links for 2008-09-24

“I knocked togeth­er a Twit­ter bot called Low Fly­ing Rocks, that scrapes data out of the NASA NEO data­base, twit­ter­ing when­ev­er a rock pass­es with­in 0.2 AU of the Earth” A nice com­ple­ment to the Tow­er Bridge Twit­ter bot by the oth­er Tom.

“Ins(table) is an inter­ac­tive instal­la­tion that explores the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the visu­al­iza­tion of speech and con­ver­sa­tions.” The best inter­ac­tion design project at this year’s HKU grad­u­a­tion expo. Some nice dataviz here, plus the table itself is an aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing object (some­thing you don’t see too often in inter­ac­tive furniture).

By far the most impres­sive game that was on show at this year’s HKU grad­u­a­tion expo. Offer­ing a very nice bal­ance between struc­tured and open-end­ed play, lush graph­ics and superb tech­ni­cal exe­cu­tion. The research that went into this (on the paidia-ludus con­tin­u­um) is worth check­ing out too.

“1. It makes lit­tle sense to talk about »visu­al aes­thet­ics« as an iso­lat­ed modal­i­ty. 2. The genre deter­mines the aes­thet­ic qual­i­ties. 3. Aes­thet­ic is not equal to good, pleas­ant, pret­ty or nice. 4. Aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence is con­nect­ed with intel­lec­tu­al delib­er­a­tion as much as with imme­di­ate, »vis­cer­al« response. 5. We need holis­tic, inter­pre­ta­tive approach­es to deal­ing with aes­thet­ics in inter­ac­tion design.”