I have been approached by Levi to participate in the fda blog and I thought I would start my first entry with an interesting project I have discovered whilst visiting the “Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2009” exhibition at the Design Museum.
Fiducial stands for a standard of reference in surveying as per the dictionary. In this project founded by a guy called Toxmeister, the markers act a bit like bar codes do with their visual representations of information readable by machines. That is what I understood from the so called “Fid.Gen bar codes” program which uses the open source Processing software to create shapes and patterns able to carry and transport information across platforms.
Apart from looking good, those shapes are useful. What more exciting than computers we could use and navigate exclusively by using our hands. Well yes I know it already exist, with the invention of the touch screen and now the iphone giving a nice and smooth control over the page flow. But what if downloading an image, reading a external document or scanning something could be done just by putting it on the screen? A bit like in some Sci-Fi movies like minority report or even in CSI Miami!
Check out The “Reactable” and see how they unleash the power of this new Fid.Gen coding system and might change the face of future computing.
Thanks to the Open Source community for being free!
Stan
Filed under: exhibition
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