IDEO Labs

“Twitter changes everything”… I’m sitting in a conference session by that name right now. That may be a stretch, but it certainly does change many things, including how people participate at events like conferences and speeches.

Increasingly presentations to large audiences are happening in the context of a ‘backchannel’, where attendees are responding in real time to what is being said at the podium. That’s a pretty interesting development, but one that’s a bit off-balance: while the audience can converse with one another and respond to what they’re hearing in the room, the content of the presentation doesn’t make it into the stream unless someone (re)tweets it.

So what if your presentation software could send tweets on your behalf that were timed to the slides of your presentation? You could effectively simulcast your presentation through the backchannel as a part of the conversation, adding ‘more info’ links, credits, or anything else you could imagine…
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Prototyping rapidly is key to developing a new concept and delivering it on time. In the Toylab we have been tinkering recently with a bunch of cool wireless and remote control ideas, but have consistently been held back by the difficulty of implementing them. Although there are many relatively simple wireless solutions available to hobbyists, we couldn’t find anything that quite fit our criteria:

• capable of transmitting arbitrary data
• bi-directional
• small
• cheap
• quick to setup
• easy to use

So, we set out to make some tools. (more…)

Thanks to the good folks at WATG’s Wimberly Labs, we got a tour today of some truly remarkable visualization and collaboration technology, including EON Reality’s immersive 3D room.

The cave (or iCube, as we’re told they would prefer we call it) is comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames. (more…)

Continuing our multi-touch research, we’ve been working on turning an off-the-shelf rear projection TV into a multi-touch display.  This screen has the best width-to-depth ratio of any multitouch system (67″ diagonal viewing area and only 16″ deep).  This is also the first example of hacking a multi-touch system into an off-the-shelf television.  The system we settled on uses very few additional components and could potentially be applied to any rear-projection TV.

The display is only 16″ deep

Setup and Theory

The system has four IR lasers mounted in the corners.  Each laser has a line generator on it (line generators are put on laser-levels to create a line of laser light).  The four lasers produce a plane of infrared light across the entire surface of the screen.  When a finger intersects this plane of light, the light illuminates it.  We have two cameras inside the TV that look at the interior of the screen from the inside.  These cameras have filters on them that only allow infrared light through.  The cameras see the “blobs” of infrared light and track these points.

Below, we’ve posted as much information as we have to enable you to build your own version!

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Less than a week ago IDEO began a quick open project with Bug Labs, makers of the BUGbase. For those unfamiliar with Bug Labs or their product, here’s a quick overview:

The project is a quick + deep exploration of the BUGbase, focused on re-envisioning the interface with an eye toward integrating new display and input technologies. We expect outcome to feel less like a finished product and more like a concept car — something that will help us learn from users and inform future designs.

This is an experiment on another level too: BugLabs is all about open source, even when it comes to this design project, and that means we have a unique opportunity to invite anyone interested in BUGbase to join us in the process. We’re keeping a dedicated blog here, and have already posted some initial interface concepts. With your feedback, we will devote the remainder of this week to focusing and detailing one or two directions and exploring the feasibility of the associated industrial design and housing-modification solutions.

If you’re interested in Bug Labs or want to participate in the design work we’re doing with them, we invite you to join us at BUG + IDEO.

Well, our Nicholas is at it again. This time he’s taken up iPhone application development, and has released a very cool (and, for a limited time, free!) little app intended to help interaction designers and other would-be iPhone software developers easily test pixel-perfect prototypes on their iPhones.

The system has two parts: the LiveView ScreenCaster and the LiveView iPhone application. The ScreenCaster is a simple application that puts a virtual iPhone skin on your screen, its dimensions corresponding to a real iPhone such that the pixels inside of the virtual skin are precisely as many as on a real iPhone display.

Once you’ve got the ScreenCaster running on a mac, all you need to do is make sure your iPhone is on the same wifi network and launch the LiveView iPhone app. Instantly you should see the name of your mac (and any others running ScreenCaster at the time). Clicking on your machine instantly brings up just the portion of the screen that you’ve ‘highlighted’.

But wait - there’s more! The ScreenCaster has an option to interpret touches as mouse clicks. Turn this feature on and your screencast becomes a two-way interactive prototype. Virtually any application on your mac, from the Finder to custom Flash apps, can quickly be ‘launched’ on your iPhone.

If you’re even thinking about building iPhone apps in the future we highly recommend grabbing this little app. Kudos, Nicholas!

LiveView for iPhone

Don’t you just hate it when you find yourself at a party without a party whistle? Are you an iPhone-aholic? Then the iPhone ToyLab has just the thing for you. Released today, the Party Whistle is your virtual party whistle (bet you didn’t see that one coming). But don’t take our word for it:

(OK, maybe that’s still taking our word for it, but, well, you know). The Party App is our Toy Lab’s first foray into fun, playful iPhone apps, and as such we thought we’d share the experiment with Labs readers. The app is a mere $0.99 at the iTunes or App store: click here to learn more.

If you download the app and try it out (say, at a New Year’s Eve party), let us know what you think by leaving a comment…

Thanks, and see you in 2009!

This one comes from Florian in our Munich office…

How’d he do it?  (more…)

Our tireless multi-touch team is pleased to announce another bit of software meant to make your prototyping life a bit easier, via support for using a wiimote with our flash API to quickly turn any TV or projection surface into a multi-touch environment. 

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In the vein of Arduino-controlled espresso machines and Lego bots, we’ve been playing around with Flash and the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. With its flexible Linux-based OS, the Nokia 770 is great for rapid prototyping. Plus, you can snag one on the cheap ($65-170 on eBay).

Hardware aside, Flash is a great language for quick prototyping. It’s an environment that many designers are already familiar with, and it enables the user to create a graphic interface in minutes.  For prototyping on small screens, Flash Lite can be used, but Flash Lite cannot communicate to other devices outside of the device it’s running on (aside from calling other phones).  The Nokia Internet tablets are interesting because they are essentially tiny Linux computers and run full-fledged Flash.  We got one of these tablets to run Flash and talk to an Arduino board.  This enables any kind of sensor to communicate with the Flash application and allows the app to control things like lights and motors.

Detailed instructions for setting this up can be found in our Google Code wiki:

Nokia N810 + Arduino

Nokia 770 + Arduino