This is a quick update on my previous post about the STRP festival. Apparently, the technology expo continued at night, so I was able to see some of the demonstrations anyway. I wanted to share a few of them just to give an impression.
There were a set of large screens mounted in the expo that displayed a video of a woman’s face together with a power meter. When the lady smiles (no pun intended) , the power bar is green and filled to the top. When she stops smiling, it drops to the bottom and turns red. It took me a while to get the meaning of this power meter since the women only stop smiling once in a while There is a video available that gives some more details.
I also had the chance to experiment with the i_AM table which was not very impressive in my opinion. Although it was definitely more simple than the reactables table, as a consequence it did not offer much functionality. Each object that was placed on the table was linked to a sample (e.g. a guitar loop) with a certain volume depending on its position on the table. When an object was pushed up or down on the table, its volume changed from loud to quiet. When it was moved to the left or to the right, it would become linked to another sample. When you turned an object, the portion of the sample that was repeated could be altered. I did not find the mappings logical, but then again the problem with these kinds of systems is that there has to be a way for the user to find out about the object’s affordances. This can be done by using objects that represent their affordances explicitly, or by displaying something helpful next to the objects. The i_AM table did not offer a way to find out about an object’s functionality.
I only took a few pictures, and most of them were blurry due to the low quality camera on my cellphone but there are quite some pictures of the festival available at Flickr, including the demo of Johannes (it seems his demo was also covered by DJ BROADCAST and Eindhovens Dagblad). Another cool concept was Vinyl workout where a record was projected on the floor and could be played by running around its surface in the direction you wanted it to go. Motor karaoke was a demo I didn’t visit, but which would have been fun to try. It is a bike race where the motorcycle is powered by the player’s voice. The louder the player screams, the faster the bike will go
Oh and the concerts were good as well
