During the Olympics, visitors to the BC Canada Pavilion will have the chance to play with The Curious Tree, created by our sister division Switch Interactive. This multi-touch cube features five-foot-wide panels featuring scenes of a tree in a west coast forest in spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each scene is identical, except for season-specific colour palettes and interactive experiences. By touching the panels, visitors can transform the forest, making flowers grow, leaves fall, icicles form, kites fly, and much more. The entire surface of the panels is interactive, allowing for multiple users and a whole array of visual effects that fill the screen. Complemented by whimsical sounds created by an award-winning composer, the user-generated experience recreates the sights and sounds of a BC forest throughout the year. Check out The Curious Tree at the BC Canada Pavilion (at the Vancouver Art Gallery) from 10 am to 5 pm, February 12 to 28.
Thanks to our Myron Campbell and Alex Beim of Tangible Interaction for last week’s incredibly fun Draw by Night event. Organized by Myron, the monthly drawing party went interactive as we got a chance to try out Alex’s Digital Graffiti Wall. Equipped with “spray cans” we had a blast digitally “painting” and “repainting” the two large screens set up in Emily Carr’s Intersections Digital Studios. Sometimes, you’ve just got to marvel at technology. For me, this was one of those times!
The Sensacell system is a human interface technology. The modules can be assembled to form interactive sensor surfaces of any size or shape from a single module to thousands of square feet, providing absolute sensing resolution. Each module contains high-brightness LED lighting arrays controlled by an on-board digital dimmer. LEDs are available in many colours, shapes, and sizes, providing a wide variety of stunning visual feedback possibilities.
I consider myself a pretty savvy web user, and so it’s sometimes easy for me to forget that the web – even for all its user-centric 2.0 wonderfulness – is still an unwieldy and disconnected place. Which is why I’m incredibly excited about Mozilla’s most recent project, Ubiquity – it solves browsing problems that are so inherent into the nature of the web, I wasn’t even aware they could be solved.
How cool would it be to see a building in a real estate ad or a 3D Mario on a Nintendo standee using this technology?! The technology is from HITlabs at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and was used for the Wellington Zoo.
One of our preferred suppliers, Metropolitan Fine Printers and its research and development arm, Enviro Image Solutions (EIS), were big winners at Print Action’s 2008 Environmental Printing Awards (EPA), taking top honours in three categories — the highest number of awards won by any printer in Canada.
I consider myself a pretty savvy web user, and so it’s sometimes easy for me to forget that the web – even for all its user-centric 2.0 wonderfulness – is still an unwieldy and disconnected place. Which is why I’m incredibly excited about Mozilla’s most recent project, 
