by Caleb Johnson on December 4, 2010 at 09:01 AM

If you find it hard to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a bar, a team of Newcastle University students have developed "smart" beer coasters and an interactive bar top that will break the ice for you. According to the Guardian, the coasters light up blue for men and pink for women when touched by a glass. All you have to do is slide the coaster within about two feet of that guy or gal ...
by Matthew Zuras on October 14, 2010 at 10:10 AM

Need some dance floor with your morning commute? Until October 25th, Berliners are being treated to the interactive installation 'Onskebronn' (Norwegian for 'wishing well') in the Hauptbahnhof train station. Created by performance art group Phase 7, the installation's LEDs respond in real-time to visitors' steps. Check out a video of an older version of the eye-popping work here. ...
by Caleb Johnson on September 17, 2010 at 11:35 AM

People no longer sit and passively watch TV; they browse the Web, text message friends and play smartphone games, all while watching the latest episode of 'Mad Men.' Hoping to capitalize on that, ABC has launched an interactive iPad app that's compatible with 'My Generation,' a fake documentary series premiering later this fall. The 'My Generation Sync' app syncs with the action onscreen by ...
by Amar Toor on July 22, 2010 at 06:30 AM

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What began as a noble British endeavor has just come down in an inglorious blaze of abuse. As Reuters reports, the U.K.'s Treasury has decided to pull its interactive 'Spending Challenge' website, after users smeared the site with weird suggestions and tirades against ethnic minorities. The challenge, which was put in place by finance minister George Osborne, was created with the intent of ...
by Caleb Johnson on June 28, 2010 at 04:35 PM

Not even a week after slashing its e-reader's price, Amazon has also revamped its Kindle application for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch with shiny new upgrades. According to Engadget, the Kindle app now features embedded audio and video on select titles. The first e-books making use of this feature are Rick Steves's "London," which features a walking tour of the town narrated by Steves, and ...
by Matthew Zuras on June 17, 2010 at 01:05 PM

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless.
Like them or ...
by Matthew Zuras on June 13, 2010 at 04:00 PM

Well, those crazy kids at MIT have done it again. We're pretty floored by this video (after the jump) of student Natan Linder's LuminAR robotic assistant, which looks like a desk lamp married to the Terminator's exoskeleton. And a task lamp was, in fact, Linder's inspiration for this gesture-driven droid, as he essentially replaced the traditional incandescent bulb with a state-of-the-art ...
by Matthew Zuras on June 4, 2010 at 10:30 AM

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As part of the 'Light in Winter' Festival in Melbourne Australia, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has created one of his largest projects ever: a three-dimensional, animated scale model of the Sun, tethered in the sky above Federation Square, called 'Solar Equation.' Lozano-Hemmer employs a ...
by Matthew Zuras on May 27, 2010 at 06:30 AM

Interaction designer Chris O'Shea, in collaboration with Random International, has created a unique interactive interface that feeds the viewer's image back to him or her. "A Study for Mirror" uses a light-reactive screen-printing system that reproduces the viewer's image on glass, before wiping it away for the next user. Contained within a small frame, the work houses both a full PC with custom ...
by Matthew Zuras on March 24, 2010 at 05:35 PM

We here in America know that everything is bigger in Texas, but the Lone Star's got nothing on Scandinavia. For example, Norway has the largest capital reserve of any country, making it the wealthiest in the world by monetary value. Some of the largest sea predators -- like the sperm whale and the basking shark -- call Norwegian waters home, while the people of Norway represent one of the largest ...
by Matthew Zuras on February 19, 2010 at 07:24 AM

To get nostalgic for a second, this humble writer, at one point, had great difficulty in learning musical notation. One reason that many parents begin to teach their children to play piano and other instruments at such a young age is the fact that young brains can more readily absorb complex languages, like music. Your writer did not begin to read music until early high school, and, surrounded ...
by Matthew Zuras on January 26, 2010 at 03:48 PM

Have your 'Magic: The Gathering' soirees been lacking that 21st-century flare? Are your Dragon Mages and Hill Giants suffering from an oppressive want of interactivity? Well, researchers from Canada's Queen's University have been developing an immersive technology that will merge traditional board and card games with the dynamic interfaces of your favorite MMORPGs. Professor Roel Vertegaal and ...
by Terrence O'Brien on January 23, 2010 at 11:00 AM

Sometimes, technology can actually bring us closer to our fellow man, rather than isolate us, as critics often claim it does. Google illustrated this perfectly by using constantly updated imagery from powerful satellites to give us perspective on the scope of the destruction in Haiti. Now CNN, with the help of Immersive Media, is offering the same unfiltered glimpse into the tragedy, from a ...
by Warren Riddle on January 8, 2010 at 09:00 AM

Interactive videos appeared on YouTube in 2008, but most of them have been limited to basic games and puzzles. A new movement in interactive viewing, though, is taking that participatory experience to a completely different, and awesome, level. A user known as kokokaka3000 has uploaded a new video titled, 'Play the Piano,' and the name is not at all misleading. Just let the vid load (after the ...
by Terrence O'Brien on February 2, 2009 at 04:07 PM

A few months back, Google unveiled the ability to embed links and notes within videos on YouTube. While the usefulness of the new tool wasn't lost on anyone, the level of interactivity it allows may have been overlooked at first. But a YouTube user known as copyrighthater has built a complex, video-based, photo-hunt game using these often overlooked tools. The game is divided into 30 "levels" ...