Kieran Nolan

Here are the slides from the Hacking Toys Into Tangible Interfaces workshop that was held at DKIT last week for the ISEA 2009 conference. Thanks to everyone that participated :)

Many thanks to Arcade Heroes for featuring my Bionic Roshambo game on their blog. I definately recommend adding their site to your rss feed, an excellent resource.

I was over in Sweden last month attending 7workshops7 organised by 1scale1, a research lab based in Malmö city. The workshops were all about interaction design and prototyping with open source hardware and software tools, mainly arduino, processing , reacTIVision, PD and some PCB design in Eagle as well. We also built a 'Smapler'. A lot of ground was covered in the two weeks and I headed back home with a new bag of tricks and fresh inspiration.

Below is a work in progress shot from my 'Alternative Displays' project, it's a 4 x 4 grid of square electromagnets. These are controlled by an Arduino and a Djuicer (a custom circuit designed especially for the workshop by 1scale1). A framed sheet of perspex goes on top of these and it contains a layer of industrial printer toner. When the magnets are switched on the the metal fibres stand up and you see a 'pixel' in the dust. Thanks to Mattias, Tony and David at 1scale1 for all their help making this. Next step is to have custom animations appear in the dust and have it respond to some external inputs.

A musical creation game from 1986 by Toshio Iwai, who created Electroplankton and most recently the Tenori-On for Yamaha. Octocky was released on the Famicom Disk System, the Japanese version of the 8-Bit NES console. The syncing of music, visuals and gameplay were groundbreaking at the time and it still stands out today. More information and a rom image to run in a suitable emulator are available here. Bonus review here.

'Zelda No Video' is a documentary about Nintendo's 'Legend of Zelda' series by Enterbrain in Japan. It was made in 2003 but was never officially translated into English. However earlier this year Zentendo released a fansub of the documentary, which took over a dozen volunteers nearly four years to complete. The documentary takes us from the series' roots on the 8bit Famicom / Nes console up to the 'The Wind Waker' on the Gamecube. A really interesting piece of videogame history and a great insight into Zelda as a cultural phenomenon in Japan and worldwide.