Tag Archives: John Brownlee

Michelangelo, clinical anatomy, mathematics, the Golden Ratio, and a myth

I would have thought an article about Michelangelo, mathematics, and the Golden Ratio would be in a journal dedicated to the arts or mathematics or possibly both. Not even my tenth guess would  have been Clinical Anatomy. As for the myth, not everyone subscribes to the Golden Ratio theory of beauty.

A July 20, 2015 Wiley Periodicals press release (also on EurekAlert) announces the publication of the research,

New research provides mathematical evidence that Michelangelo used the Golden Ratio of 1.6 when painting The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Golden Ratio is found when you divide a line into two parts so that the longer part divided by the smaller part is equal to the whole length divided by the longer part.

The Golden Ratio has been linked with greater structural efficiency and has puzzled scientists for centuries due to its frequent occurrence in nature–for example in snail shells and flower petals. The Golden Ratio can also be found in a variety of works by architects and designers, in famous musical compositions, and in the creations of many artists.

The findings suggest that the beauty and harmony found in the works of Michelangelo may not be based solely on his anatomical knowledge. He likely knew that anatomical structures incorporating the Golden Ratio offer greater structural efficiency and, therefore, he used it to enhance the aesthetic quality of his works.

“We believe that this discovery will bring a new dimension to the great work of Michelangelo,” said Dr. Deivis de Campos, author of the Clinical Anatomy study.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

More than a neuroanatomical representation in The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo Buonarroti, a representation of the Golden Ratio by Deivis De Campos, Tais Malysz,  João Antonio Bonatto-Costa, Geraldo Pereira Jotz, Lino Pinto De Oliveira Junior, and Andrea Oxley da Rocha. Clinical Anatomy DOI: 10.1002/ca.22580 Article first published online: 17 JUL 2015

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This paper is open access.

Golden Ratio myth

One final comment, it seems not everyone is convinced that the Golden Ratio plays an important role in design, art, and architecture according to an April 13, 2015 article by John Brownlee for Fast Company titled: The Golden Ratio: Design’s Biggest Myth,

In the world of art, architecture, and design, the golden ratio has earned a tremendous reputation. Greats like Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí have used the number in their work. The Parthenon, the Pyramids at Giza, the paintings of Michelangelo, the Mona Lisa, even the Apple logo are all said to incorporate it.

It’s bullshit. The golden ratio’s aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don’t use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There’s also no science to really back it up. Those who believe the golden ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam.

Fascinating, non?

Nano-enabled toothbrush uses water only for cleansing teeth

Milan Design Week (April 14 – 19, 2015) generally doesn’t generally feature here but the introduction of a nano-enabled toothbrush which will keep your teeth looking like they were just cleaned at the dental office and doesn’t require toothpaste cannot be ignored. From an April 13, 2015 article by John Brownlee for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

Designer Kosho Ueshima collaborated with Japanese technology company Yumeshokunin to create an incredible toothbrush that uses nanotechnology to clean your teeth—no toothpaste necessary. The brush’s bristles—which are 0.178 millimeters thick—are coated in mineral ions, and when passed over your teeth, the ions remove stains and form a protective coating over your enamel. To activate the brush, all that’s needed is a dip in a cup of water.

Meant to resemble a stream of running water, the brush is named Misoka, which means “last day of the month,” in Japanese. That also happens to be the lifespan of these brushes, requiring a change of bristles every 30 days.

Here’s the latest version of the toothbrush,

NanoToothBrush

A ??, ??, 2015 article by Jessica Zannoti for Social Design Magazine, provides more details,

The project is a collaboration with the company Yumeshokunin Co. LTD of Osaka entrusting the nanotechnology mineral development of its products.

Yumeshokunin – “artisan of dreams” in Japanese – combines craftsmanship with advanced technology, with the idea of ​​”convey feeling in the world.”

Misoka: nanotechnology, mineral ions and water (pure)

The objects that make use of nanotechnology are characterized by the size of the order of a billionth of a meter. The bristles of the toothbrush misoka are in fact coated with mineral ions of nanometric dimensions. As you brush, the ions move in the water and pass the bristles to the teeth by removing stains, coating them and keeping them clean and shiny all day.

Unlike traditional bristles, those misoka thin on the tips for better cleaning and massaging the interdental areas. Even without toothpaste, teeth are shiny and clean as just come out of a session of teeth cleaning at the dentist.

The expression misoka Japanese for “last day of the month” and the toothbrush should be replaced every month just, after which time it deteriorates and loses its effectiveness. Misoka also due Misogi word meaning “to purify body and spirit with pure water.” If you brush your teeth with misoka means using energy minerals – noted Kosho Ueshima at the design stage – then this gesture is equivalent to simply brush with water. The result is a new way to brush teeth.

I have not been able to unearth more information about the mineral ions being used to clean teeth. According to Zanotti and other sources, the toothbrush has been available since 2007 in the Japanese and Asian markets. 2015 marks the toothbrush’s introduction to Europe.

You might be able to find out more about the product and the mineral ions on the Yumeshokunin website but you will need Japanese language reading skills.

Visual data that’s good enough to eat

John Brownlee in a June 30, 2014 article for Fast Company explores a facet of data visualization upending the notion that this is a purely visual specialty (Note: Links have been removed),

It would be fair to say that visualization maestro Moritz Stefaner eats up data. Over the years, he has used data for everything from identifying the world’s selfiest cities to showing the hidden network stringing together the world’s scientific institutions.

It was probably only a matter of time before Stefaner made his consumption of data literal. Stefaner is now exploring a new frontier in data viz. It’s called Data Cuisine, and it’s all about cooking up infographics that you can literally eat: a pizza that conveys the patterns of 100 years of Italian immigration, for example, or a salmon mousse that explores the environmental impacts of commercial fishing over the past decade.

Here’s one of the dishes you can see should you visit the Data Cuisine website’s Data Dishes webpage,

RequiemForScience

This fascinating dish provides a multi-layered representation of a simple, but striking statistic: science funding in Spain was cut by a staggering 34% over the last few years.

Antonija Kuzmanic decided to represent this huge drop in funding with two almond cakes (Tortas de Santiago) — based on the same recipe, but prepared differently. The first one was made applying “scientific” techniques (foaming the dough with a siphon and microwaving it for 45 seconds), representing the situation before the cuts, while the second cake represents today.

It was baked in the traditional way without advanced techniques, and turned out considerably drier and denser. In addition, the amount of sugar used in the cakes is proportional to the different amounts of funding in science, resulting in a much less enjoyable experience for the “non-science” cake.

 

Brownlee’s article offers a good overview of the project, the two organizers Mauritz Stefaner and Susanne Jaschko, and the first two workshops that were held in Helsinki (Nov. 2013) and in Barcelona (June 2014), respectively.

While Data Cuisine seems the best organized of the food data visualization movement, the proponents note other efforts on their Resources and reference projects page.

Scientific A, B, Cs

Thanks to John Brownlee and his May 15, 2014 article on Fast Company about a fascinating project which marries typography/lettering  (the artist refers to her work as ‘lettering’) with scientific inventions (Note: A link has been removed),

If you’ve ever wondered how a Faraday circuit, a steam engine, or a cyclotron works, this is the typeface for you.

A glossary of the 26 inventions that have most changed the world have been turned into a literal ABCs, thanks to a new typeface by New Delhi design student Khyati Trehan.

Trehan has placed some of the material for her project, The Beauty of Scientific Diagrams on Behance (an online portfolio),

The project aims to explore scientific diagrams and take form integration to more complex territories. It looks at experimenting with typography, lettering and illustration, paying tribute to the history of science.

Since making the perfect match between the letter and the diagram was such a task, choosing the invention or the discovery was hardly up to me but dependent on what I could find (double coincidence of wants). I couldn’t find appropriate diagrams that looked like the letters they needed to be morphed into for P, X and Q.

Also, blogsfeaturing this project have been calling this a typeface for some reason but in no way is it a typeface. [emphasis mine] It’s lettering. Making a typeface is a completely different ball game and in my opinion, is much much harder.

Purchase prints at http://society6.com/KhyatiTrehan

Here’s one image from the sampling she offers in her online portfolio,

Downloaded from http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Beauty-of-Scientific-Diagrams/11833563

Downloaded from http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Beauty-of-Scientific-Diagrams/11833563

Trehan has also documented The Beauty of Scientific Diagrams project on the ISSUU digital publishing platform where you will find an 84 pp. report in English and links to supporting documentation in English and French.

The Beauty of Scientific Diagrams

A documentation of my 2nd elective done as a student of Graphic Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

The very curious can find more about India’s National Institute of Design here. From the institute’s Right to Information webpage,

The National Institute of Design (NID) is one of the foremost multi-disciplinary institutions in the field of design education, applied research, training, design consultancy services and outreach programmes. NID is a Society registered under the Societies Registration Act,1860 (21 of 1860) and also registered under the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950 (29 of 1950) and established in 1961 as an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Industry (now known as the Ministry of Commerce and Industry).

I was quite interested to see that the institute hosted an Indo-French Design Conclave in October 2013,

Indo French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research (CEFIPRA) is an autonomous body for bilateral scientific cooperation between India and France, promoting collaborative research in cutting edge science and technology fields.

CEFIPRA in partnership with NID (National institute of Design), Ahmedabad are holding a Design Conclave cutting across disciplines in the design and engineering, on 21st and 22nd October 2013in New Delhi.

This would be a preceding event for the international Technology Summit, New Delhi during 23-24th October 2013 with France as the partner country.

The goal of this conclave is to explore the possibility of Indo-French collaborations in the interface of engineering and design through:

a) Scientific research
b) Design and Technology collaborative Research
c) Student and Faculty mobility
c) Industrial (especially SMEs [small to medium enterprises]) …

This may help to explain the French reference materials informing Trehan’s project.

A wearable book (The Girl Who Was Plugged In) makes you feel the protagonists pain

A team of students taking an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) course called ‘Science Fiction to Science Fabrication‘ have created a new kind of category for books, sensory fiction.  John Brownlee in his Feb. 10, 2014 article for Fast Company describes it this way,

Have you ever felt your pulse quicken when you read a book, or your skin go clammy during a horror story? A new student project out of MIT wants to deepen those sensations. They have created a wearable book that uses inexpensive technology and neuroscientific hacking to create a sort of cyberpunk Neverending Story that blurs the line between the bodies of a reader and protagonist.

Called Sensory Fiction, the project was created by a team of four MIT students–Felix Heibeck, Alexis Hope, Julie Legault, and Sophia Brueckner …

Here’s the MIT video demonstrating the book in use (from the course’s sensory fiction page),

Here’s how the students have described their sensory book, from the project page,

Sensory fiction is about new ways of experiencing and creating stories.

Traditionally, fiction creates and induces emotions and empathy through words and images.  By using a combination of networked sensors and actuators, the Sensory Fiction author is provided with new means of conveying plot, mood, and emotion while still allowing space for the reader’s imagination. These tools can be wielded to create an immersive storytelling experience tailored to the reader.

To explore this idea, we created a connected book and wearable. The ‘augmented’ book portrays the scenery and sets the mood, and the wearable allows the reader to experience the protagonist’s physiological emotions.

The book cover animates to reflect the book’s changing atmosphere, while certain passages trigger vibration patterns.

Changes in the protagonist’s emotional or physical state triggers discrete feedback in the wearable, whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localized temperature fluctuations.

Our prototype story, ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ by James Tiptree showcases an incredible range of settings and emotions. The main protagonist experiences both deep love and ultimate despair, the freedom of Barcelona sunshine and the captivity of a dark damp cellar.

The book and wearable support the following outputs:

  • Light (the book cover has 150 programmable LEDs to create ambient light based on changing setting and mood)
  • Sound
  • Personal heating device to change skin temperature (through a Peltier junction secured at the collarbone)
  • Vibration to influence heart rate
  • Compression system (to convey tightness or loosening through pressurized airbags)

One of the earliest stories about this project was a Jan. 28,2014 piece written by Alison Flood for the Guardian where she explains how vibration, etc. are used to convey/stimulate the reader’s sensations and emotions,

MIT scientists have created a ‘wearable’ book using temperature and lighting to mimic the experiences of a book’s protagonist

The book, explain the researchers, senses the page a reader is on, and changes ambient lighting and vibrations to “match the mood”. A series of straps form a vest which contains a “heartbeat and shiver simulator”, a body compression system, temperature controls and sound.

“Changes in the protagonist’s emotional or physical state trigger discrete feedback in the wearable [vest], whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localised temperature fluctuations,” say the academics.

Flood goes on to illuminate how science fiction has explored the notion of ‘sensory books’ (Note: Links have been removed) and how at least one science fiction novelist is responding to this new type of book,,

The Arthur C Clarke award-winning science fiction novelist Chris Beckett wrote about a similar invention in his novel Marcher, although his “sensory” experience comes in the form of a video game:

Adam Roberts, another prize-winning science fiction writer, found the idea of “sensory” fiction “amazing”, but also “infantalising, like reverting to those sorts of books we buy for toddlers that have buttons in them to generate relevant sound-effects”.

Elise Hu in her Feb. 6, 2014 posting on the US National Public Radio (NPR) blog, All Tech Considered, takes a different approach to the topic,

The prototype does work, but it won’t be manufactured anytime soon. The creation was only “meant to provoke discussion,” Hope says. It was put together as part of a class in which designers read science fiction and make functional prototypes to explore the ideas in the books.

If it ever does become more widely available, sensory fiction could have an unintended consequence. When I shared this idea with NPR editor Ellen McDonnell, she quipped, “If these device things are helping ‘put you there,’ it just means the writing won’t have to be as good.”

I hope the students are successful at provoking discussion as so far they seem to have primarily provoked interest.

As for my two cents, I think that in a world where it seems making personal connections  is increasingly difficult (i.e., people becoming more isolated) that sensory fiction which stimulates people into feeling something as they read a book seems a logical progression.  It’s also interesting to me that all of the focus is on the reader with no mention as to what writers might produce (other than McDonnell’s cheeky comment) if they knew their books were going to be given the ‘sensory treatment’. One more musing, I wonder if there might a difference in how males and females, writers and readers, respond to sensory fiction.

Now for a bit of wordplay. Feeling can be emotional but, in English, it can also refer to touch and researchers at MIT have also been investigating new touch-oriented media.  You can read more about that project in my Reaching beyond the screen with the Tangible Media Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) posting dated Nov. 13, 2013. One final thought, I am intrigued by how interested scientists at MIT seem to be in feelings of all kinds.

Getting the logos they deserve: 50 physicists and mathematicians

There are some 50 logos created by Dr. Prateek Lala of the University of Toronto (Canada) on behalf of various physicists and mathematicians. Before showing any of these clever logos, here’s a bit more about Dr. Lala’s logos in John Brownlee’s Feb. 5, 2014 article for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

The scientific typographics were created by Dr. Prateek Lala, a physician and amateur calligrapher from Toronto. Inspired by the type biographies of Indian graphic designer Kapil Bhagat, Lala designed his logos to make the lives and discoveries of various scientists more engaging and immediately relatable to students.

Kelly Oakes in a Feb. 3, 2014 post for BuzzFeed features 20 of the logos and I’ve downloaded two of them for here,

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) formulated the equations that describe electricity, magnetism, and optics as manifestations of the same phenomenon – the electromagnetic field. He’s also the namesake of Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment in which a hypothetical demon violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Credit: Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) formulated the equations that describe electricity, magnetism, and optics as manifestations of the same phenomenon – the electromagnetic field. He’s also the namesake of Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment in which a hypothetical demon violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Credit: Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

I particularly enjoy how Dr. Lala has introduced the ‘demon’ into the logo. And then, there’s this one,

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a biophysicist who used X-ray diffraction data to determine the structures of complex minerals and living tissues, including – famously – DNA. Credit: Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a biophysicist who used X-ray diffraction data to determine the structures of complex minerals and living tissues, including – famously – DNA. Credit: Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

There is a bit of a controversy regarding Franklin as many believe she should have received more acknowledgement for her role in Crick and Watson’s ‘discovery of DNA’. I last mentioned Franklin in an August 19, 2013 posting (scroll down half-way) featuring a rap, Rosalind Franklin vs Watson & Crick, which was written and performed by children as part  of Tom McFadden’s Battle Rap Histories of Epic Science (Brahe’s Battles) school science project. The rap does a very good job of summarizing the discovery and the controversy and the performance is of a professional grade.

Getting back to Dr. Lala’s logos, there’s a slide show of 50 logos on this Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics webpage. I selected this one from the slideshow for inclusion here,

Aryabhatta (476-550) was a pioneer of mathematics and astronomy in India. He is believed to have devised the concept of zero and worked on the approximation of pi. Credit Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

Aryabhatta (476-550) was a pioneer of mathematics and astronomy in India. He is believed to have devised the concept of zero and worked on the approximation of pi. Credit Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

Dr. Lala has created some infographics of his logos which are can be seen here at visual.ly or you can see one featuring 60 of his logos in a July 26, 2013 posting by Carolina Brandão Zanelli on her Art for Scientists blog. As well, the Perimeter Institute is offering a poster of Dr. Lala’s logos in the Fall 2013 issue of their Inside the Perimeter magazine available here.

I was a little curious about Dr. Lala and was able to find this on academia.edu,

Prateek Lala
University of Toronto, Medicine, Post-Doc

Research Interests:
Medicine, Pharmacology, Drug metabolism, Pharmacoinformatics and Education

Enjoy!

Light: harvesting with transformation *optics and sensing with a photovoltaic bracelet

There’s a good general description (although it’s still quite technical and challenging) of nanoplasmonics in a Jan. 6, 2014 news release on EurekAlert (later in this posting I have an item about a practical application for photovoltaics),

The control of light is vital to many applications, including imaging, communications, sensing, cancer treatment, and even welding processes for automobile parts. Transformation optics is an emerging field that has revolutionized our understanding of how to control light by constituting an effectively curved electromagnetic space. This revolutionary strategy not only revisits the fundamental physics of light-matter interactions, but also renders trivial the design of optical functions that may otherwise be difficult or virtually impossible, such as an “invisibility cloak,” which could only previously be found in science fiction. When compared with ray optics, the new transformation optics technique provides a picture that is equally intuitive, but that is much more accurate in its description of the wave nature of light by using the electric and magnetic field lines as its basis. Therefore, the validity of this method is not restricted to the macroscopic regime, but can also be extended to the subwavelength scale. In a recent review paper published by SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences, Yu Luo and colleagues from Imperial College London illustrate how the general capabilities of the transformation optics technique can be used to treat the subwavelength fields that occur in plasmonic systems and review the latest developments in transformation optics as applied to nanophotonics.

Here’s a more detailed description of the difficulties and the solution (transformation optics) from the news release,

In plasmonics, metallic structures with sharp corners can trap light into nanometric volumes, thus giving rise to strong near-field enhancements. This effect can be used to detect single molecules, generate high harmonic signals, and even improve absorption in photovoltaic devices. Further developments using these techniques need to be guided by accurate and versatile theoretical modeling. However, modeling of this type can be difficult, because various aspects associated with the sharp plasmonic structures can hinder provision of accurate and convenient solutions to the problem at hand. First, the size of the sharp metallic point structure is normally much smaller than that of the device overall, which makes it difficult to create meshes for numerical simulations. Second, the strong contrast in the dielectric functions at the metal-dielectric interfaces leads to slow convergence of the field expansions. Yu Luo and colleagues deploy the theory of transformation optics to circumvent these problems. Their idea is to transform a complex plasmonic system with little intrinsic geometrical symmetry into a canonical structure with translational or rotational symmetry, which is then relatively easy to study using conventional theory. For example, two touching nanowires can be transformed into two flat metal surfaces that are separated by a gap, and a sharp metal edge can be related to a periodic array of metal slabs. Other structures that can be studied using transformation optics include pairs of metallic nanospheres, asymmetric core-shell structures and rough metal surfaces. In fact, using transformation optics techniques, we could reverse engineer the optical properties of complex plasmonic nanostructures and redesign these structures based on the requirements of the desired applications.

And then, there’s what seems to be a plea for more researchers in the field,

Practical issues with the realization of plasmonic devices, such as the effects of edge rounding at sharp boundaries on the local field enhancement and resonance properties, can also be considered theoretically using transformation optics and provide useful guidance for the fabrication of these devices. In particular, the necessary conditions are highlighted for both broadband light absorption effects and large field enhancements. Experimental evidence for phenomena that have been predicted by transformation optics has also been reviewed, indicating potential applications in biosensing and broadband solar photovoltaics. These studies demonstrate the accuracy and versatility of transformation optics methods and are expected to encourage more researchers to enter this field. [emphasis mine]

Honestly, I don’t understand nanoplasmonics very well even after reading the description but there’s enough accessible information in the news release to help me achieve a better understanding. For those who want to further explore this latest work in trransformative optics and nanoplasmonics, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Harvesting light with transformation optics by LUO Yu, ZHAO RongKuo, FERNANDEZ-DOMINGUEZ Antonio I., MAIER Stefan A., & PENDRY John B… Sci China Inf Sci, 2013, 56(12): 120401(13).

This paper is open access as of Jan. 8, 2014.

Photovoltaic bracelet/brooch

On to the other ‘light’ topic mentioned earlier. John Brownlee has written about June, a photovoltaic bracelet, which tells you how much sun exposure you’ve had, in a Jan. 7, 2014 article for Fast Company (aka Co-Design; Note: Links have been removed),

… Meet the June, a bedazzling, Bluetooth-connected bracelet that tells you how much sun you’re getting. But don’t dismiss the June just because you’re not worried about the SPF. This is the future of wearables. [emphasis mine]

… fashionably designed wearable that measures exposure to the sun. Made by Netatmo and designed by Louis Vuitton and Harry Winston collaborator Camille Toupet, the June syncs over Bluetooth to a paired iPhone, where an app tells you how much sun you’re getting based upon readings from the bracelet’s photovoltaic gem, and then recommends sunglasses, a hat or a specific sunscreen based upon the measurements. It costs $100,

Lily Hay Newman in a Jan. 8, 2014 posting on Slate’s future tense blog challenges the notion that June is the “future of wearables,”

… it really only does one thing: It measures sun exposure. It’s a single-use device that syncs to a single-use app. Perhaps it foreshadows a world where we each customize our array of wearable sensors by picking and choosing among single-focus gadgets from day to day. Which sensors we want and how we want to look would both play a part in dictating how we dressed and accessorized. Wearables certainly would be a lot more attractive if they weren’t crammed with maximal functionality. But this is also wildly inefficient, and previous technologies haven’t evolved this way. Cameras, MP3 players, calculators, notebooks, calendars, phones, and everything else eventually collapsed into smartphones: one device. No matter how attractive a sensor-turned-bracelet is, there’s a limit to how many wearables one person can actually, you know, wear.

She also notes that June is being marketed to women primarily and suggests that wearables offer an opportunity to change how technology is marketed (Note:Llinks have been removed),

Since the aesthetic direction of wearables is still undetermined, and is currently dictated by the tech inside, the devices present a good opportunity to move away from traditional, often reductive, male and female marketing, which can be particularly blatant in tech. Example: the EPad Femme tablet for women. Alternate example: The Honda Fit She’s. It’s a tall order, but balancing form and function is the crux of the uncertainty in wearables right now.

I recommend reading both articles (Brownlee’s contains a June promotional video). For the curious here’s what the bracelet looks like (from the June webpage),

[downloaded from http://www.netatmo.com/en-US/product/june]

[downloaded from http://www.netatmo.com/en-US/product/june]

June  can also be worn as a brooch; the Netatmo website’s June webpage states,

Versatile, JUNE can be worn as a bracelet or as a brooch.

I haven’t been able to find a product launch date other than it will be ‘sometime in 2014’.

* Removed an extra preposition ‘with’ that preceded the word optics.

Reaching beyond the screen with the Tangible Media Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Researchers at MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Tangible Media Group are quite literally reaching beyond the screen with inFORM, their Dynamic Shape Display,

John Brownlee’s Nov. 12, 2013 article for Fast Company describes the project this way (Note: A link has been removed),

Created by Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer and overseen by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, the technology behind the inFORM isn’t that hard to understand. It’s basically a fancy Pinscreen, one of those executive desk toys that allows you to create a rough 3-D model of an object by pressing it into a bed of flattened pins. With inFORM, each of those “pins” is connected to a motor controlled by a nearby laptop, which can not only move the pins to render digital content physically, but can also register real-life objects interacting with its surface thanks to the sensors of a hacked Microsoft Kinect.

To put it in the simplest terms, the inFORM is a self-aware computer monitor that doesn’t just display light, but shape as well. Remotely, two people Skyping could physically interact by playing catch, for example, or manipulating an object together, or even slapping high five from across the planet.

I found this bit in Brownlee’s article particularly interesting,

As the world increasingly embraces touch screens, the pullable knobs, twisting dials, and pushable buttons that defined the interfaces of the past have become digital ghosts. The tactile is gone and the Tangible Media Group sees that as a huge problem.

I echo what the researchers suggest about the loss of the tactile. Many years ago, when I worked in libraries, we digitized the  card catalogues and it was, for me, the beginning of the end for my career in the world of libraries. To this day, I still miss the cards.(I suspect there’s a subtle relationship between tactile cues and memory.)

Research in libraries was a more physical pursuit then. Now, almost everything can be done with a computer screen; you need never leave your chair to research and retrieve your documents. Of course, there are some advantages to this world of screens; I can access documents in a way that would have been unthinkable in a world dominated by library card catalogues. Still, I am pleased to see work being done to reintegrate the tactile into our digitized world as I agree with the researchers who view this loss as a problem. It’s not just exercise that we’re missing with our current regime.

The researchers have produced a paper for a SIGCHI (Special Interest Group, Computer Human Interface; Association for Computing Machinery) conference but it appears to be unpublished and it is undated,

inFORM: Dynamic Physical Affordances and Constraints through Shape and Object Actuation by Sean Follmer, Daniel Leithinger, Alex Olwal, Akimitsu Hogge, and  Hiroshi Ishi.

The researchers have made this paper freely available.