Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Dentsu London has created an amazing iPad/Stop motion animation. Very cool!

Thought I would share a couple of technologies that I’ll think we will start hearing quite a bit about in the next few months. Real time motion capture via a 3D camera is now within reach for independent developers. I’ve always been interested in immersive design that can respond to a person in real time in a natural and intuitive way but without using cumbersome remotes or controllers. This seems like it has real potential to do that and can plug directly into Flash or Unity.

A book signing and lecture by designer James Victore will be tomorrow night.

OK, truth be told, it is quite often that a designer or illustrator is presented with a ‘boring assignment’.  As an illustrator, I always think “why are they punishing me with such a boring topic, what did I do to deserve this?”  Over the years I came to realize that they KNOW it’s a boring assignment!  That’s why they are hiring an illustrator to  figure out a way to make the article, topic readable and hopefully it’s actually because I’m a creative person that they hired me!

So, I’ve always been impressed when I stumble upon something that is truly fun for what I know had to have made the artist’s heart sink when they first heard the topic:

Case in point.

Digital Nature is an evening of new media at the Denver Botanical Gardens. I’ll be showing an iPhone game that I’ve designed for the event.

UC Denver Live!’s Justice/Injustice series of lectures and presentations will explore through the eyes of artists who use different mediums of expression the realities and dubious nature of justice and injustice as it exists today in our society. The artists will be available for question and answer periods after their presentations. The series is free and open to the public.

Details…

Educators are constantly looking for new ways to impart learning, can World of Warcraft help? Some researchers think we should be looking at popular games for answers.

Great news for designers that want to code in Flash or any other language besides Objective-C! Apple TOS now allows third-party development applications for iPhones/iPads.

What this means is that you can code in tools like Flash, Unity, UDK or anything else as long as the resulting App complies with the App store guidelines. Flash still won’t run in the iOS browser, but games and applications built in Flash can be downloaded from the App store once approved. This takes away a lot of the uncertainty in the design world about how to make apps for the iPhone and allows developers to use the tools they are most comfortable with.

Here is the schedule for this year’s CAM live at Starz theater, there are some really interesting topics this year and I would encourage everyone to attend. These take place on Wednesdays @ 11:30 and you are welcome to bring lunch with you. You can download the PDF version and read the details of each presentation.

I have created a new page to document a series of videos that came out of a talk given at  ixd10 and SXSW in 2010.  Find it under Courses>Interactive>Interactive Links > Right Way to Wireframe.  IX11 will be in Boulder in February 2011, should be really cool.

I know students always want to know the “right” way to do things, I think it’s a useful reminder that ultimately it is whatever works for you and your needs. This series of videos show several interactive designer’s process of creating a wireframe and it shows how various tools can be useful to that end.

If you are not sure what exactly a wireframe is, check out this presentation by information architect Nick Finck.