FXPAL Blog

Our friend Takashi Matsumoto, (who built the Post-Bit system with us here at FXPAL) built a cubic display called Z-agon with colleagues at the Keio Media Design Laboratory. Takashi points us at this video of a very nicely realized cubic display (well, five-sided, but still). It’s called pCubee: a Perspective-Corrected Handheld Cubic Display and it comes from the Human Communications Technology Lab at the University of British Columbia. Some of you may have seen a version of this demoed at ACM Multimedia 2009; it will also be at CHI 2010. Longer and more detailed video is here.

Recently, I had an opportunity to see the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 (serial #2) in action. It’s an impressive piece of machinery, weighing in at about five tons, consisting of 25,000 parts. Mostly metal. It’s on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View through December, when Nathan Myhrvold takes it home and installs it in his living room, next to the T-Rex. Babbage built a few smaller models, but never saw the completion of the project after a falling out with his master builder and subsequent loss of funding from the government. Still, he had something like 12 years of funding to attempt to build the device. (He also made money on other inventions such as the cowcatcher at the front of steam engines.)

The Science Museum in London built Difference Engine No. 2 serial #1 in the late 1980s to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s birth.

Front view showing the registers

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We are happy to see that the summer issue of the AIEDAM journal is now published (editors:  Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Mark D. Gross). It contains our article on the electronic-paper-based Post-Bits system, “Prototyping a tangible tool for design: Multimedia e-paper sticky notes.”

So, what are Post-Bits? We were looking for new ways to use e-paper, and at the same time, we were (and are) very interested in tangible tools for enhancing all kinds of work. This project started when Takashi Matsumoto interned here at FXPAL.  You can see Takashi talking about Post-Bits in the video below the fold:

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Last week we had two interesting visitors who each gave talks in the area of tangible computing. (Briefly, tangible computing explores ways of interacting with computers using real-world physical objects; much more info can be found online including at the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab). FXPAL has done a number of tangible interface projects over the years, including the PostBits project, the Convertible Podium, and others.

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