In December our team was allowed two weeks to pursue a “passion project”. It didn’t have be work-related, just something you truly wanted to work on. I chose to design tread patterns on the soles of shoes. I had never given a thought about shoe treads until, a week earlier, a woman on the NodeBox… Read More
Author: John Cartan
I am a designer, inventor, and writer currently working as a Senior Design Architect in the Oracle User Experience Emerging Technologies group.
In this post I will simultaneously have Fun With Data and Fun With Maps. I will use public APIs to turn my Isle of Alameda into a “choropleth“, a map which displays areas that are colored or patterned in relation to data. To do this I will need to find boundaries within Alameda that I… Read More
The best way to learn how to make your own maps is to map someplace familiar. The place I live, Alameda, is an island in the San Francisco Bay, but existing maps don’t do it justice. So as part of my Fun With Maps project I set out to disentangle Alameda from the urban sprawl… Read More
Maps are one of the oldest and most powerful forms of visualization. Lately I’ve been learning how to make my own maps using open source data and public APIs. I started by simply plotting locations on a world map. World maps in svg format are readily available on the web. Wikimedia Commons, for example, has… Read More
In my previous entry, Fun with Facebook, I described how to pull data from Facebook’s Graph API Explorer, organize it using NodeBox, and turn it into representations of friends, posts, and the “likes” that connect them. Here is the final result: The above image is a snapshot of a high-resolution poster with many fine details.… Read More
I am often surprised by which of my Facebook posts are the most liked and by who likes what. I wondered: are there any interesting patterns there? Could I visualize them? My next question (as always) was: could I get the data? Thanks to the rise of the API economy I could. Companies have discovered… Read More
One month before we entered the OAUX Exchange tent at OpenWorld, Jake (@jkuramot) challenged us to come up with a visualization “that would ambiently show data about the people in the space.” Mark (@mvilrokx), Noel (@noelportugal) and I accepted the challenge. Mark put together the Internet of Things ultrasonic sensors, Noel created a cloud database… Read More
Architects design space. A building is just a way to create spaces. Information architects at Oracle design relationships with abstract concepts. So far the main way we have to create visible spaces for our users is by projecting pixels onto glass screens. This may change someday. If the promise of virtual reality is ever achieved,… Read More
At first I was skeptical. I was perfectly happy with my iPad Air and the Pro seemed too big and too expensive. Six months later I wouldn’t dream of going back. The iPad Pro has become my primary computing device. Does the Pro eliminate the need for a laptop or desktop? Almost, but for me… Read More
We are still in the early days of virtual reality. Just as in the early days of manned flight, this is a time of experimentation. What do we wear on our heads? Helmets? Goggles? Contact lenses? Or do we simply walk into a cave or dome or tank? What do we wear or hold in… Read More
Here is a blast from the past: a letter I wrote to some friends back in 1994 about my very first VR experience. VR enjoyed a brief spin as the next big thing that year. Jaron Lanier had been featured in the second issue of Wired magazine and virtual reality arcades began to appear in… Read More
Look, I’m as fond of holodecks and the matrix as the next nerd. I was having queazy VR experiences back in 1994. That’s me just last month strapped into to a cheap plastic viewer, staring boldly into the future. I’ve been thinking and writing about virtual reality for over twenty years now. But are we… Read More
We are always on the hunt for interesting new uses of the Apple Watch, so when my colleague Ben Bendig alerted me to AstroPad’s new iPhone/Apple Watch app, I downloaded it immediately. The app, AstroPad Mini, is intended to let you use your iPhone as a graphics tablet and controls Photoshop nicely right out of… Read More
In my previous post I argued that the hunt is on for a better way to code, a way more suited for a designer’s need to test new interactions. I said I wanted a process less like solving a Rubik’s cube and more like throwing a pot. What does this actually mean? “I want to… Read More
Fact 1: Dazzling animated displays (sprites, shaders, parallax, 3D) are more plentiful and easier to make than ever before. Fact 2: More natural and expressive forms of input (swiping, pinching, gesturing, talking) are being implemented and enhanced every day. Fact 3: Put these two together and the possible new forms of human computer interaction are… Read More
I often tell people that you need both a left brain and a right brain to be a software designer: a left brain to analyze and understand, a right brain to dream and wonder. The EyeO Festival which Thao and I just attended in Minneapolis, was food for our right brains. EyeO is about the… Read More
Editor’s note: John and Noel (@noelportugal) need to chat about Google’s Physical Web gBeacons. I have been a tad skeptical about the usefulness of smart watches, but my colleague Julia Blyumen has changed my thinking. In her recent blog post, Julia noted that a smart watch could become both a detector and a universal remote… Read More
Julia’s recent post about her experiences with the Samsung Gear watches triggered a lively conversation here at the AppsLab. I’m going to share my response here and sprinkle in some of Julia’s replies. I’ll also make a separate post about the interesting paper she referenced. Dear Julia, You embraced the idea of the smart watch as… Read More
Back in the early 90s I ventured into virtual reality and was sick for a whole day afterwards. We have since learned that people become queazy when their visual systems and vestibular systems get out of sync. You have to get the visual response lag below a certain threshold. It’s a very challenging technical problem which… Read More
Editor’s note: Here’s another post from friend of the ‘Lab and colleague, John Cartan. When John reached out, offering a review of the Narrative Clip (neé Memento), I jumped at the opportunity to read and publish his thoughts, and not just because I value his insights. When Noel (@noelportugal) and I were in the Netherlands for… Read More