Today I had my final two midterm presentations. The Easy Radio RF transceivers are working. The erratic numbers coming through were due to a 4mhz clock being used on the PIC. Jeff Gray assisted me in a late night debug. It turns out that the serial data being received from the transceiver could net be read fast enough when the PIC was powered with a 4mhz crystal. We slapped on an external 20mhz oscillator and the data came through just fine. To say the least, the Easy Radios and I made up. And, a big thank you to Jeff for his assistance in troubleshooting.

The image to the left is from the Interactive 3D project I've been working on. The premise of the game is to launch a penguin onto a moving ice burg. The big news is that I finally get VirTools and have come to appreciate its benefits as an interactive platform. There are still a few bugs that need to be worked out with the web player. Once its cleaned up a bit it will be available to play on line. All in all the week went well.

For the past few days I'v primarily been working on my midterms for Networked Objects and Interactive 3D. On the 3D front things are moving along just fine. Texturing and scripting the interactions in VirTools takes time but the efforts are paying off. The terrain is more thoroughly modeled, the particle systems are working, and the physics engine research I did early on is paying off big time.

For Networked Objects, as a proof of concept for a project I'm working on in Toy Design, I've assembled the Easy Radio Transceiver circuits but have not been able to figure out what is being went across the line. I send an incremented bit value but the serial data on the other side is 'funny' data. I think the discombobulation has to do with how the data is being packaged, sent and decoded on the other side. More to come one both of these topics as I attempt to wrap things up today. Wish me luck!

The Reuters article about Bill Gates and the $100 laptop is quite funny when you plug in "said the richest man in the world" after every quote from Bill Gates. Here's and example:

"If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type," Said the richest man in the world.

Is he suggesting we'll get "somebody there who can help support the user" for a $100 as well? He must have some damn fine connections in Bangalore. What's funny is that his pink belly becomes exposed when he attempts to imagine what is must be like to 'crank a laptop'. Mr.Gates, do us all a favor and don't try to relate to poor people. Just hand out your money and we'll all be happy. OK?

Just about every morning I make coffee in a singe cup coffee maker. The process is fairly simple. There is an opening in the top which holds a filter. In the filter I place ground beans, add hot water and coffee comes out the bottom directly into my cup.

Over the weekend I came across something simple that made me very happy. The Melitta company has reissued the single cup device with a few improvements. They've added a gap at the bottom allowing you to see if the mug is full and if the coffee is done coming out the bottom. They've also added a sturdy rim in place of a tea cup handle which gives you a more stable grip for dealing with boiling hot liquids. These are small improvements that add up to a much better coffee making experience. I can see how much is in the cup! I can see if the coffee is done dripping!

Melitta is calling the redesigned product 'Ready, Set, Joe' (quite possibly the lamest name they could come up with) and attempting to market it as a 'for the travel mug' device. For the record I've never used it for a travel mug, but I'm sure it would work fine for that to.

I'm not writing about single cup coffee makers today because I think everyone should run out get one. Most people drink more than one cup at a time. I'm focusing on this product because it is a great example of how a few simple design considerations can have a great deal of impact on how we use things. In fact a few simple design consideration can improve things quite a bit. Thank you Melitta.

Josh Davis does some work for BMW
[via Rich Hauck]

Gizmodo has some good coverage of CBIT inclding phots of Recycle’o’saurus.

Interactive Architecture is always a good read.

And I know I know I know I'm a relativly later commre to jump on the tagging craze but I started using Kinja for blog content aggreation and del.icio.us for link sharing. Both are great tools that will help you be a better person. Happy Friday.

This week has been productive. Yesterday I presented my A-Z mid term. As a proof of concept for the kinetic sculpture, I built a java app which listens to incoming email on my NYU account, processes the incoming characters and then gives them to me one at a time. The characters are used to make a visualization based on the layout of the characters on a keyboard. The source code in the documentation is still a work in progress. Earlier this week the wood type arrived. Wood type is beautiful stuff. The upshot of all this that the back end for the kinetic text is in place and the front end is now under way too.

I also meet with Michael Olson to discuss my Interactive 3D midterm. I'm in the process of building a game where players get to launch penguins onto icebergs. In an interactive 3D environment (of course). After weeks of stumbling around VirTools is finally making more sense.

Anh and I have been working on our light box. We were able to send the shift register bytes and illuminate each side of the mirrored cube. More info will be published on our toy development on our toy design blog.

This past week has been a busy one (what else is new). On the 3D front I posted some screen captures of a penguin model I've been working on. Last week we learned about inverse kinematics chains in Maya. Our workflow has been to model and animate in Maya, export to VirTools where we author interactions with the 3D forms. VirTools has an extremely hard environment to learn. If you don't already have the VirTools web player, you should download it. Its a good plugin which is picking up steam as more companies are deliver 3D games and simulations. I'll be publishing some of the VirTools work I've been working on in the next few weeks.

The World Oil Clock is on the ITP window display for the next week. The ITP window display is on south west corner of Broadway at Waverly.

Last night I headed over to the Fredriek Taylor gallery for the Antenna opening. The work overall was not typical of the interactive environments Antenna has become known for but poses some interesting questions about how we interact with the urban environment. Worth checking out is your in the area.