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The State of Kinect Gaming
I’ve played almost every Kinect game available, and I have to admit, most of them aren’t very good. There are a few exceptions, which I’ll get to below. The “controller-less” aspect of the Kinect was what brought it so much initial excitement. However, we’re still not good at designing experiences that take advantage of this.…
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Your code doesn’t need to be THAT good
I’m currently crunching to finish a software project. It’s my first time collaborating with a large number of non-co-located people with a shared repository. It’s been interesting and frustrating to manage tasks and larger-scale goals across such a group. One of the problems is that different members have different aesthetic values on what “good” software…
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Distributed Disc Tossing: The Value of Jerks
My department had a BBQ on Toronto Centre Island last Sunday. I am a frequent Ultimate Frisbee player, so I brought my disc to toss around. Some others did too, so we had an M tossers and N discs situation. I had just started the last course of my Master’s the week before, Distributed Computing,…
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Where I'm going, where I've been
Near the end of the first semester of my Master’s, my research topic was becoming clearer – along the lines of “teaching the use of gestural interfaces”. This was motivated by the proliferation of gestural interaction in devices of many form factors. Much of my thoughts on this were driven by my improv and theatre…
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Improv Math: Military Clock
A few weeks ago, I went to see PROJECTproject, an improv show in the Toronto area. They had just come back from a tour to Western Canada, and one of the things they brought back with them was a structure called Military Clock. I think they said it came from Winnipeg. I’m always on the…
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Stuck in Real Time
At Friday’s DGP party, a projector and a webcam was set up. The webcam was aimed at the party, and the projector was aimed at a large white wall, displaying the party. This is all good and cool, and if you aim the webcam so that it sees part of the projection, then you get…
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A conversation with the Google Earth API
Dustin: Oh hey there, Google Earth, it looks like you have an API so that we can actually talk to each other.GE: Yeah, hello! It’s really useful.Dustin: Well, we’ll see about that. So, I’ve turned you on. Can you tell me what layers you have?GE: Of course! I’ve got the Geographic Web, Roads, 3D Buildings,…
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Mimicry-Afforded Gesture Instruction
I was exploring techniques to teach novel gesture interaction “in the moment”. The alternative is to have the user learn everything interaction up front, or to have a large toolbar that takes up screen real estate. I created a concept video that showed me working on a multi-touch tabletop I was using “for the first…