conception of what it means to design with embedded electronics.

A switch, after all, is just a connection made or broken between power and ground.

When you begin to think about it that way, the “what is a switch” experience goes beyond a simple electronics lesson. What happens when you take the switch away from the wall, out of the plastic casing?

What kind of interactions can you create when you start experimenting with other materials, quick prototypes of your concepts, and new ways of connecting?

Tellart teaches Physical Computing/Interaction Design workshops yearly at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden – in this particular two week long workshop, the students were asked to conceive of ideas that would encourage a more energetic “desk-job” experience. “Repetitive strain injury”, or RSI, is the name for a group of conditions common in computer workers and assembly line workers – carpal tunnel syndrome is a well known example. The conditions arise from too much time spent in a poor posture position or too much repetitive muscle activity.

The students, who came from a variety of different undergraduate backgrounds ranging from Computer Science to Psychology, were taught some basic physical computing concepts, and given an introduction to our Sketchtools platform.

Check out the Offsite section on tellart.com to see more videos of our workshops and courses…