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The internet of weird things at SXSW: smart porta potties, light books and a robot zen gardener

Katie Fehrenbacher — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 18:51:55 +0000

Sometimes the internet of things is just there to mess with you. At the official opening night party for the SXSW Interactive Festival on Friday, design firm Frog Design created a party space where objects embedded with computing and wireless networks made party-goers think, laugh, and maybe even feel a little uncomfortable.

Frog, which has hosted the kick-off party for many years, called the series of interactive displays “The Other Singularity,” and Frog Principal Technologist Jared Ficklin said they were meant to show tech in “unexpected places.” Ficklin said Frog was expecting between 4,000 and 7,000 people to pass through the party and play with the displays.

Augmented Reality Porta Potty

After you enter the porta potty, a video display is projected onto the door and it can show whether you’re standing or sitting and how long you’ve been in the biffy. While the installation wasn’t working for part of the party, this is the one that I thought would make party-goers the most uncomfortable. No one wants to come out of a porta potty that’s displaying how you’ve been sitting on the toilet for 10 minutes.

Paintbrush LEDs

This 8-by-32-foot display was filled with different color individual LED lights. Viewers could use wand devices to wireless change the color of the individual LEDs, making the display kind of like a huge Lite Brite. Ficklin said someday when the LEDs and technology get cheaper and smaller, this type of display could be used for a wall in a home or office, and the occupant could change the colors of the wall using a remote.

Light books

The premise of this installation was: “someday light will be cheaper thank ink.” These machines projected light and images into books, and stylized it to look like light books. And I learned a new word, “skeoumorphic,” which means digital objects that have been stylized to look real.

The Gutenberg Bible-version

The Robotic Zen Gardener

Think of this one like the Roomba meets a Japanese zen gardener. The robot traverses the sand path and rakes it with its embedded metal rakes. Cool? Or pointless? We’ll let you meditate on that one.

The crowdsourced DJ

Frog Design worked with TouchTunes, a company that makes digital jukeboxes, to build an installation of dozens of screens that enabled party-goers to vote on and choose the music being played at the party. Frog and TouchTunes execs said they were interested to see if the early-adopter hipsters at SXSW would stick to Top 40 or being more creative and choosy with their tunes. For the short time I was there, Top 40 ruled the airwaves (and my multiple selections of Bob Seger’s Night Moves alas didn’t play).

Rattlesnake light bike

It’s not connected, but it was cool. A huge rattle snake moved by bicyclists and glowing with lights.

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Printers are for toys, not newspapers: 20 predictions for 2013

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:34:51 +0000

The design experts over at frog design have taken a look at the current accessibility of broadband, cheap electronics, tablets and the rise of 3-D printing and see a new world that we might recognize from science fiction, but is really just a year away. The firm released its 20 tech trends for 2013 on Thursday, and the surprise for me is how many of these things I already see happening and how many of them are familiar form my teenage (and yes, current) reading.

For example, the trend report says that the rise of 3-D printing will bring about a new re-mixing culture that enables real customization at the individual level of any device or product. It also will lead to a rise in more small-time, on-demand manufacturing operations. On the device side, things like tablets replacing the printed word in magazines and books may draw some criticism while the idea of ubiquitous facial scanning and image recognition may creep others out. Smarter smartphones that can be biometrically secured by scanning a fingerprint might be welcome for making mobile payments actually happen, while the idea of driverless cars will begin fundamentally changing how our society is developed.

Some of the trends are a bit silly, such as the idea of our mobile devices “developing a patina,” which the author explains isn’t a physical patina like a worn cover of a book or the softening of leather over time, but a digital patina that is composed of a “layered interaction model of touch,voice and gesture.” Others, like putting a human face on computing beg for longer and more detailed write ups. But either way, the report is a fun read. If you printed these on cards and used them as conversation starters among the TED-set I bet it would lead to fascinating conversations — and probably a startup idea or two.

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GigaOM RoadMap Video Rewind: Frog Design’s Mark Rolston

Om Malik — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:32:54 +0000

Mark Rolston, Chief Creative Officer of Frog Design was one of the speakers at our inaugural GigaOM RoadMap conference, held earlier this month. In this conversation he talks about how as computing become all pervasive, we need to rethink computers and how we interact with them. (Related post: How we will design products for the Internet of things.)

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap review

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:34:39 +0000

The GigaOM RoadMap conference on Nov. 10 gathered leaders and visionaries to discuss how, thanks to technological and generational shifts, society as a whole is becoming more connected — not only in the media we consume and the social networks we use but also in the way we interact with devices and manage our resources. This research note takes a look back on the event in order to analyze this new era of connectivity across various industries, from Jack Dorsey’s idea of becoming “more human,” not less, to the concept of “invisible technology” and data, the fuel of the new century. Companies mentioned in this report include Airbnb, Netflix and Twitter. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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How will we design products for the Internet of Things?

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:01:25 +0000

As revolutionary as the mobile ecosystem is, it’s the interactions of more-intelligent connected devices with people outside the context of phones or computers that will drive more innovation, says Mark Rolston, the chief creative officer at Frog Design. Rolston, speaking at the Mobile Future Forward conference on Monday in Seattle described a future where devices become more contextually aware, thanks to embedded and connected sensors.

Instead of thinking about the buttons on a phone or a laptop, manufacturers and designers need to think about what will happen when computers are embedded in everything and connected all the time. Instead of computing’s being confined in a box on a desk or in the hand, computers will be everywhere, pulling data from a variety of places. Understanding how those computers will pull information about their environment, relay that data to users and then interpret what users want them to do creates a web of interaction that will require new ways of thinking and design.

In fact, user interaction might be a very minimal part of the overall design. For example, Rolston described a wearable glucose monitor that has elements embedded in the body, a monitor interpreting the data from the user’s bloodstream and a wearable screen for the patient to interact with. Of those three elements, the patient input screen is likely gathering the least important information and must convey complicated information simply.

In a conversation after his panel, Rolston explained that the challenges inherent in designing interfaces in such a world will come from devices trying to understand a user’s intent, as we build out new ways to interact with them, such as motion. How will a machine know when someone waving their hands while they talk to a friend becomes someone trying to tell a computer to do something? Of course, when a device can watch us and interpret our movements and commands effectively, it essentially gives computers the illusion of humanity. That’s the illusion Rolston apparently is trying to create.

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Tweet About TV With frog’s tvChatter iPhone App

Liz Gannes — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:30:39 +0000

frog design, the design firm with 40 years of experience advising clients on how best to create their consumer electronics and services, from Windows XP to Roku to TV Guide’s new web site, recently began making a few products of its own. Among the first is a social TV iPhone app called tvChatter, meant to be used alongside watching programs live or simultaneously with friends.

The free application will come out with frog client NBC as a launch partner as soon as Apple approves it (probably in the next week or so). It brings in a stream of Twitter updates that are deemed relevant to about 30 prime-time shows from various networks. When users give their Twitter credentials, they can tweet directly to a stream and follow along with either their friends or everyone else in the world watching the same show and tweeting about it.

I like that tvChatter fits into the common situation of sitting on a couch, watching TV while noodling around on your iPhone. And the urge to get social and interact around content is certainly making itself evident these days. frog also makes tvChatter lightweight by not having its own registration system, instead tying neatly into accounts on everyone’s favorite quippy comment service, Twitter.

On the TV network side, inspiring people to watch television in real time means they get maximum measurement, buzz and ad dollar value from their audience. And it’s only a short (and possibly sponsored) hop over to an official web site via mobile browser to get more information about a show and interact further.

On the downside, this app is incredibly spoiler-prone. For those of us on the West Coast, especially watchers who tend towards elimination reality shows or suspenseful dramas, social media is the enemy until you’ve actually watched the show. For now, frog does try to cut down tweets from previous airings in other time zones, and says that eventually the app might be location-sensitive.

Another potential casualty of the app is the quality of users’ tweet streams. Your Twitter followers who don’t care about the show you’re watching with tvChatter might be a little peeved about the influx of pollution in your stream. But then again, they might just be tempted to come join you.

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