Hardware
I think most of us who are passionate about programming and software are the sort of people who'd like to tinker with anything, I doubt there are many of us who didn't have Lego (or Meccano if you're a bit older). It's just that software is a bit cleaner, cheaper and less frustrating than making things out of metal, have you ever wished you could have an undo key in real life?
The point is that I'm still fascinated with real life things, whether its space shuttles, robots or lasers. But the really exciting stuff is real world things that I can hook up to a computer and write nice clean undoable software to make new stuff in the real world. There's been a couple of things I've come across recently that have really impressed me, the first was Matt Biddulphs experiments with hardware controllers hooked up to objects in Second Life. He was using an Arduino board, which is a small piece of hardware you can hook up over USB and use to control devices and receive feedback. Both the hardware design and all the accompanying software is open source, you can build your own board from off the shelf parts or buy one from a number of places for around £15 (£50 for a bluetooth version).
The next cool thing I came across was a new multi-touch screen technology. You may think that doesn't sound like all that, we've had touch screens for years, so you can touch it in two places, with this screen though you can touch it with as many body parts as you have! Plus it can sense pressure, this adds several new dimensions to your input interface. You can then make use of multi-finger gestures that are simple to do but convey much more information more precisely than you could with just a mouse/keyboard. There is a presentation on it here, well worth watching.
The last thing I came across just today was an experimental music sequencer which can be used as a toy or a learning device. You have physical blocks that represent samples, you chain them together and each one triggers the next with infra-red, you can move the blocks around in real time changing the flow, place them in circles to make it loop or fork it out into different paths. This would be great at a party for interactive colloborative DJing. You could apply this technology to more than music though, imagine hooking these blocks up to yahoo pipes to filter and process data feeds, or experiment with workflows. I really hope someone decides to manufacture these soon. Watch more videos on their site here.
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The point is that I'm still fascinated with real life things, whether its space shuttles, robots or lasers. But the really exciting stuff is real world things that I can hook up to a computer and write nice clean undoable software to make new stuff in the real world. There's been a couple of things I've come across recently that have really impressed me, the first was Matt Biddulphs experiments with hardware controllers hooked up to objects in Second Life. He was using an Arduino board, which is a small piece of hardware you can hook up over USB and use to control devices and receive feedback. Both the hardware design and all the accompanying software is open source, you can build your own board from off the shelf parts or buy one from a number of places for around £15 (£50 for a bluetooth version).
The next cool thing I came across was a new multi-touch screen technology. You may think that doesn't sound like all that, we've had touch screens for years, so you can touch it in two places, with this screen though you can touch it with as many body parts as you have! Plus it can sense pressure, this adds several new dimensions to your input interface. You can then make use of multi-finger gestures that are simple to do but convey much more information more precisely than you could with just a mouse/keyboard. There is a presentation on it here, well worth watching.
The last thing I came across just today was an experimental music sequencer which can be used as a toy or a learning device. You have physical blocks that represent samples, you chain them together and each one triggers the next with infra-red, you can move the blocks around in real time changing the flow, place them in circles to make it loop or fork it out into different paths. This would be great at a party for interactive colloborative DJing. You could apply this technology to more than music though, imagine hooking these blocks up to yahoo pipes to filter and process data feeds, or experiment with workflows. I really hope someone decides to manufacture these soon. Watch more videos on their site here.
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