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Featured in The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition, the Morph concept device is a bridge between highly advanced technologies and their potential benefits to end-users. This device concept showcases some revolutionary leaps being explored by Nokia Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre (United Kingdom) – nanoscale technologies that will potentially create a world of radically different devices that open up an entirely new spectrum of possibilities.

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Hussein’s theme for this season was sun worship and celebrity and he chose to use lasers to symbolise this in his dresses. Challenging as ever we integrated more than 200 moving lasers in two dresses and a jacket with an additional 60 lasers in a large hat.  
  
The lasers are held on the dresses by tiny brass hinges that were custom made from etched sheet material and they are moved by very small servo motors.     

“Holographic display down to desktop size! This fully integrated 3D projection platform that combines the most advanced modern projection techniques with a contemporary sleek housing.”

Video after the jump!

A very awesome piece of special effects promoting the Japanese release of “The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep”

Video after the jump.

Troika has been commissioned by Artwise Curators to create a signature piece at the entrance of the new British Airways luxury lounges in Heathrow Terminal 5. We created for them ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture.

More at: troika website + youtube

Phantom Limb is an arcade-style game for two players, designed to test and retrain their sense of perception.
To begin, players position themselves at either end of the table, placing their hands onto the controls in a cavity below.

Both players start with eight lives – represented by coloured oblong bars above their hands. The first player to destroy all their opponents lives, wins the game.

The controls consist of eight pressure-sensitive pads corresponding to the red squares on the table surface. Pressing a pad generates an expanding blue ring that deflects the puck upon contact.

Unliked the duality of an arcade game where opponents simply face each other, players swap hands with one another. Placing their hands into the cavity below, each player appears to grown their opponents arms out of theirs elbows.

The reactive cube, like a piece of paper or computer monitor screen is a form of visual medium. It is a more visceral kind of screen, designed to transform digital images into apparently physical objects.

It works by projecting a two dimensional image through a three dimensional mass - in this case water mixed with a specially formulated emulsion. The emulsion is composed of micro-sized particles of oil formulated to stay suspended in water. The projected light is captured by the oil and appears to become a virtually real object.

Each version in the series is based on a particular form of interaction. Some cubes respond to sound, another to the force of a person breath and the most recent draws a line around the edge of a person’s hand. In each instance the interface has been made as transparent as possible, avoiding technology that comes between the user and their experience of what happens in the cube.

Later versions of the cube were developed in collaboration with Tom Roope of Tomato Interactive and Andy Allenson of Romandson.

Piss-screen

Makoto Hirahara designed the Bright Blind. What is it? A fake window for people who work all day long in a windowless room; it creates the illusion of sunlight.

How does it work? Uses electroluminescent sheets to present the appearance of bright light. If the light gets a bit too bright, the user just needs to adjust the blind as they would with a real one.

More info at: http://www.walyou.com/blog/2007/11/27/bring-sunshine-to-your-room-with-bright-blind/

Sony announced in August the development of a bio battery that generates electricity from carbohydrates (sugar) utilizing enzymes as its catalyst, through the application of power generation principles found in living organisms.

Test cells of this bio battery have achieved power output of 50 mW, currently the world’s highest level for passive-type bio batteries. The output of these test cells is sufficient to power music play back on a memory-type Walkman.

Sugar is a naturally occurring energy source produced by plants through photosynthesis. It is therefore regenerative, and can be found in most areas of the earth, underlining the potential for sugar-based bio batteries as an ecologically-friendly energy device of the future.

Skorpions are a set of kinetic electronic garments that move and change on the body in slow, organic motions. They have anthropomorphic qualities and can be imagined as parasites that inhabit the skin of the host. They breathe and pulse, controlled by their own internal programming. They are not “interactive” artifacts insofar as their programming does not respond to simplistic sensor data. They have intentionality; they are programmed to live, to exist, to subsist. They are living behavioral kinetic sculptures that exploit characteristics such as control, anticipation, and unpredictability. They have their own personalities, their own fears and desires.

Skorpions reference the history of garments as instruments of pain and desire. They hurt you and distort your body the same way as corsets and foot binding. They emphasize our lack of control over our garments and our digital technologies. Our clothes shift and change in ways that we do not anticipate. Our electronics malfunction and become obsolete.

Skorpions shift and modulate personal and social space by imposing physical constraints on the body. They alter behavior, by hiding or revealing hidden layers, inviting others inside the protective shells of fabric, by erecting breathable walls, or tearing themselves open to divulge hidden secrets.

Wieden + Kennedy London has designed this year’s Regent Street Christmas lights. They’re due to be officially switched on at 6.00pm today but here’s a sneak preview of how they look

The installation is called ‘Unity’ and is brought to you by Regent Street and Nokia. It was created by us, in partnership with lighting specialists UVA. There are fourteen clusters of lights. They change colour in reaction to wind, temperature and, from 14th December, you’ll be able to change the displays via the interactive window display in Nokia’s new Regent Street flagship store. There will also be a number of special pre-programmed displays over the Christmas period.

source: welcome to optimism, wieden+kennedy, London