Scott Fisher

oh HELL ya!

I have to say that the cubes were the coolest things I've seen in a long time! I can't wait to be able to create my controller for a video game, manipulate the game based on the controller I put together, then take it apart for the next obsticle in the game. It would seriously make puzzle games a lot more challenging.

Imagine needing to put the shape together for the puzzle on the screen... or better yet, a puzzle fighter-type game where you and an opponent are trying to do it against one another... put together the right shape immediately... time is running out!

I would like to see other building blocks besides cubes. I understand that it's all in the prototype phase right now, but more and varied blocks means more challenging puzzles and constructs.

Maybe, eventually, it'll be just a flat lego-like sheet that you can build on top of with small lego pieces that show up in the game.

Kick ass :)

I think the cubes grabed my attention because of their easy application to gaming.

It'd be easy to sell them as a start pack for a game, and additional cubes as add-ons. The demo showed a plane. A dogfighting game, where add-on cubes would change what your plane could do, seems like a natural extension.

I had some trouble with the put-yourself-in-the-system idea. I wasn't sure why I would want to do that. The interface afterwards was neat, but I didn't see it as ground breaking. Maybe I'm looking at it too cynically.

The multi-perspective stereoscopic images are a neat idea. But making it viewable for a larger group of people, without making the box to unwieldly, would turn it in to a killer app.

In general, it's good to see that people are thinking of different ways to manipulate data, beyond a mouse and keyboard. Most of what we saw trended towards a more natural, intutive manipulation of information.

I totally forgot about the Illusionhole! With the little hole in the table that was shown most of the time, I can see very few applications... but the big one for the amusement park ride looked like it would be fun!

By the "put yourself in the system" idea that you mentioned, I assume you mean the one where people can touch the screen to create goldfish? Right now, I'm not too sure what else it could be... all I can say is that as far as from an interactive art perspective, it could be neat. Otherwise, for a game or anything else, it probably wouldn't be very engaging for very long.

The application that really caught my eye but wasn't given that much attention was the "Delphian Desktop." Though the prototype seemed simple enough in that it was a cursor that predicted your destination through your mouse movement, I feel that the underlying principle behind has potentially powerful wide ranging applications. I love simple applications that can improve your efficiency. And I think that any application that can predict what you are trying to do can also help you do it better. Already something like this is already being used in Google. When you search online, your search is logged in your search history. The next time you search for the same term your most frequented site will be placed on the top of the list.

If there were an common interface API for all application, I feel that an plugin could be written that could record your patterns of actions on the computer. Then the next time you perform an action and your perform the first two steps of it, the application could suggest the next 4 steps that would follow through according to your history of actions. If the 4 next steps are correct the computer automatically performs them for you.

I feel that this feature would be the next step in Human Computer Interaction, where computers adapt to human behavior to become more efficient tools.

Virtual Chopsticks was my favorite project because it integrates touching with tasting although right now it is in its early experimental moment.

The cubes were definatly interesting. The more dynamic they are the more interesting the interface. If someone could make a smaller version of that which would allow a player to create most anything.
Time to talk to lego about their brick and update it.

And then the girls crashed into the water. Game Over.

There is something interesting about the cubes. It’s not just their functionality. It has to do with their shape. If these devices were spheres, I just can’t imagine it having the same effect. There is something authorial can controlling about them. Maybe because the edges of the cube are straight and the corners are perfect rights. I wonder what it would be like to but together different shapes, where the shape represents some of the functionality of the device. Moral of the story: the girls will control everything with cubes and take over the world.

For me, a lot of the appeal for the blocks comes from the ability to manipulate something of a simliar shape to what is shown on the screen.

I remember fighting games like "street fighter" would frustrate the hell out of me because I could never remember what the buttons would do. Mashing the keypad didn't win me very many matches.

New interfaces for games are always interesting...

Right Kellee?

These guys should be teaming up with Nintendo to put out a game for thw Wii.

I concur with most everyone in that the most impressive demo was of the cubes. I can only imagine the puzzle possibilities. Imagine building a city from simply stacking different arrangements of cubes togeter? And even better, imagine tearing them apart.

Killer App for blocks = Tetris. Come on you know how many tetris-philes would but into this? Rick? The blocks were the most interesting thing to me, I wasn’t quite sold on the delphian desktop or the illusion hole. I am all for speeding up the workflow but, the delphian desktop seems like it would be very easy to send a file to the wrong folder. Not to mention trying to teach people who are accustomed the simplicity of bejeweled to try to use the mouse to launch icons across the screen…so, I am cool with “ctrl-c”ing for now.

Yes, new interefaces are always interesting, but I don't share everyone's enthusiasm for the limitless possibilities/mass market appeal of those blocks. To me it still seemed like they were an awfully limited platform. As versatile as they were, I dodn't see them as different or intuitive enough to really be able to design a broad range of content for.

Of course it was hard to hear this presentaiton given that all of us who had a class at six were stuffed in the breakout room...

the desktop prediction thing was cool, and so were the blocks. but, while what kitamura-san presented was interesting, so many seminars dedicated to cs r&d that, i've chosen this post to draw attention to this fact in this post. this is an m_f_a, and though most of the students aren't really _that_ interested in art, per se, i think we could have a greater ratio of artists to technologists. perhaps this fact was highlighted for me by having this as the first seminar of the semester.