(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!

How’d he do it?  Florian’s thoughtful song is deceptively simple: a tiny music box is attached to the stem of his bike.

A microphone is carefully attached beneath it, placed to allow just enough ambient noise while getting clean sound from the music box. The box’s crank is connected by a makeshift belt which is connected at the other end to his front hub.

Once in place, it’s up to Florian to modulate the pace of the song by controlling his own speed. We think the result speaks for itself.

Happy holidays from IDEO Labs — We’ll see you in the new year!

The WiiMote provides high-performance (100Hz) tracking of up to four infrared light sources. That means that instead of using fingers as inputs, you’ll need to use some sort of IR light emitter. We modified LED keychain lights with IR emitters:

Information on building suitable light pens is available here and here and here and you can buy readymade pens here for $8.

The system is fairly buggy: our experience with the wiimote interface drivers results in about a 30% connection rate (details as to why, and what to do about it, are included with the code). At any rate, the system should give you the ability to play around and test ideas.

Everything you need is available through our Google Code repository: http://code.google.com/p/ideo-multitouch

Good luck and let us know what you think!

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

We’ve been using a Nokia Internet tablet, an Arduino board, and Flash for some rapid prototyping fun (read more here).  We’ve learned some interesting tidbits about the Nokia tablets as prototyping platforms:

1. How to prevent the tablet from dimming the screen or entering sleep mode
2. How to hack your own buttons onto the nav controller (up, down, left, right, enter) (770 only)
3. How to disable all of the hard buttons to prevent accidental use (770 only).
4. Creating snap-dome hard keys for prototyping small devices with physical buttons.
5. Application Instructions (Connecting as root, SSH, SCP, changing passwords)
6. ROM Tool instructions (Flash the ROM, R&D mode, USB Host Mode, new Kernel)

1. How to prevent the tablet from dimming the screen or entering sleep mode
These two commands allow you turn off the screen dimming and sleep modes:

install xTerm (see the Arduino+770 post)
Start xTerm (Extras > X Terminal)

# gconftool-2 -t list –list-type=int -s /system/osso/dsm/display/possible_display_blank_timeouts [30,60,120,300,600,1800,3600,0]

# gconftool-2 -t list –list-type=int -s /system/osso/dsm/display/possible_display_dim_timeouts [30,60,120,300,600,1800,3600,0]

now there are 1 hour intervals for sleep and screen dimming.  This is nice to have for many circumstances.  For instance, if the Nokia tablet falls asleep while connected to Arduino it loses the connection.

2) How to hack your own buttons onto the nav controller (up, down, left, right, enter)

Here is a diagram if you would like to hack your own buttons onto the nav controller:

3) How to disable all of the hard buttons to prevent accidental use.

To disable everything but power and home:

Download “xfree86″ from here.

Drag xfree86 to the memory card then run:

# sudo gainroot
# cp /media/mmc1/xfree86 /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86

Here are the current button mappings that are commented out of the file:

111= up
116= down
113= left
114=right
36=enter
9=back
70=menu
71=home
72=screen size
73=+
74=-
124=power

Feel free to change the comments to enable some other buttons you may need.

4.) Creating snap-dome hard keys for prototyping small devices with physical buttons.

We prototyped a small screen of a device on the touchscreen by showing the image of the intended device on the touchscreen.  The device we were prototyping had hard buttons, however, not a touchscreen.  This led to a confusing situation, there are buttons on the touchscreen of the 770 device that simulate real buttons, but the screen of the prototype is not a touchscreen itself.  To get around this problem we laser-cut an acrylic shield with fingers and placed snap-domes on the fingers that will touch the screen when the snap-domes are depressed:

5) Application Instructions (Connecting as root, SSH, SCP, changing passwords)

We have written instructions on:

1. How to become root (superuser access)
2. How to use a remote terminal over WiFi (SSH)
3. How to transfer files to the tablet over WiFi (useful if it is set to USB host mode)
4. How to change user passwords

To keep this post short, these instructions are available for download here.

6) ROM Tool instructions (Flash the ROM, R&D mode, USB Host Mode, new Kernel)

We have written instructions on:

1. How to flash the ROM with a fresh system (in case something gets screwed up)
2. How to toggle R&D mode
3. How to toggle USB Host mode
4. How to swap the kernel image only

To keep this post short, these instructions are available for download here.

In fact, with eight worldwide locations, six time zones, and roughly fifty people involved, IDEO’s Global Chain Reaction looked more like a blueprint for possible points of failure than a functioning Rube Goldberg machine designed to run sequentially across three continents.

Even Jon Kaplan, the IDEO veteran behind the effort, had moments of doubt. But more than that, he had moments of disbelief: How could someone actually come up with that!? How could someone actually engineer a pole-dancing doll to spin around in silver garland, knock down a Phillippe Starck juicer, trigger a Gaussian gun, and topple a Tickle-Me Elmo, plastic eyes first, onto a computer mouse that then prints a document in Shanghai? All told, there were about ten other machine-based vignettes that lasted almost 20 minutes and spanned day and night, thanks to the fifteen-hour time difference between offices.

Unlike many Rube Goldberg machines, the goal wasn’t to turn on the lights or pour a glass of milk. Instead, Jon wanted to get people psyched about IDEO’s engineering capabilities and to broadcast the distributed contraption live for all to see. Of course, getting a hot dog in the Chicago office to dial a cell phone in Palo Alto for the sole purpose of pumping helium into a bucket of soap and water for a three-foot cylinder of bubbles did plenty to get people excited. When the Chicago team added flames to the mix, Jon didn’t flinch.

“I sent out rules and people either ignored them or followed them. The sense of humor part was great. Munich emailed early on and said, These rules are there for breaking, right?”

The San Francisco office waits patiently for the New York office to knock on their door

The New York office logs on

Elmo in Palo Alto sends a print to Shanghai

Munich maps out their multi-floor Rube Goldberg

The Boston team gets their machine ready amongst scenes of local history

In the case of multi-touch interfaces, that meant building a system we could start prototyping on. What we wanted was:

• a multi-touch display large enough to facilitate use by several people at once
• an API for flash that would let us quickly prototype multi-touch interfaces and applications

It took us about 5 weeks to get everything together. Kyle, one of our all-around gearheads, had already been building a drafting-table-style FTIR system in his garage which helped kick-start us.

We knew we wanted our system to be larger and vertical, though, so we went back to the drawing board on hardware. We had some old projection surfaces from a project we had done long ago in storage.

With that as our base we designed a system around a short-throw projector and a wide-angle IR cam. This allowed us to build a pretty large rear-projection display without the depth requirements of Han’s systems.

Meanwhile, Kyle and Nicholas (another all-around whiz) were hard at work building a multi-touch server and an API that could be used to quickly prototype interactions. They built the back-end in Processing. It’s a great platform for rapid prototypes, particularly where there’s hardware-software integration involved.

On the front end we chose to create an API for Flash because it lets us realize our ideas quickly and use a wide variety of media, from video to vector graphics. Nicholas’ Flash API is pretty cool: a system that allows anyone who knows ActionScript to quickly mock up multi-touch using reference to “fingers” (e.g. when two fingers are down on this image, scale it…). 

Using our server and API, Nicholas was also able to very quickly throw together a handful of demos. Take a look:

Want to jump into the multi-touch arena by creating a system of your own? We’ve just published the code from our own prototype system at Google Code: it should be all the software you need to make your own FTIR system: a back-end app to run a multi-touch server, and an API to create your multi-touch flash applications.

You can find the source code for the FTIR server and the Flash API at http://code.google.com/p/ideo-multitouch/. Everything is licensed under Creative Commons.

This stuff is definitely not polished to commercial application standards: It’s use-at-your-own-risk, unsupported code. We’ve all got day jobs and can’t offer much by way of technical support, but if you find it useful we’re happy to have you make use of it.

And by all means if you make something you’re excited about with it, send it our way!

• pulse width modulated analog voltage
• timer overflow interrupt handling. 

Initially this library was built to address the fact that Arduino’s analogWrite() function does not provide a mechanism to change the period or frequency of any of the timers which drive hardware based pulse width modulation, but it has since grown to accommodate the interrupt handling features as they are related and just downright useful.

Some of the things we have used the library for on projects in house include:

• CPU independent servo control
• Frequency generation in the audible range (digital synthesis)
• Integrated hardware / software PWM control for independently variable analog voltages on 12 pins simultaneously (4x RGB leds)

You can download the library and learn much more about the project by visiting our page on the Arduino Playground at: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/Timer1

Most people who have heard of multi-touch know of it in the context of the iPhone. Being able to use more than one finger on the iPhone’s screen means support for some pretty intuitive interactions. Pinch a map to zoom out. Slide a finger to scroll through photos. Multi-touch is a big part of that little device.

But when you’ve got a large screen with multi-touch support, that’s when things start to get really interesting.

Most computer interfaces today assume a single user. Whether a screen is small or large, the computer powering it is usually designed for one user. There’s one keyboard and one mouse. And even if you were to add another, the software only allows for one cursor. Every interaction assumes a single user.

But multi-touch, particularly on large displays, assumes multiple inputs at the same time. Multiple fingers, yes, or multiple hands from multiple people. In other words, it’s a system designed for “us” instead of for “me” — for collaboration instead of heads-down work.

At IDEO, a lot of the work we do is collaborative. Most of it is. And since most software doesn’t allow for more than one input at a time, they don’t fit much into the collaborative part of our work. But we can’t help but wonder what might happen if we started messing around with multi-touch.

On the technology side it’s still early in the game, but there’s already some pretty cool stuff out there:

Apple

Apple is definitely the technology leader in the multi-touch world. They’ve got a number of patents, many of which secure their lead in capacitive multi-touch technology. Capacitive multi-touch systems, like the iPhone, are fantastic. They can handle lots of inputs in a wide variety of environmental conditions without requiring any special equipment on the part of the user. The only problem is that right now there’s nothing commercially available larger than the iPhone.

One of these days the good folk in Cupertino may release larger screens based on their technologies, but until that day comes there’s very little we can make use of here…

Perceptive Pixel

Meanwhile, Jeff Han and the folks at Perceptive Pixel have been extending Han’s work on frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR) to produce large-scale multi-touch displays. Their most recent display is a vertical, wide-screen system that easily supports two or more people working together:

Han’s systems are great in many ways. The technology is fairly cheap to implement (all you need is a projector, a sheet of acrylic, some IR LEDs, and an IR-sensitive webcam), and as you can see it scales well to large sizes. The downside is that the sun is a great source of IR light, so it’s easy to confuse the system (hence the dark room in the video). You also need enough space behind your screen for a projector to throw its image.

Johnny Lee

Johnny Lee may be the coolest thing to come out of Carnegie Melon since John Forbes Nash. Among other impressive projects, he’s managed to build a multi-touch system out of any ordinary computer, a Wiimote, and a couple of IR-LEDs.

Part of what makes Johnny Lee’s stuff so cool is that it’s so cheap to pull off. All you need is $50 worth of additional equipment to turn a computer or projected image into a multi-touch environment. The only downside is that the system can’t handle more than two inputs at a time, which limits what you can do with it.

At IDEO we’ve been exploring the pros and cons of these and other multi-touch systems. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but most of the other stuff we’ve seen seems to be a variation one one or another of these approaches. How about you? Are there notable systems we’ve missed?

Normally, one of the first things that admin will do when they set up their blog is to go and remove the Hello world! post. But for this blog, we’ve decided to keep it.

The feeling a coder has when they see “Hello world!” for the first time on the tool or system they’re creating is a great feeling. You’ve just given birth to something. It’s still young, fragile, and only a hint of what it someday will be. But it’s alive. Something you’ve made with your own two hands is starting to breath. It has begun.

At IDEO we have that that feeling often. Bringing new ideas to life is an essential part of what we do. The first versions are usually rough. They’re early proofs of the concepts, ways of helping us explore, learn, and think. Usually they’re not very pretty. They’re not finished products, after all, but prototypes of what could be.

Most of the time those prototypes don’t get shown to anyone but the client who hired us. But sometimes we do stuff that we can share, and we’ve created this blog to do just that. This is a place where we can offer bits of what we’re working on, talk about cool techniques and share our excitement over the tools that help us create.

It’s also a place where we hope conversations will take place. If you see something you like, leave a comment and let us know. Point us to an even cooler version of whatever it is we’re so jazzed about. Toss in an idea. Ask a ‘what if’…

Hello world!