Video (40Mb) - Example of using interactive architecture to boil an egg
Video from Discovery Channel with Dr. Ted Selker of MIT talking about some of the projects.
The real world is not a computer screen. When can augmented reality and ambient interfaces improve the usability of a physical environment? Context Aware Computing at MIT have presented data from design studies and experiments that demonstrate the value for ambient information and augmented reality design. The domestic kitchen is used as a domain to place smart technologies and to study visual attention, multi-tasking, food-preparation and disruptiveness.
Food is the most important thing to our daily life. Preparing, cooking, sharing, storage and playing food has its social and technoligical culture. Design and Artifical Intelligence approaches were taken to re-creating the food environment. Re-designing the kitchen and re-defining its components provides alternatives of life styles. Adding machine intelligence to these activities can enhance the processes of human-to-human communication and human-machine operations.
That article is utter cobblers. Apart from the contrived use of non-language to invent concepts that don’t exist, the whole idea behind “interfacing” with the environment as if daily life is in any way enhanced by trying to digitize the experience is a complete sham and based on absolutely nothing factual.
We are entering an era where the technologists and designers are expanding design into such a deep level of fantasy that they are now pretending that ordinary human beings will find a life-enhancing use for something that is neither necessary nor sensible to even think about using.
The best I can say to describe how these crazy ideas come into the arena is that they are like someone deciding that it’s possible to make a toilet that instead of flushing it you can have the life-experience of doing so enhanced if you have a computer in the bathroom which you can click on an icon that sends the flush system into operation and therefore makes the task of flushing a more sensible interface where the end-user (if you’ll pardon the pun) can interact with the toilet and when finishing ones task one can re-boot the toilet and know that the Recycle Bin has been emptied.
They’ll then use the slender excuse that the computer helps to prevent the person spreading germs as they never have to touch the handle of the toilet. Always of course ignoring the fact that they are handling a computer mouse which is just as unhygeinic with unwashed hands. But we will expected to ignore that because the process of interfacing with the computer instead of the toilet will be so much better for the attention deficit levels of the idiots who think it’s an enhanced experience. Honestly - they can’t see that digital world is removing their minds, and that’s just the people inventing the stuff. There ain’t no hope for mankind heading down this ridiculous slope out of control.