At SIGBOVIK, the annual conference held in honor of Harry Q. Bovik, I presented the latest research by myself and my esteemed colleague Marty McGuire in the area of optimizing the way in which we consume content. The result, as shown above, is called RSS Invaders.
Basically, it is a mashup of Google Reader and Space Invaders. It logs into your reader account and presents you with a real-time display of news items, represented by a photo from the post. When you choose to ‘view’ the item, by engaging it with a projectile from your laser canon, the full text from the article is displayed as a particle fountain, in pleasing manner. We believe that this method of interaction has significant advantages over a traditional, page-based interface, because it allows you to deal with a much larger set of items in a smaller amount of time, and with a greatly reduced cognitive load. The current system implements a read-only interface to your newsfeed, however we anticipate future expansion of this research into bribed social networking (powerups for advertising the game to your friends!) and feedback loops (game events are published as live feeds, which are then fed back into the game).
And no, we’re not kidding, it actually works :-). Source code for this proof-of-concept project is available on github, for both RSS Invaders and Marty’s GoogleReaderClient library for Processing. Here is the submitted abstract for my talk:
A novel approach to managing information overload in syndicated feed readers
With the rapid expansion of digital news services, and the trend for users to select content personally, sorting through the available content quickly becomes a major hangup for consumption of content. A user can quickly find themselves overwhelmed, and unable to keep up with the ever-increasing number of news items available.
People suffer from information overload when dealing with their online content, however they are perfectly capable of handling high-information video games.
In this paper, I present a novel method for dealing with this situation. Reaching to the entertainment industry for inspiration, this new method presents news items as entities in a virtual space, and allows the user to quickly deal with them using a simple set of familiar tools, including a laser gun, and star bomb.
Today at the Children’s Museum, I worked with Paul to prototype a workshop activity that I will be running there with Hack Pittsburgh in the near future. After a few failed attempts while we worked out the right combination of materials and sizes, everyone was able to build a motor that worked at least part of the time.
This is almost the simplest motor that you can make, all you need is a AA battery, a couple of paper clips, ~18″ of 26 awg wire, a magnet, and some tape. The only tricky bit is that you only file off the enamel on half of one of the sides (radially), so that the coil is only energized during half of the rotation. Basically, the coil is heavier on one side than the other, so the force of gravity causes it to spin towards that orientation. When the heavy side is at the bottom, it starts to conduct electricity, which turns the electromagnet on. The electromagnetic force from the coil is then repelled by the fixed magnet, which causes to the coil to flip over. But then, the coil is resting on the insulated portion of the wire, and gravity takes over again. If you line everything up just so, and give it a little nudge, this unstable system will cause the whole unit to spin around.
As usual, there was lots of awesome stuff going on at the museum, including an animation station where kids could make a stop-motion video using an overhead camera and scraps from the crafting area. When I went over to check it out, there were two girls making an animation about a bear that ate a poisonous mushroom and floated up into the sky to eat the sun. Absolutely wonderful and ridiculous, I wanted to make one! As a bonus, the videos are going to be screened in the downstairs theater. I totally want to steal their idea and go make my own animations now
Marty unboxes the Make: Electronics Components Pack 1:
Like many enthusiastic makers, I recently got my hands on a copy of the excellent Make: Electronics book from O’Reilly. It’s an excellent bottom-up, experiment-based introduction to electronics, but sourcing all of the parts required to complete each experiment can be an adventure.
Thankfully, the Maker Shed is now offering two componentspacks to help you work through the book without having to order from a half-dozen parts vendors!
