Philip van Allen

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I’m very interested in how tangible objects can be used in interesting ways to interact with information on screens. This video collects together a series of experiments on the use of a range of object prototypes. In making these, I imagined a screen in front of me (in some cases a standard size screen, in other cases a wall sized screen), and manipulated the various objects as if I was controlling and interacting with content on the screen. It was more an experiment in the affordance of the objects in relation to screens than thinking of specific applications.

This project was aided by the help of my graduate students Jonathan Jarvis, and Parker Kuncl.

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Demo Video, More video on YouTube

The Acura Oracle project was initiated by MDP alumni Nikolai Cornell at George P. Johnson for the Acura stand at the international auto shows (including Detroit, Chicago, New York, and LA). I participated as a consultant in the initial creative brainstorming and technical definition. Bringing in Moto Development to create the multi-touch technology and optics, I coordinated Moto with the creative team, advised on interaction issues, and developed test projects to explore different interaction possibilities.

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One of the online outlets of Communication Arts, designinteract.com (site dead), just covered the Infiniti Interactive Mirror — a life-sized video and sound installation where people interact with three 8 foot high screens by simply reaching out to different areas of the display interface. This project grew out of one of our graduate’s thesis project and work he did in my Interactive Objects and Spaces class with fellow student Scott Nazarian (MDP, 2004). Nikolai Cornell (MDP, 2004) conceived of and managed the project which was built for carmaker Infiniti by George P. Johnson in collaboration with the Designory, Mindflood, and my company, Commotion. The installation is part of the traveling Infiniti auto show exhibit and was displayed at the Detroit and Chicago auto shows. It will soon be in New York City, and in December it will be in Los Angeles.

The designinteract.com article is especially interesting in that it covers the entire process of the project, from concept through completion: www.designinteract.com/features/mirrors/ (site dead – instead please view a PDF of site rescued from the wayback machine at archive.org) 

For an overview of the project and video of people using it, see the dedicated site for it here: www.interactivemirror.net

 

 

 

 

 

 

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An installation for Infiniti at the International Auto Shows, the Infiniti Interactive Mirror is a 3 screen interface that uses mirrored glass and rear projection to create a seamless large screen touch interface. George P. Johnson created the project with Nikolai Cornell (MDP alum, basing the project on his thesis project) as creative director. Nikolai worked with The Designory, MindFlood, and my company Commotion. 

On this project, I designed and built the sensor system that detects a person’s hand position in front of a flat surface without any sensors on the sides of the display or behind the user. In addition, I provided interactive consulting on the project.

Read an article on how the project was produced (rescued with the wayback machine – was originally published online at designinteract.com, but communication arts killed it).

www.interactivemirror.net

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Corporate Delicti was a group exhibition at Nucleus Gallery around the topic of disillusionment with corporate life. Collaborating with student Colin Owen, we built a system of interactive objects from an office – a copier, file cabinet, and fax machine. Painted gray, each object was made interactive by removing the guts and putting sensors and speakers inside.

The copier groaned when someone approached it, and when the “copy” button was pushed, a loop of copying sound played. With each subsequent push, an additional music track was added to the mix.

The file cabinet played more music tracks that synchronized with the copier sound. This track faded up as the user opened the drawer, bringing in more tracks the further the drawer was opened (typing, drums, etc.), In addition, occasionally when the drawer was opened, the sound of crows seemed to jump out of the cabinet and fly across the room as the sound moved from a speaker inside the cabinet to speakers above it, and the across the gallery to speakers in the back.

The fax machine played a loud and ominous sound when the flash-hook on the phone was clicked. It then played a computer voice that read the terms of a contract that indicated the company owned everything created, throughout the universe.

More pictures

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For the U2 ZooTV tour in 1993, I and my MusicWorks team at Philips Media (Brett Spivey, Randy Picolet, Mike Diehr) created two interactive projects for the band to use onstage. It’s fun to think about what it was like to make interactive media back then. Keep in mind, this was the year NCSA released the first real web browser called Mosaic, before Photoshop had layers, and when a 650 meg (gig) SCSI hard drive was $2500 and the size of a breadbox.

This experiment allowed the band members to interact with the big video screens as they stood on stage. In the first project, Welcome to ZooTV, Bono selected a region, then the city, and then one of four versions of himself to welcome the audience to the show. The second project was BeatBox, and was run by Edge. He picked a song, and then played around with the beat by changing tempo and selecting between 3 different sound sets (including a zoo version with animal sounds for the kick drum, snare etc.). 

Apparently the band only used the projects on a couple gigs, as it turned out to be a bit too time-consuming for them to run it. If anyone has any stage pictures of them using it, please let me know. I think one of the shows where they used it was in Texas.

These projects were created using CDi technology developed by Philips and Sony. This was the first commercially released set top box that used CD media. My MusicWorks group produced several music titles for this medium. These were called CDi-Ready discs, and they played on normal CD players, but were the first music CDs ever to include multimedia content as well. Titles included James Brown, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, and Luciano Pavarotti.

Later, when I started Commotion, we went pretty far down the road on a proposal to create an interactive project with U2. It would have been developed on either CDi or the 3DO platform.

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