2015-05-07

This post is a summary of a study we did to evaluate the Leap Motion device for two-dimensional pointing and selecting tasks. The study was implemented by Manuel Seixas during his MSc degree. Continue reading...

2014-07-10

This is a selection of the best projects made by the students of the Tangible Interfaces Design course of the Sound and Image master program (Sound specialization). Continue reading...

2014-05-17

This is a selection of the best projects made by the students of the Generative Design course of the Digital Design Post-graduation program. Continue reading...

2013-12-07

"A Viagem" ("The Trip") is an interactive video installation by the VOID group (Carlos Sena Caires + Jorge Cardoso) initially developed for the Procesalia exhibition. Continue reading...

2013-11-23

The School of Arts was present at the Festival IN in Lisbon, last week. Besides having a regular stand, our school participated with various interactive projects. One of those projects was a giant projection made from the faces of the visitors. Continue reading...

2013-08-15

When Mendeley generates BibTeX files for entries with more than one URL, it concatenates the various URLs in a single BibTeX url field. That's a problem because it means the URLs will be wrongly formatted when you cite the entry in your LaTeX document. Continue reading...

2013-04-30

The School of Arts was asked to develop some multimedia installations for the Catholic University, Porto stands for the Qualifica 2013 fair. We developed two installations: one was a typical Kinect body interaction installation and the other was an information kiosk that used the Reactable Live hardware. Continue reading...

2012-12-23

CloudHQ (the link has a referral that gives you, and me, one month free premium) is cloud synchronization/backup service, which recently added SkyDrive as another supported cloud. So, what it it good for? I’ll describe what I use it for. Continue reading...

2012-11-11

A good book, but not a great book. The main contribution of the book, I think, is the library of gestural patterns for touchscreens and free form gestures. There are also other interesting chapters such as the one about documenting gestures, and on communicating interactivity for gestural interfaces. Continue reading...

2012-10-08

“Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot” by Greg Borenstein is about the Kinect. The book covers a lot of what has been done with Kinect’s depth sensor, and shows you how you can do it also. It’s a very complete book that covers topics such working with the depth map, with the point cloud, skeleton, but also things such as generating models for 3d printing. Continue reading...

2012-10-07

There are plenty of sites to generate animated GIFs to use in AJAX loading processes, for example ajaxload.info, or preloaders.net. These sites allow you generate a plethora of different loading graphics with different color and sizes. However, they generated graphics with a very limited maximum size, which makes the useless if you want a preloader graphic for use in a large public display application. Continue reading...

2012-09-02

My first attempt to create a digital signage player in Google Chrome used a very simple scheduling strategy: define a list of content items to be played, along with the duration for each item, and play each item sequentially. However, this solution is not very flexible as it does not allow different programs during a day. Using a Cron-based scheduler is much more flexible. Continue reading...

2012-09-01

Just found out that Byword “A writing app that gives you just the tools you need to write Markdown and rich text with as little friction as possible.” – Byword website, is now available for iOS. I have been using it for Mac OS X, and it is a very nice app (made by a team of Portuguese guys). I definitely have to check the iOS version out, as I have elected Byword as my new main editor for blog posts (I’m rolling out my semi-automatic html+shell scripting blog system). Continue reading...

2012-08-30

I have been struggling with a way to get my Google Chrome extension to be able to list a user’s directory in order to automatically load and display files from that directory. It turns out, there is no easy way to list the files in an arbitrary directory in a user’s filesystem using Javascript, even in a Chrome extension. The File API in HTML 5 allows web apps to have their own filesystem, but it is an isolated filesystem so that’s no good. You can actually read the contens of a file using XMLRequest (for example this code from Read local file with XmlHttpRequest - JavaScript - Snipplr Social Snippet Repository does just that):Continue reading...