Two lovely gadgets from the Work in Progress Show of Design Interactions in London.
First one is an Origami TV Remote Control Interface, by Hayeon Yoo.
According to a research, most children who face a TV remote control for the first time tend to fear using it: there are often two or three remote controls for every TV, and each one has too many buttons. Most of these buttons are not really necessary for kids. Besides, the shapes or modality of the remote control might not relate to them.
The Origami TV Remote Control enables children to learn only the essential functions such as “Channel Selection� and “Volume Control� through a paper playing method. The prototype was developed from 1-week Electronics and 1-week Software workshop and a wireless sensor board and Max/MSP are used as main tools.
It was indeed very fun to control the volume of the TV with the origami, i couldn’t stop raising and lowering the volume actually.
Emotoscope, by Kenichi Okada, is a lovely, poetic and 19th Century-looking device designed to give users an experience of missing time.
Digital cameras or video cameras make it possible for us to take thousands of pictures or videos with high quality image, but on the other hand, we might be losing the opportunity of looking at things more carefully.
That’s why Okada sometimes uses an analog film camera to shoot his everyday life and plays the films with a projector. “Every time I watch film, it gives me nostalgic and emotional feelings,” he writes. “Then I start to miss the moment that I was there. The experiences become very precious to me.”
Emotoscope is designed to help you see present moments as if they were precious memories from the past. You watch the world around you through the device and it all suddenly becomes a bit sepia-coloured, blurred and framed.
I want one for my birthday. I’d take it to festivals and exhibition to watch all these new media art gurus and installations through the lens of the Emotoscope. I’m not sure it would make me see them more carefully but it would certainly put them in an interestingly ironic perspective.
Can’t remember if i told you but i made a little photoset of the images. And Sutjes has a much nicer one.