Lay strips of a transparent, conductive material behind a sheet of glass onto which you are rear-projecting. Use the conductive strips for capacitive sensing, and recovering distance and position from the screen.
8/18/09: This is actually really common, I just hadn't heard of it. Whoops.
Drop an iPhone somewhere. Whenever the accelerometer reads motion, have it record video and send it back to a server wirelessly. Create a collection of "found cell phone" footage, of people discovering the cell phone and deciding what to do next.
Inspired by the U.Frame Festival category, "Light Media (films made with mobile phones)".
Almost all stencil graffiti operates on the principle of separating thresholding colors. Last summer, on the side of a Roman business, I saw another approach: line engraving. It made me wonder, "what other techniques have yet to be explored with stencils?"
The first one I've imagined is halftone stenciling. Ideally, there would be some cheap way to create a halftone stencil "printer" able to cut many small holes of variable size from card/paper. I can only imagine it involving some sort of spiral/conical head where variable depths correspond to variable diameters. With four layers we could reproduce images using a CMYK separation model. A quick prototype might be done with Illustrator and laser cutter.
Surprisingly, at least two people have endeavored to produce these by hand. One took two weeks, the other used paper instead of card ("no fucking way am i cutting a 1000's holes on card n lose all feeling in my index finger for 3weeks").
Update: it works. If you have access to a laser cutter, you can make your own.
BeatBearing is a tangible music sequencer driven by ball bearing placement.
A nearly equivalent system could be prototyped using a laptop screen and an overhead webcam. The screen would provide the "current position" line, and the camera would read the content. The main problem is obstruction, but there are better approximations (adding more cameras, mirrors, or assuming permanence for obstructed regions).
Furthermore, by removing the material constraint (i.e., ball bearings), we open up a number of possibilities. Multicolored jelly bean-based edible/tangible interfaces, anyone?
Update: I worked this one out, but with Skittles instead of jellybeans.
Whenever I hit "Ctrl-C" I get this feeling that something is now on the clipboard. Not just an impression, but as if I'm carrying it on my chest. As though my body has started to compensate in the physical for something that is virtual. It doesn't disappear until I hit "Ctrl-V".
Sometimes, when I'm about to hit "Ctrl-C", the weight becomes more apparent and I remember that there is something already on the clipboard that I haven't pasted yet. I'll paste it where intended and get back to copying.
Could we subvert this phenomena? What if pasting was non-linear, and whenever you hit "Ctrl-V" something from, perhaps, 5 copies ago appeared? Sometimes the last copy would appear as well, but most of the time it would be other copies.
Not that this would be useful in any everyday situation (though it could be) — it would be more of a catharsis.
Large spaces like libraries tend to have absurd amounts of very diffuse lighting. Most of this light is unnecessary. What would be nice is to attach to every light a micro controller that senses movement and light levels. In the most basic case, it would only turn the light on if there was movement and the light already available was below a certain threshold.
More advanced versions could learn about how much movement there was during different times of day, and how long people hung around in that space.
This seems like a fairly basic idea, so it has probably already been tested and rejected because it's too distracting or for some other reason.
Many graffiti stencils are based on images that have just been processed at a threshold for lightness. You might say they're "plotter" style stencils. I imagine another approach somewhere between "dot matrix" and "halftone": if you have a tool for making holes of one size, you can create darker areas by concentrating the holes. Borrowing from traditional color printing techniques, if you create three stencils for red, green and blue, you can produce a "full color" image. It would be good to automate the hole placement, or even choose aesthetically pleasing dithering algorithms.
This idea comes from a stencil I saw in Rome last night that used the kind of line art we have for the portraits on American currency. We might as well experiment with other approaches to stencil creation and construction as well.
One of the similarities between television programs and websites is their desire to attract individuals and keep them interested for as long as possible. However, there are a number of variables influencing people's interest. If we normalized for content driven interest, we can determine an optimal visual presentation using genetic algorithms (with visit length as the fitness function).
The main problem would be that people expect a website or television program to be a fairly continuous experience (with some exceptions, like MySpace, where each page is a different "space"). If every link felt like it took you to a new website, there'd be a severe decline in usability. One potential solution to this would be to have multiple populations, and have only minor variations for each user while there may be huge variations between users.
There's also very different considerations for different types of websites and programming (online stores vs. online news vs. game websites, television shopping vs. news programs vs. game shows...).
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