Archive for May, 2008
Today, the WorldWide Telescope was released as a public beta by Microsoft. It is now available for download at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org.
The WorldWide Telescope is virtual telescope software for browsing imagery of the universe from a variety of sources. This learning resource provides a smooth and seamless user experience that allows users to explore the sky, while understanding context and scale of what they are looking at. The exploration experience is enhanced by a highly visual interface for finding the good stuff in the sky and guided tours made by other users.
Over the last year Artefact collaborated with Microsoft researchers Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay on the design of this simple user interface that always provides a sense of context, scale, and direction. We consulted on the overall user experience design of the application as well as the WWT branding and website.
Congratulations to Curtis and Jonathan on releasing such a compelling experience that will captivate many people around the world!
May 13th, 2008
Look. I know why you’re reading this, and just to get it out of the way, this post has nothing to do with erotic bondage. Now that we’re clear, I’d like to share with you a little project I scoped at MOMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit last weekend. This interactive table combines old school arcade gaming with super old school gladiator pain and suffering. Compete head to head with your best bud. Win a point and dude gets subjected to mechanized assault via rubber whip, electric shock, or singeing blast of hot air. Lose a point, and you get the same snappy torture. Force feedback is great, but I’ll stick with dual-shock controllers for the time being. Discover your inner masochist at the official painstation site.
May 13th, 2008
Today in London, HTC unveiled the Touch Diamond flagship phone. HTC has taken a great leap forward in touch screen innovation with the introduction of its new 3D touch interface called TouchFLO 3D. TouchFLO 3D provides animated access to people, messaging, email, photos, music, weather and more. We collaborated with HTC’s innovation team in Seattle on concept, design, prototyping and helping build this UI over a nine month period. We will write a more elaborate case study on our involvment shortly. For now Congratulations to the Design and Development team at HTC, on a great product release!. Looking for more great press like the following great quotes;
“The UI is absolutely amazing and takes what you see on the latest HTC Touch to a new level that should appeal to many people looking for a rich experience from their mobile device.” – Mathew Miller, ZDNET
“There’s a lot of fluidity to the overall user experience, That’s something HTC can use to try and differentiate from other Windows Mobile devices.”– Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research.
“They have done a lot of work on top of the platform to make the user experience more enjoyable, and other phones will start to look very disappointing by comparison.”– Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight.
May 6th, 2008
It’s with deep sadness that I received email from the Bellevue store manager, that NAU has had to cease operations. The blurb on their website informs us that they could not raise the necessary funds to continue to move forward. I suspect this is an especially tricky time for retailers who must raise lots of capitol to design and build out their inventories way in advance of a sale. For a limited time they will continue operations on the website and they have a 50% off sale.
For those who don’t know them, NAU was an exceptionally innovative small company, socially and environmentally driven they donated 5% of every purchase to a environmental, social or humanitarian partners. They innovated with an in-store experience touch screen console where you could try on clothes in store and save money by having it shipped to your home directly. There was lots of other innovations in the clothes themselves they developed 24 new fabrics focused on sustainability, performance and beauty. The design aesthetic always emphasized an elegant simplicity with great attention to details of cuts, seams, stitching.
Nau where also very helpful in assisting us with the development of our NAU concept e-commerce experience and frankly they just seemed like some great people, who were not just making great clothes but making a big difference in the process. Bugger.
May 5th, 2008