You Don't Want to Know (via Super Punch)
Come with us into a world where everything is slowed down more than 100 times. Thanks to an expert videographer and editor named Tom Guilmette and a Vision Research Phantom Flex camera, we get a peek into an alternative universe — the same one we inhabit, but where the temporal element has been distorted in a variety of ways.
According to Guilmette on his Vimeo site:
“I was working a gig in Vegas with a brand new Phantom Flex high speed digital cinema camera. I had to try it out. In fact, I never did go to bed that night. I opened up a wormhole shooting at 2,564 frames per second.â€
Most video ambles by at somewhere between 24 and 30 frames per second when it’s shot and viewed, but when you play back this 2,564 frame-per-second video at the usual speed of 24 or 30fps, things are slowed down so much, you can see things you’d never be able to detect in real time.
I’m always amazed at the way extreme slow motion techniques can turn everyday occurrences into mind-bending art. Beyond that, I’m impressed with the way Guilmette makes his video so entertaining with convincing sound effects, music and sharp editing, further playing with speed differences to create an astonishing timescape.
Want to shoot one of these yourself? Get yourself a Phantom Flex camera, available for rental for $3000 a day.
More About: Digital Cinema, Slow Motion, Tom Guilmette, trending, video, Vision Research Phantom Flex camera
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The future does bring some rather interesting additions to the fore, among them include contact lenses that are capable of projecting images right on top of your retinas, according to researchers at the University of Washington who have been hard at work on super small and semi-transparent LEDs which will be integrated into existing contact lenses. To date, they managed to develop red and blue pixels, awaiting the day when they are able to figure out green ones to create full color displays. Now fret not that the images are just millimeters away from your retinas – they will still be in perfect focus, and once the display is turned off, everything else will end up being transparent. As the lenses themselves are inside your eyelids, you won’t be able to not see anything that is projected – so closing your eyes won’t work at all. Does this mean we will have to pay more to get ad-free contact lenses in the future? That is certainly open to debate.
Contact lenses of the future projects images onto eyeballs, By Ubergizmo, 11 Jan 2011. Top Stories : Contact lenses of the future projects images onto eyeballs, Verizon iPhone announced, CES Trends That You Should Not Miss,
Can you hear me now? Good, because the Verizon iPhone has finally made its public debut. Verizon made the announcement during its highly anticipated post-CES press conference in New York on Tuesday, noting that the device will be available for preorder starting February 3, and that the public will be able to pick it up from Verizon and Apple retail stores on February 10.
The phone being offered by Verizon is the same as the iPhone 4 that made its debut on AT&T in the summer of 2010, but with a slightly modified antenna and apparently no SIM slot. The device comes in 16GB and 32GB models for $199 and $299 with two-year contract, and can act as a 3G WiFi hotspot for up to five devices at a time (that's definitely something we can't do with our AT&T iPhones yet).
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A growing number of consumer electronics companies are integrating Skype client software into their products. Skype is winning some adoption on pocketable devices, and could potentially see a lot more growth in the mobile market soon due to the company's recent acquisition of Qik. Another area where Skype is starting to gain some ground is in the living room, on Internet-enabled televisions and set-top boxes.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, we saw Skype demoed on a number of different home theater products. Panasonic and LG introduced support for high-definition Skype video calling in some of their televisions last year. This year, Sony and Vizio are jumping on the bandwagon. In an effort to enable Skype calling on televisions that don't have the feature built in, Sony and Panasonic are also including it as a standard feature on on some of their Blu Ray players.
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Finger painting on the iPhone and iPod has become something of a phenomenon, thanks to apps like Brushes [iTunes link] and SketchBook Pro [iTunes link], and the work of high-profile artists like David Kassan, the New Yorker’s Jorge Colombo and David Hockney. In fact, Paris’s Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation is currently running an exhibition featuring Hockney’s iPad paintings until January 30.
But not everyone loves finger painting on the iPad. Like actual finger painting, it’s awkward and imprecise. Unfortunately, the current range of styluses for the iPad aren’t much help — instead of your finger, it feels like painting with a large, round eraser tip.
Which is why I was excited to discover Artists, a new kind of stylus that more closely resembles a paintbrush. It’s made with a long handle and soft bristles, which the creator, @nomadbrush, assures interested parties is “incredibly responsive.â€
While it doesn’t look like the brush will necessarily provide the precision myself and others are looking for, it could very well prove more intuitive for artists used to traditional tools.
We’ll have a full review when the stylus comes out in February. Check out the video above in the meantime.
[via Gizmodo]
More About: artists, design, ipad, ipad stylus, stylus
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The all-or-nothing funding site has had its fair share of successes in the past, but the TikTok and LunaTik multi-touch watch kits are on another level. The project reached its conclusion late Thursday evening, bringing in a staggering $941,648 from 13,511 backers in just 30 days. That figure is all the more impressive when you consider that TikTok+LunaTik’s original goal was only $15,000.
The project itself was born after Scott Wilson, the founder of the Chicago-based design studio MINIMAL, first saw the new iPod nano. When we spoke to Wilson last month, he explained it was clear that the device could be a great wrist watch, after seeing the size and shape of the new nano. Wilson wasn’t alone. To date, scores of companies have brought their own iPod nano watch straps or kits to market.
When the success of TikTok and LunaTik became clear, Wilson took measures to ramp up production at the factories in China. Through the course of the project, Wilson has offered up additional updates on the status of the kits, created a website for interested users who missed out on the Kickstarter pledge bonanza at Lunatik.com and promoted other worthy Kickstarter projects.
When speaking with Wilson, it was evident to us that he recognized that actually manufacturing and distributing LunaTik and TikTok would be a massive undertaking. Coordinating with the factories, preparing packaging and handling shipping are not trivial tasks, especially when talking about an order of this size.
Earlier this week, just ahead of the project’s closing date, Wilson uploaded a video compilation of his trip to China, showing off his hands-on time with the manufacturing process.
These updates and this “inside look†at how something moves from concept, to prototype, to finished project are part of what we think makes Kickstarter so special. Beyond just acting as a great way to raise funds, the ability to share updates and include backers in the journey is unique. Aspiring entrepreneurs are encouraged to take notes on Wilson’s approach to making the most out of Kickstarter.
As a backer of this project, I can’t wait to get the final product in my hands — and on my wrist. What do you think about Kickstarter’s potential for funding small and large scale projects?
More About: ipod nano, kickstarter, lunatik, tiktok
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When it comes to user experience, designers and developers must do much more than present their users with a “pretty face†web page.
The user experience (UX) of a site or app involves much more than looks; the UX is something that lingers on after the user has left your site. It lies in ease of use, perceived value, whether desired goals were achieved and so much more. The user interface (UI) is only part of that larger experience, but it can contribute much to a user’s impression of the app.
In writing about the best web designs of 2010, form and function each played a large role in determining our choices. But when we think about user experience, function takes absolute precedence.
What sites and apps were the most interesting, the most useful, the most innovative of the past year? In this post, we examine five groundbreaking new UX/UIs from 2010 and discuss how each one expands our expectations of the user experience.
One of the earlier launches this year, Quora was a buzz-heavy private beta service in 2009. As a product of some of the best design minds at Facebook, the site was almost guaranteed to have an excellent UX from the start.
We love Quora’s elegant interactions. It looks simple; it prompts instant and easy engagement; and it takes the hide-and-seek elements of a Q&A site away, leaving the user with a trove of relevant information at his or her fingertips.
We’re not the only ones who love Quora’s design. For a bit of meta navel-gazing, read this Quora Q&A on why people like Quora’s design.
Initially, another thing that made Quora’s UX so excellent was the quality of its membership. Have a question about Facebook? A Facebooker would likely answer it. Questions about venture capital? Here are some actual investors to talk to you. Marketing? Ad execs were on the site, too.
One thing we loved about Hipmunk from the start is that it took a traditionally bad user experience — airline flight search — and made it into a good one.
This startup reimagined the most important element of online flight search: how results are displayed. It took a convoluted, multi-entry/multi-exit process and made it simple to behold and linear to walk through, creating a user experience that is far from the stress-inducing nightmare flight search once was.
The company has also hinted it will be turning its eyes toward other types of travel services soon, possibly hotel search. We can’t wait.
To get the big picture, check out the video above, and the excellent interview blogger Robert Scoble conducted with Hipmunk co-founder Steve Huffman.
Seesmic launched a new iteration of its popular desktop app just a couple months ago. Dubbed Seesmic Desktop 2, the application also included an entire marketplace of plugins, making SD2 an all-in-one social media access point — a great set of features for run-of-the-mill social media narcissists, as well as businesses that need more control and monitoring tools for their web efforts.
Seesmic’s Silverlight-built, Mac- and Windows-compatible product also came wrapped in a gorgeous and functional UI with elegant and subtle details, making it a joy to behold as well as a pleasure to use.
During some turbulent times for third-party applications, Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur proved his very salient point: If you make a great product, build in great functionality, and give users a great experience, you can still build a business on someone else’s platform.
Flipboard launched this year as one of the first iPad apps that sought to reimagine social media for a new form factor.
The tablet gave designers and developers a chance to think about lean-back, glossy, high-end design experiences. Of course, magazines had a heyday; their content is already almost a perfect fit for the iPad. But when you think about social media content — those messy, spaghetti-like, intertwining and overlapping feeds of drama, irrelevance and the occasional gem — you begin to see what a challenge the makers of Flipboard had on their hands. Could social media be both beautiful and functional on a tablet?
Flipboard integrates personalized Twitter and Facebook feeds to build a social magazine for each user. In an initial review we called it “gorgeous and a pleasure to use,†and the app has continued to rack up the platitudes from social media junkies around the web. Its core value proposition is more than just its beautiful, mag-like design; it makes the experience of reading social feeds simpler, faster and better.
Without a doubt, 2010 has been the first big year for Internet-connected living room devices. We’ve seen cool things in the past from PlayStation, Xbox and Boxee; however, 2010 brought something new: affordability and ease of entry.
Roku’s set-top boxes start at just $60; already priced to win. Each model also comes with built-in WiFi and they are easy to install — they practically set themselves up. They connect to some of the most popular Internet content providers, including Netflix, MLB.tv and now Hulu, as well.
The Roku UI is simple, clean, bright and intuitive; it reminds us of the more user-friendly gaming interfaces, like that of Nintendo’s Wii. It’s a design language that says, “I’m not technical; I’m fun.†Very quickly, the design itself fades into the background and the content becomes all the user notices.
In a word, Roku’s UX is amazing because it makes something that was supposed to be complicated and scary (bringing Internet content to the living room) inexpensive, easy and a pleasure to use.
Those are five of our favorite user experiences from 2010; we’d love to know what impressed you this year. In the comments, tell us about the apps, devices and websites that you’ve loved using throughout 2010 or nominate them for a Mashable Award.
In partnership with Cirque du Soleil, The Mashable Awards Gala event will bring together the winners and nominees, the Mashable community, partners, media, the marketing community, consumer electronics and technology brands and attendees from the 2011 International CES Convention to Las Vegas on Thursday, January 6, 2011. Together, we will celebrate the winners and the community of the Mashable Awards at the Cirque du Soleil Zumanity stage in the beautiful New York New York Hotel. The event will include acts and performances from our partner Cirque du Soleil Zumanity. In addition, there will be special guest presenters and appearances.
Date: Thursday, January 6th, 2011 (during International CES Convention week)
Time: 7:00 – 10:00 pm PT
Location: Cirque du Soleil Zumanity, New York New York Hotel, Las Vegas
Agenda: Networking, Open Bars, Acts, Surprises and the Mashable Awards Gala presentations
Socialize: Facebook, Foursquare, Meetup, Plancast, Twitter (Hashtag: #MashableAwards)
Sponsorships are available. Please contact sponsorships@mashable.com for more information.
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From a group of 20 street performers at its beginnings in 1984, Cirque du Soleil is now a global entertainment organization providing high-quality artistic entertainment. The company has over 5,000 employees, including more than 1,200 artists from close to 50 different countries.
Cirque du Soleil has brought wonder and delight to nearly 100 million spectators in 300 cities on five continents. In 2010 Cirque du Soleil, will present 21 shows simultaneously throughout the world, including seven in Las Vegas.
For more information about Cirque du Soleil, visit www.cirquedusoleil.com
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Join us at the 2011 International CES®, the global platform for inspired ideas and innovation. With 2,500 exhibitors, CES continues to be the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow and always reflects the dynamic consumer electronics industry. The International CES is not open to the general public and all attendees must be in the CE industry to be eligible to attend the show. Register FREE for the 2011 CES with priority code MSHB, an exclusive promotion for Mashable Readers.
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Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications including the BlackBerry® wireless platform and the new BlackBerry PlayBook. For the latest on the BlackBerry PlayBook visit the Inside BlackBerry Blog.
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Mobile Future is a broad-based coalition of businesses, non-profit organizations and individuals interested in and dedicated to advocating for an environment in which innovations in wireless technology and services are enabled and encouraged. Our mission is to educate the public and key decision makers on innovations in the wireless industry that have transformed the way Americans work and play and to advocate continued investment in wireless technologies.
Our “Mobile Year in Review 2010†animation proves a glimpse into the most notable breakthroughs in the wireless industry this year.
Yahoo! is an innovative technology company that operates the largest digital media, content, and communications business in the world. Yahoo! keeps more than half a billion consumers worldwide connected to what matters to them most, and delivers powerful audience solutions to advertisers through its unique combination of Science + Art + Scale. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit the company’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal.
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Aro Mobile is an intelligent mobile experience that includes better email, connected contacts, smarter calendar and improved browsing.
The Aro system automatically learns what’s important in your life—the people, places, dates and organizations you care about most. In your communications, Aro automatically identifies people, places, events, dates,organizations and locations. From any recognized term, Aro offers quick action menus to speed up your day.
The unique Aro experience is powered by advanced web services: next generation natural language processing and semantic data analytics services. Aro gives you the power to see through the clutter and focus your mobile life.
Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications including the BlackBerry® wireless platform and the new BlackBerry PlayBook. For the latest on the BlackBerry PlayBook visit the Inside BlackBerry Blog.
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Influxis specializes in the deployment of creative streaming solutions. Services include large scale deployment, mobile streaming, turn-key applications, and enterprise support with custom network options. With the unique combination of a worldwide network, knowledgeable developer support and nearly a decade of streaming media experience, Influxis is an essential partner to businesses, advertisers, developers, educators, and others who seek expertise in innovative streaming.
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Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications including the BlackBerry® wireless platform and the new BlackBerry PlayBook. For the latest on the BlackBerry PlayBook visit the Inside BlackBerry Blog.
More About: best user experience, best ux, Flipboard, hipmunk, ix, mashable awards, mashable awards 2010, quora, UI, user experience, ux/ui
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Nestled amongst the many funny and delightful reviews for the AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cable, an 8-foot audio cable that sells for $6,800.00 (a $1,650.00 savings!) is this wonderful short science fiction story by Whisper, an Amazon customer in California:
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.Click through for the exciting finale!PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long... I will type as fast as I can.
DO NOT USE THE CABLES!
We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this... accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the... whispers... began.
Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly... we began to UNDERSTAND.
No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER!
I have only a little time..., (via Making Light)
Walt Disney: One Man's Dream Reopens With New Magic, Fond Memories at Disney's Hollywood Studios