No more locked room syndrome

"Locked door syndrome" in games sucks. These dudes have a system that can render a whole city to explore - rooms n all. Awesomeness.

From Blues News

Augmented Reality using just hands and a marker pen :)

Sweeeeeeet

MOVITS!

Loving this act from Sweden - proving tough to find a place to buy their album from though. Enjoy!

MOVITS! Fel del av gården from Axel Söderlund on Vimeo.

More samples over at Paul Irish's always great Aurgasm blog

'Everyday digital' gets closer and closer through DST

Seems like an obvious statement, doesn't it? But I wonder just how many people realise how close we are to having digital in our everyday lives a hell of more than we currently do.

Here's a video showing off Asus's latest digital surface technology (DST - I just made that up, btw):

And here's Microsoft's Surface:

And, here's Microsoft's vision for a DST-capable home:

All of these technologies are real, and already developed. Technology like this has a habit of becoming the accepted norm very quickly, imo. I'm working on a 42" touchscreen prototype at work right now, and it really surpised me how everyone who uses it (we have Google Maps running on it right now) tries the pinch-zoom motion to attempt to zoom - a feature really only currently used by the majority on the iPhone with its multi-touch capabilities.

I'd say that in 5-10 years, DST will be much, much more available in public places and the home. This is exciting, and is going to present some major usability challenges.

Techoviking. Scariest pointer of all time.

This man is a giant and has the most intimidating point I think I've ever seen :)

Zombies, Skittles and Augmented Reality

This, literally, is the SHIZZ! The dudes over at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design have used augmented reality, backed up with a new high-powered handheld from Nvidia to create what looks like a really fun... um... pseudo-reality? 3D/2D mashup? Dunno. Whatever - it looks like a great laugh.

Astonishingly, they've got the system recognising Skittles sweets in real-time as game elements. So, that's AR without the ugly codes.

I can't believe how smoothly this runs... the potential is awesome!

Seen on AdFreak

Comfort Wipe. 'Maintain your dignity' with a stick.

Speechless. WTF? Wiping your ass with paper is archaic... so wipe your ass the modern way... with paper... on a stick!

These poor people's careers... "Hi. I'm a fat bloke. I can't reach round the planetoid that is my bum to 'maintain myself'". And, good point raised by a comment on YouTube: do you bring it with you to friends' houses?!

Seen on AdFreak

Bank Lets Customers Deposit Checks by Taking Pics with an iPhone

USAA (Big US bank) allows users to photograph a cheque (note spelling) and send via their iPhone app to instantly deposit the amount.

So?

• Further death of the need to physically visit a location to ‘do something’ – further death of the high-street presence?
• "you just submit the photos and void the check in your hand. The deposit to your account is instant."

Be interesting to see how open to hacking/cheating this is…

Read more at Lifehacker

BooneOakley launches their agency website as a youtube vid

Damn. Good idea. Simple. Wish I'd thought of it.

YouTube timeline becomes the site navigation, as do 4 embedded buttons which link to other videos on YouTube.

Pretty big stake in the digital ground to present your agency on a UGC platform. Plus, of course, they get blogged by people like me. Nice work chaps.

Seen on Ad Freak

Spotify on mobile

Some sleuthy person in my office found this. Spotify (wikipedia entry | Company site) is a service I'm signed up to that streams millions of tracks for free, with radio ads in between. It's heading to mobile, I'm just waiting for the iPhone app :)

Originally seen on Ashleytemple.co.uk

Data visualisation

Originally seen on The Guardian

(MASSIVE DORK ALERT...) I've got a thing for data. Basically because it can be used to describe so much in such an ordered way (playing to my OCD there). From my time as an Actionscript developer, I was gripped by Object-Oriented Programming and how almost anything can be described as objects with properties.

Visualising data is something I do by nature now, whenever I start a process of system design. Even little things like the little application I programmed at the weekend, started with me thinking "what is involved in this application, what properties do they need to have, and what do they ned to do?". An example is a restaurant menu system: meals are objects, with properties such as price, type (vegetarian for example). Customers are objects with properties such as 'Has Ordered', and methods such as "Order meal X".

This collection of data visualisations is sometimes beautiful, sometimes enlightening. Like the visualisation of Beethoven's 5th Symphony below:

Seeing the relationships between artists on this site has helped me find new ones I like when I've used it:

Given that I'm such a sucker for the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio, I guess it should be no surprise to me that nature (in this case us, our creations, our habits, our new digital societies such as Twitter) should demonstrate curves and trends of the sort you might find in nature itself.

Marc Tobias - ultimate lock-picker

I've always had a bit of a fascination with lock-picking. I'm not sure why - it could be because it was so much damn fun in Thief 3 (a series of my all-time favourite games). It could be because no matter how many times I read it, Lock Bumping is just too frightening easy.

Ceck out the video below of Marc Tobias, scourge of the 'safe' and hacker of high (physical security). He busts open Medeco locks (apparently the name in high security locks) in less than 10 minutes each, and lock bumps one in 8 seconds. In fact, the original Wired Techbiz post on which I read about Marc Tobias can be quoted as saying that these locks are "the lock famous for protecting places like military installations and the homes of American presidents and British royals". Shocking :)