Tinker it now!

A good friend of mine Camille Moussette just finished his masters degree in Interaction design at Umea and used Arduino for prototyping his degree project: Hapi, hapic interfaces for mobile devices.

Check it out!

For this year’s Milan Furniture Fair,Syneo commissioned Tinker.it to work on their exhibition concept for Persol, the famous italian sunglasses brand.

Under their conceptual lead, we helped bring to life 3 interaction concepts within the Persol exhibition:

1. Details screen

2. Theme selector

3. Musical visualisation

Watch the movie!.

For our Hungarian readers, Index.hu interviewed Massimo Banzi about hardware hacking and his workshop in Budapest last week.

Here’s a video of the workshop itself.

Tinker.it’s good friend and hacker Matt Biddulph made a great Pecha Kucha -style presentation of Tinker.it and the value of prototyping within the hacker community at Xtech in Paris this week.

The advantage of being a network of people with such different interests and talents, is that we can release products (software/hardware) with a fast pace.
One week we release a hardware piece, the next a software one, the one after a paper about an installation, a tutorial, a tip.
I was always excited about this opportunity, because I think that a hacker-minded group can do a lot of good to the community.
This was one of the purposes of twodotone joining Tinker.it.
For example we have a Windows C++ programmer that can do many things very quickly. His name is salvatore (a.k.a. “saver”).

To cut a long story short, the intro is to announce we finally released TinkerProxy for the Windows platform.
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On May 8th 2007, the annual Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring Show opened at New York University and is now running until May 9th at 9pm. The fourth floor of this Manhattan building transforms itself every year into a multimedia festival of interactive installations and break through technology created by the artists and innovators participating in the NYU program. Among this semester’s projects Zoonori, by Joo Youn Paek, represents a collaborative musical interface made of five devices that, once folded like origami, can not only create five different animal figures, but will fill the room with extremely beautiful and poetic voices. This piece reinvents the individual act of origami-folding as a collaborative musical experience.

imPulse, created by Gilad Lotan and Christian Croft, is a modular design object that can sense your pulse rate and allows users to transmit it wirelessly and layer it along with someone else’s pulse. It visualizes both heartbeats and creates intimacy across a distance, without requiring the typical physical connection necessary to perceive someone’s pulse.
Experimental Devices for Performance, by Andrew Schneider, are five devices both handheld and wearable that reintepret the act of performance all together; the performer has controll over the technological media while the devices also inform and transform the performer, hence creating the final act. A very important dialogue, that has been developing at ITP in the recent years, is the one around Sustainable Practices, like the Solar Powered Recharging Station for batteries and the BikeJus by Addie Wagenknecht, Marc Covitz, Shinyoung Park and Felipe Ribeiro, that relays on a DC motor activated by the sole act of pedaling to generate electricity in order to power household appliances like TVs and light fixtures.
Another interesting field emerging from ITP is the one of Assistive Technologies, such as Rosie Daniel’s and Amanda O’Brian’s Mouth Piano, especially designed for people with limited mobility like stroke victims, this adaptive musical interface allows people to play music with their teeth and tounge movements while providing physical theraphy to patients.
See you again in the Fall 2007!

I will be presenting Tinker.it, it’s approach and projects so far in a “lightning talk” of 20 slides for 20 seconds next Thursday evening in Paris for Xtech 2007.

If you’re around, come and say hi!

Massimo will be in London this week teaching an Arduino workshop at the Dana Centre for the Takeaway, DIY festival. Do go drop by and say hi!

“Arduino Workshop
Discover more about Arduino, an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple i/o board and a development environment for writing software. It can be used to develop interactive objects and control a variety of lights, motors and other outputs.
Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino project and interactive designer for Prada, Whirlpool, V and A, Artemide, Persol and Adidas”

New:Adrien McEwen was nice enough to post a lovely review of the workshop.