We’re suckers for these “vision of the future” vids. While there’s nothing quite groundbreaking about The Astonishing Tribe‘s vision (except maybe that 90′s haircuts are back), it’s still fun to see. Oh, transparent OLED! We can’t wait.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Microsoft’s screens and displays of 2019 vision.

via Gizmodo

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HD projection power house Obscura Digital, the company that can use any object as canvas, released a video highlighting their 2010 California Roadshow that is very inspiring. They traveled across the state transforming many popular locations including 700 ft of the USS Midway and the architectural wonder that is the Walt Disney Concert hall. Some locations used as many as 12 projectors and required around two days of rigging and calibrating. Pictures and alternate video below.

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Behold! The Galaxy Tab (teaser).  Portable 7″ screen, video calling, Android OS. Check back for updates from the IFA trade show on September 2nd, where we hope to see some live demos and new features. Kudos to Samsung for coming up with an even worse tablet name than the iPad.

via Gizmodo

Behold these brand spanking new pics of the Toshiba SmartPad. This is the first tablet pictures we have seen with ports including HDMI, USB, and a memory card reader of some sort. A tablet with HMDI is great news for content creators wanting to use their tablet as an HD presentation tool. Other rumored specs include a 10″ screen, Android OS, and an Nvidia Tegra platform 2. More details as they are leaked!

via Notebook Italia via Engadget

According to Download Squad, the Google/HTC tablet is rumored to be released on November 26th, Black Friday 2010. The tablet is being manufactured by HTC for Google and will be equipped with Google’s new Chrome OS and launched on Verizon. The Chrome OS has very few details, but we are definitely excited to see what it may bring.

Brazilian designer Dinard da Mata, developed this sleek flexible OLED smartphone concept for Philips called the Fluid. Its long horizontal design enables it to also act as a phone, video game controller, and with the ability to wrap around your wrist, this will be one of the first phones to allow us tech nerds to wear the device like the oh so fashionable snap bracelet.

via The Design Blog

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Meet the Glass Infrastructure. An open social information network comprised of 30 touch screens placed throughout the MIT Media Lab. Its purpose is to create an augmented media experience that helps visitors, students, faculty, and even the janitors, to access information and multimedia from the 130 or so projects going on in the building at any particular time. Also, like IBM’s future digital billboards, these screens will also have the ability to scan RFID badges on any building visitor if they come within 5-10 feet of the screen. This will allow automatic log in and will display the person’s personal portfolio.

MIT Media Lab RFID Badge

Each screen will give incentive to visitors to interact and explore the projects throughout the building. When a visitor logs in, he or she can view what projects are closest by proximity or by previous interest that the computer keeps in your profile. The network also encourages users to socialize and talk. More then one person can log in at the same time to promote discussion, exchange information on projects, and collect each others information. To further provide a social experience, there is a “Leader board” displayed across two large screens that displays a live news feed of the Glass Infrastructure.

via Digital Signage Today
pics via curiouslee’s Flickr

Pictures below….

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Don’t fret if you don’t know what that means. We’ll explain it for you. That’s what we do.

The Firefox team has been hard at work creating some pretty amazing web functionality that will have you forgetting you’re not using an app. This includes enabling users to perform some pretty amazing seamless video effects, transitions, layering, and MultiTouch gestures that you would find on an iPad. Of course you’ve seen this type of design in Flash or inside an app, but with the Firefox 4 Beta this is possible inside your browser.

Don’t take our word for it. It’s something you really should see in action to understand (videos below). You can test all this yourself in the Firefox 4 Beta and if your one of those “lucky” Windows 7 users with a touch display (so not jealous), you can test the MultiTouch webpages out.

All this is making for a media rich web experience and a platform for Living Art to thrive.

Here’s a quick summary:

HTML5

If you’ve been living under rock, there’s a war going down and it’s Flash vs. HTML5. Flash, an add-on to browsers, provides advanced animations, video, and a plethora of other pretty little things, but as critics point out, it can but excessive strain on browsing speed, battery life, and can be buggy on mobile platforms, which is why Apple has decided to leave it out on the iPhone and iPad. HTML5 aims to reproduce what Flash offers while being more simple to encode and less processor intensive and completely integrated in the browser.

SVG

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. It is code that lets developers designers make really cool graphics and animations without the need for an add-on like flash. This includes pattern and gradient fills, sophisticated filter-effects, anti-aliased rendering, clipping to arbitrary paths, and animations. What makes this different from Flash is the fact that it is compliant with popular open source web standards such as XSL, DOM, and CSS while Flash relies on technology that is not open source.

CSS3 Transitions

CSS3 Transitions provide a way to animate CSS code properties without having the changes take place instantly. This means you are able to take HTML elements and apply certain properties such as scale, translate, or skew, and apply to them over time instead of doing it instantly. An example provided by Firefox is “if you change the color of an element from white to black, normally the change is instantaneous. With CSS transitions enabled, the change occurs over an interval of time you can specify, following an acceleration curve you can customize.

HTML5 + CSS3 + SVG Video:

MultiTouch Video:

For more information please check out Mozilla Hacks.

After seeing two previous motion posters, it is not surprising to see a that a third SAW 3D motion poster has been released. They have been generating quite the amount of buzz on twitter and the web and its great to see these living one-sheets become a success! Hopefully there will be more to come before the release.

Motion Poster: (Click for full size. Sorry iPads, flash required)

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VR/URBAN have created a hand held digital slingshot that fires text message graffiti onto buildings.  These self-proclaimed “public media interventionistas”, created the SMSlingshot- a wooden device that would make Dennis the Menace proud- equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser, and batteries. The aspiring digital vandal types a text message on the keypad,  aims the slingshot at a projection (in this case, on a building), and boom, the message appears with a splat.

Their broader vision is far more compelling than this crude demonstration. Their wish is to reclaim the urban space and give the people tools for occupying the screens, sighting the need for these “intervention devices” as an answer to the rise of increased commercial digital advertising screens. Sort of a high-tech digital can of spray paint.

“People shall not only remain as a passive audience, they must obtain the privilege and besides that, the right tools to create their own multimedia content in the streets.”

via Gizmodo and VR/URBAN

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