Flyfire, a project initiated by the SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) aims to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment.

In its first implementation, the Flyfire project sets out to explore the capabilities of this display system by using a large number of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each helicopter contains small LEDs and acts as a smart pixel. Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario.

With the self-stabilizing and precise controlling technology from the ARES Lab, the motion of the pixels is adaptable in real time. The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience.

Creative Allies gives passionate art students, designers, creative types, writers, photographers, videomakers and fans (Allies) the opporunity to work with their favorite bands. Allies can from anywhere in the world upload their creations inspired by music. The creations can be licensed by the musician it was made for.

Musicians on the other hand can post requests for whatever they need made,  and allies can browse jobs to find something that strikes their creative chord.

Each day, we are surrounded by seemingly insignificant objects, taking them from one place to the other, or leaving them on a table for weeks, without paying any attention to them. We ignore or forget them, using things only when we need to, making sure they don’t interfere or inhabit our space. But what if they were not so stable and subservient? What if they could swivel, bounce or even fly. And what if they did so all at the same time?

Julien Vallée and Nicolas Burrows want to imagine a place where objects could live and move, harmoniously, and of their own accord. Without interfering with each other these objects would bounce, roll, turn and cross each other’s paths. This experiment is about re-discovering our daily surroundings.

Above  is the making of the interactive video that was originally made for the If You Could Collaborate exhibition. Each object is assigned to a letter on the keyboard, and can be activated or deactivated at any time. The online version will be soon available to play with at dansedance.com

The Attractive City Generator was conceived and developed as a part of a research project at the ETH in Zurich, at the chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design. It is a tool to educate people how cities could be created in many ways and different settings in a very playful way.

The goal is to make people aware of social conditions in an urban network and encourage them to take part in decisions – involve people into the process of urban planning . The urban planners are only setting the basic rules for the city as a basic framework. Instead of using a mouse or a keyboard, the application is designed much more intuitively and contextually for the user.

Cre­at­ive Cit­ies seeks to ini­ti­ate con­ver­sa­tion about why inclus­ive, sus­tain­able and cre­at­ive cit­ies are bene­fi­cial, and neces­sary in a rap­idly urb­an­ising region, and to use pro­jects, research and opin­ions to sug­gest factors that aid the devel­op­ment of cre­at­ive cit­ies. They seek to identify and cel­eb­rate the local skill base of cit­ies in the region and to high­light the value of devel­op­ing tra­di­tional skill sets and indus­tries to con­nect with a global know­ledge economy.

The blog doesn’t seek to provide neat “solu­tions” to the diverse issues faced by cit­ies across the region, or to impose the val­ues of one city on another, or to replace the in-depth and ongo­ing work of experts in this field.

Rather, they seek to use a short-term strategy to plant a seed in the minds of a broader audi­ence about the ideas around cre­at­ive cit­ies, and to con­nect that audi­ence with sources for fur­ther inform­a­tion about issues of sus­tain­ab­il­ity, inclus­ive­ness and the poten­tial of the cre­at­ive eco­nomy with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to cit­ies in East Asia.

Thir­teen coun­tries are included in the scope of the Cre­at­ive Cit­ies pro­ject. They hope to secure con­tri­bu­tions from them all and to high­light the skill sets, strengths and unique con­di­tions of major cit­ies in each of these countries. The countries are: Aus­tralia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malay­sia, New Zea­l­and, Phil­ip­pines, Singa­pore, Taiwan, Thai­l­and, Viet­nam and UK.

In this installation YesYesNo teamed up with The Church, Inside Out Productions and Electric Canvas to turn the Auckland Ferry Building into an interactive playground. Their  job was to create an installation that would go beyond merely projection on buildings and allow viewers to become performers, by taking their body movements and amplifying them 5 stories tall.

They used three different types of interaction – body interaction on the two stages, hand interaction above a light table, and phone interaction with the tracking of waving phones. There were six  scenes, cycled every hour for the public.

How To Explain It To My Parents is a Documentary series by Lernert & Sander in which nine abstract artists explain to their mom and dad what their work is all about.

Above, episode 1 with fantastic artist Arno Coenen.

‘SixthSense‘ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

We’ve evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about what is facing us. That information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take in a situation. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Moreover, Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. ‘WUW’ attempts to free information from its confines and releases it into the world, seamlessly integrating it with the physical world.

With the miniaturization of computing devices that fit inside our pockets, we are always connected to the digital world. However, there is no link between our interaction with these digital devices and interaction with the physical world. ‘WUW’ bridges this gap by augmenting the physical world around us with digital information and proposing natural hand gestures as the mechanism to interact with that information. ‘WUW’ brings the intangible information out into the tangible world. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted on a hat or coupled in a pendant like device, ‘WUW’ sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects you are interacting with. ‘WUW’ projects information to any surface, walls, and the objects around us, and to interact with the information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or with the object itself.