Earlier when I was looking into Michel Gondry’s curation of the YouTube homepage last week I stumbled across this demonstration of the ‘Assist Sketch Understanding System’ from MIT in 2006. It’s definitely the most impressive physics engine I have come across since we saw the Soda Constructor at college! Via illustration blog drawn.

Secondly, Asi introduced me to the new visualisation layer which has been added to the video’s to introduce you to related clips, it’s accessed via the network icon when you go fullscreen. At first I thought that it was an interesting way to discover stuff, but when I clicked on a video balloon and the mind map of sorts started to grow, ‘interesting’ became ‘confusing’ very quickly. My confusion is with the outline colours of the bubbles, as there is no suggestion to why the clips are grouped by a certain colour, is it just me or is the relationships between the clips unclear?

Ok, a geeky one here… A couple of months back I noticed a job going for a graphic designer for Propellerhead’s Reason software.

“Tasks will include interface design of devices, interface widgets, icons and other graphical elements for our software applications as well as graphical elements for the web.”

I started thinking.. what a mental job!! Apart from being one of the most extensive and painstakingly accurate pieces of metaphorically designed software ever, it is also one of the greatest audio experiences. Designing it well is a real interface design challenge.

Well months have past, someone got the job, and a new version is on the horizon. Version 4 Looks like the designers have once again had their work cut out, cramming those tiny buttons in. I don’t think they’re recreating any more real devices now, all that’s left is to invent new ones.

Can’t wait to get my mits on this!

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