Philip van Allen

The Microsoft Office Labs Vision 2019 video recently shown at the Wharton Business Technology Conference, by Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop (text of speech), does a good job of showing potential modes of interacting with embedded and ubiquitous multi-touch displays. But how original is it? My students in Art Center College of Design’s graduate Media Design Program have been working on ideas like this for many years, and have made speculative videos like this, as well as working prototypes and real projects. See below for several examples, as well as some thoughts on where future interfaces should go – is Microsoft just proposing another version of windows?

Update: Behind the scenes of the making of the video

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Microsoft Office Lab’s Vision 2019 video

MDP Alumni Sebastian Bettencourt’s Beyond The Fold Newspaper Project

Here are links to several of my students’ past projects:

• 2004 – wall – scott nazarian, nikolai cornell
• 2005,2006 – mirror – in search of identity, infiniti interactive - nikolai cornell, phil van allen, others
• 2006 – interactive table – acura oracle – nikolai cornell, jonathan jarvis, phil van allen, others
• 2006 – handheld augmented reality – telepath – matt mcbride
• 2007 – e-paper newspaper – beyond the fold - sebastian bettencourt

…Read more

NET Lab Widgets

There’s a new version of the NET Lab Toolkit. This release adds a new skin, single keystroke to make widgets invisible, play/pause function for VideoControl and several bug fixes. This is in addition to support for Xbee wireless sensors, the Wii Remote, and DMX lighting control that came with the ALPHA version released in July ‘08.

On April 25th 2008, Anne Burdick (MDP Department Chair), Nik Hafermaas (Dean of Communication Design @ Art Center) and I gave a talk at the USC Interactive Media Arts and Practice Program to discuss the MDP’s New Ecology of Things research initiative. This talk was webcast, and the web recording of it can be seen on Adobe’s education site.