LED floor
People have done a lot with projection mapping onto floors, but what if you made a giant LED display as your floor? BMW paired with ASB GlassFloor to create a full-LED video sports floor. It was installed in Munich at BMW Park at the home venue of FC Bayern Basketball.
This does offer advantages over pure projection mapping since there are no issues with occlusion shadows (though that’s a problem largely solved already by using multiple projectors in multiple locations).
Personally, it seems terribly distracting if you’re trying to actually play on it or watch live play – but seems to have has possibilities for live entertainment/concert events or possibly new kinds of games. One could imagine games in which the floor changes configuration/boundaries. Color could be used to mark out 2 and 3 point regions. Perhaps colors could indicate different bonus scoring is in effect, or to pulse to count down the last 10 seconds of gameplay, or perhaps indicate a penalty is in effect (though this would be best only indicated as changes to the perimeter colors).
Vuevo translation device
Pixie Dust Technologies in Japan created the Vuevo display – a cool little automatic translation device. It listens to you talking, and then translates between two languages live while putting up what the other person said on a transparent display. While auto-translation is not new, having it in such a clean, professional form factor means they have been popping up in Japan at better quality restaurants and hotels where foreign travelers are common.
Meta’s new Ray Ban glasses also have a translation feature as well, but it’s still rough (works best as listening to a lecture vs interactive real-life conversations:)
Of course, one has to wonder how it will do with accents…
Saxophone man
Teatro Pachuco (also http://straatanimatie.eu/) created a whimsical saxophone playing man. Since both hands seem to be visible, how is he playing the upside-down sax? He has some other quirky videos as well.
New UI trends?
UI trends are called ‘morphisms’. We’ve gone through glass-morphism, squircle-morphism, and lots of other morphisms. Morphism changes by UI designers chasing the latest cool-looking thing is why the web site that was working just fine for you gets re-designed every 6 months.
Malewicz talks about some of these trends and the design languages used to describe and classify them.
Claude Design to replace the UI marketplace?
Claude Design has hit the scene – and Figma stock dropped 7.7% the same day.
A small team with access to a frontier model can reach “good enough” on a design tool in a matter of weeks. The question being priced in isn’t “will Figma die?” It’s “what is Figma’s moat, actually?”
Learn more about Claude Design here or read a step-by-step walkthrough in this Medium article.
3D Printing your dress
Next Gen cyberpunk clothes
A robotics and animatronic cosplay enthusiast known as Zibartas has made a real-life NUSA Infiltrator jacket.
This is a cosplay recreation of the NUS Infiltrator bomber jacket from Cyberpunk 2077 that has a tall collar that houses a display. That feature collar alone packs in $1,200 worth of 4 flexible OLED displays driven by a pair of Raspberry Pi 4 SBCs.
I think this is a great example of new technological fashion that is becoming possible for designers. We’re already starting to see 3D printed clothes, spray on shoes and spray-on dresses, and the re-booted Tron franchise a few years ago introduced Oryon Technologies Elastolite EL Panels (tape) into real-world costumes.
I think we’re just scratching the surface of what will soon be very quickly possible in wearables.
Links:
Tron Electroluminescent (El) Tape
Want to create your own clothes that have lighted tape/lines like recent Tron movies? Want to create unique lighting at your next event or home? Want to wrap your car in illuminated panels?
Look no further than Ellumiglow. They sell a wide variety of wearable electroluminescent solutions for home and clothing.
The original Tron costume lighting solution supposedly was created by a company called Oryon Technologies Inc and the product was Elastolite EL Panels – but they don’t seem to exist or have a web presence anymore.
There are hobbyist selling complete Tron cosplay kits, and others that show you how to screen-print your own El clothing:
Links:
Impossible Architecture in The Shining
A Quiet Side points out the set and hotel layout was intentionally impossible in some places. The hotel was a combination of 3 different real hotels. He suggests that was to make the hotel seem like a maze you couldn’t escape.
Even more interesting is he’s created probably the most architecturally accurate fully navigable 3D model of the Overlook Hotel in Enscape (download here). In doing so, he really shows off the impossible architectures the hotel has.
More than just confusion or giving the sense of a maze, I almost took it as a dream. I have occasionally had dreams in which you walk through a door from one place to a completely other place, or impossible switches from one place to another.
Kubrick does a good job of keeping this subtle enough that most people don’t notice these details even on re-watching.
But what if it were just a little bit more overt. What if you made a movie about being trapped in a hotel/place in which the past and future blend much more seamlessly forward and backwards in time, as well geometry that was arranged by locations where some horror or another happened more than just a logical layout. Where it’s much more dream-like and areas are connected by associations instead of physical layout? You would have to keep it very subtle to avoid it becoming the movie Inception or overdoing it; but it is and interesting idea to explore…