MusicBox – Visual Playlist


Perhaps this is how music playlists should’ve been all along – visual and much more spontaneous and interactive in how you’d listen to and choose songs, created by MIT lab’s Anita Lillie (as part of her master thesis):

My Master’s thesis is focused on the problem of finding music you like, both inside your own collection (to match a particular mood, for example), or outside of your own collection. I don’t like the hugely text-dependent ways of searching for music in traditional media players like iTunes and Windows Media Player. My thesis work will depart from that interface, and will present your music collection in a space, organized by similarity. I will be calculating similarity both from audio features (straight from the audio signal) and textual descriptions (gathered from tags on the web).

It’s also great that she’s decided to share it out openly and early – hopefully this’d turn into a mature (free and open?) software soon too – I’d certainly dig this over iTunes and Windows Media Player.

MINI Augmented Reality Ad


There is quite a bit of user involvement before he/she can ‘get’ the ad – but the concept is an interesting one. The steps are as follows:

  1. User sees the ad on magazine, follows instruction to the MINI website.
  2. User holds the magazine in front of his own webcam.
  3. MINI website detects the orientation of the magazine, super-imposes a 3D model of the MINI car on the magazine on the monitor.
  4. User plays around, taken by the interactivity of this augmented reality.
  5. ???
  6. Profit!

[via designboom]

Seadragon for iPhone

I was somewhat surprised that Microsoft has decided to launch for free (for the first time) Seadragon Mobile, a very interesting zooming-user-interface, on Apple’s iPhone. Check it out:

I was first captivated by Seadragon some years ago when it was shown in a demo – the way it can (infinitely) zoom down smoothly and still be sharp (without first opening a gigazillion-byte file), the way it has almost zero UI element on screen for it to work (so nothing is blocking you from the things you actually do want to see)  – is something inherently suitable for mobile application, IMHO.

Wonder if this’d take off to one day become a dominant way of accessing information. While currently it’s very much just browsing through static images, some day it may be interactive elements: links, bookmarks, videos, opened and running applications, etc.