fashion and technology

The fashion world seems to be embracing technology more and more - loved this fashionpopcorn blog post about an Oasis launch that used quite a simple device to engage people, with specially commissioned poetry running on MP3 players for the audience. Artistically presented. I like that they also produced paper-based versions for people to take away as souvenirs.

Will be keeping an eye on this.

launch of the DCRC

Had a great time yesterday at the official launch of the Digital Cultures Research Centre. I met some interesting people and reconnected with old friends and collaborators who had come down to see what we are planning to do. It's an exciting time for all of us at the DCRC, and I am really pleased to be part of a great team of people. I even joined in with my colleagues, to draw with Tine Bech's lights, but refused the lure of the karaoke salon. I have seen the photos...............

don't forget your fiducial

I just popped out in my lunchbreak to watch some colleagues having fun playing with the Sancho Plan's new project on the BBC Big Screen outside the Pervasive Media Studio. They had to wave big cards with patterns on that triggered animated characters to appear on the screen and sing together in harmony.



Apologies for the flicker effect

Ada Lovelace Day

So here we are and it's Ada Lovelace Day again, when we are meant to blog about women we admire who are working in technology. Last year I wrote about my youngest daughter, admiring her tenaciousness at getting equal time to play with technology. This year in a spirit of shameless self-promotion I want to celebrate my two older daughters, who are now working together, and with me, developing ideas for new media/technology projects and cooking up plans for an interesting joint future

mini projector fun

I saw one of these in action at the BBC Blue Room that had travelled to Bristol to show people some nice bits of future technology at New Tools New Ways of Working.
It's an Optoma Pico PK 101 DLP mini projector, about the size of a mobile phone, that connects via video input to your device. The one I saw was projecting video from an iPhone, at roughly the same size as a 13" monitor. It says it can display up to 60". I have a vision of football matches being projected onto all available surfaces at family events. Needless to say I wanted one.
You can find out more here

babies do skype

clean speech

and speaking of phones, love this idea, that the phone can spot swear words in speech to text and replace them with a row of symbols. It reminded me of the story I was told by someone who was happily playing with his child's toy that translated text to speech, seeing how far he could go with typing in obscenities for the toy to declaim. He managed to get quite a few but there were some words that must have been deemed so foul by the designers that the toy would not even attempt to speak them out loud.

I am not sure whether I would want a piece of software to edit swearing out of speech, although on reflection, I can think of a few people I would like to nominate for permanent use of something similar, everytime they open their mouths.