Designers Party :

An Evocative Shower Knob : Yoo Kyoung Noh

Everyone experiences rotating a shower knob to adjust to the proper temperature when he/ she takes a shower. Taking a shower is one of the most common experiences to everyone, and I wanted to use this common behavior as the main physical interaction for my project. For this virtual shower project, I changed the meaning of a hot shower to an emotional experience and a cold shower as a realistic experience.

As the user turns the shower knob towards the realistic side, money falls down from the shower-head, and various quotes that tell how to be rich falls down together. On the contrary, as user turns the shower knob to the emotional side, the rose petals and different quotes that tell how to fall in love fall down from the shower-head.

The different degrees of the rotation reflects the number of rose petals or leaves of money and the content of the text that fall. If the shower knob sits in the middle, both money and the rose petals fall down together. By turning a real shower knob in a physical space, the user can experience either an emotional or realistic virtual shower and can find the appropriate level of love and money.

Yoo Kyoung Noh

crystal zoetrope : Woo Hun Lee, Jin Ha Song

Crystal zoetrope 2009

Shade Pixel is an interactive display that uses flexible Spandex to represent information. It can be used as an ambient display for its peripherality; non-luminescent nature and simple appearance. The main difference from other displays is that Shade Pixel is applicable to the surfaces of everyday products or to the environment as an interactive skin.

The neat artistic display comes courtesy of Woohun Lee and JinHa Seong of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). They first created hundreds of animated geometric objects using 3-D animation software, and then engraved those object models into a crystal disc by using sub-surface laser engraving.

That crystal disc ended up sitting on a motor that spins at 120 rpm, in a circular bar stool configuration. A group of 25 LED lights surrounding the crystal disc help create the animation by blinking on and off at 80 hertz. People can play with the device based on a touch sensor array, which allows users to control the direction of the spinning spiral and its brightness.

Design Media Lab at the KIST

Fils Sound Film Is A Flexible, Transparent Speaker : Fils

Fils Sound Film is a flexible, light transparent sound technology which can be used to create speakers pretty much anywhere you’d ever want. The speakers are actually produced using piezoelectric film which can produce sound waves when electrical current is applied. Sound quality isn’t stellar, since the low-end drops out at 200Hz, but the highs range all the way to 25kHz.

Fils

AntiVJ Performance New Songdo City : AntiVJ

AntiVJ, a media performance group of European artists, recently took over the façade of one of New Songdo City’s recently constructed buildings, projecting onto it, an awe-inspiring audiovisual presentation.

An inspired homage to technology and construction itself, Songdo is a futuristic masterplan city being built on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land in South Korea, along Incheon’s waterfront, and AntiVJ’s work explores a similar theme to the development, that of the “importance of technology, the coexistence of the ancient and the new and the presence of the sea as both a calming and menacing element”.

AntiVJ

New RFID Tag : Sunchon National University, Rice University

New RFID Tag Could Mean the End of Bar Codes
Lines at the grocery store might become as obsolete as milkmen, if a new tag that seeks to replace bar codes becomes commonplace.

Researchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in Houston have built a radio frequency identification tag that can be printed directly onto cereal boxes and potato chip bags. The tag uses ink laced with carbon nanotubes to print electronics on paper or plastic that could instantly transmit information about a cart full of groceries.

The new tag, reported in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, costs about three cents to print, compared to about 50 cents for each silicon-based tag. The team hopes to eventually bring that cost below one cent per tag to make the devices commercially competitive. It can store one bit of information — essentially a 1 or a 0 — in an area about the size of a business card.

“The work is impressive,” comments Thomas N. Jackson of Penn State University in University Park, who is also developing flexible electronics. He thinks it will be difficult to compete with silicon, which is well established in the realm of consumer products packaging. But similar technology could be used to do things silicon can’t do, he says, such as make smart bandages that can sense infections or freshness-sensing food packaging.

And for those who would rather not have their food broadcast radio waves after getting it home, fear not. Tour says the signals can be blocked by wrapping groceries in aluminum foil.

Sunchon National University

Rice University

Windoro bot cleans windows : PIRO

Pohang Institute of Intelligent Robotics (PIRO) presents Windoro. Its two halves, that cling together via powerful magnets, scrub both sides of a window at once with their on-board cleaning solution.

PIRO

OLED Breakthrough Yields 75% More Efficient Lights : KAIST

There is indeed a cool breakthrough in OLED efficiency, but we hear about the "breakthroughs" so often that we kind of want to say, "Bring it already!" Despite the mini fit of frustration and sarcasm, we can't deny a bit of giddiness behind the possibility that a new technology could reduce OLED energy consumption by (a super duper) 75%.

According to OLED Info, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has figured out a way to use surface plasmon. Brace yourself for a little geek-speak. Surface plasmon is, essentially, fluctuation in the electron density at the boundary of two materials. The interaction between the light emitting layer in OLEDs and surface plasmons affect efficiency. So, researchers tweaked the process and were able to squeeze out a 75% higher efficiency rate without sacrificing the intensity of the lighting.

Researchers expect the new findings will go far in improving OLED technologies, especially for flexible OLEDs. Indeed, if they keep making improvements at this rate, next thing we know we'll be adding power to the grid every time we flip on an OLED device.

KAIST