Braille T-shirts

Being in the Accessibility Program Office here at Sun, and therefore on the lookout for anything that can help our blind users, I just couldn't pass this one up. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing posted a blog entry entited "Braille t-shirts with anti-groper countermeasures". Here's a link to the referenced web site. Naughty but nice.

[Technorati Tag: accessibility]

[Technorati Tag: T-shirts]

( Jul 14 2004, 05:52:07 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]

LDraw - a LEGO Open Standard

LEGO is one of those companies I truly admire. They've reinvented themselves numerous times. They are always current and they've generated a community of users around their products. There are numerous freely available tools to help you work with LEGO and to allow you to share your ideas and visions with others. To make this happen there has to be standards. One such standard is LDraw

Quoting from there web site:

LDraw is an open standard for LEGO CAD programs that allow the user to create virtual LEGO models and scenes. You can use it to document models you have physically built, create building instructions just like LEGO, render 3D photo realistic images of your virtual models and even make animations. The possiblities are endless. Unlike real LEGO bricks where you are limited by the number of parts and colors, in LDraw nothing is impossible.

This web site is the central reposity for all thing related to LDraw.

The site has pointers to books describing the standard and the numerous tools built around it. There are also links for tutorials, the specifications and software downloads.

Here's the model of the month and the scene of the month.

LEGO has certainly come a long way since I played with it when I was a child. Now I get to play with it all over again with my five year old son. Yippee!

[Technorati Tag: software]

[Technorati Tag: CAD]

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( Jul 14 2004, 02:25:50 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

A different audio/visual experience

A pointer to this came from one of the self-promotion articles in Interactive Design Annual 6 as featured in the September/October 2000 edition of the Communication Arts magazine. It showed off an Audiovisual environment created by Golan Levin when he was at the MIT Media Lab. It's a performance medium that merges paint programs and musical instruments. It looked fascinating on paper, but that didn't really show off what it could do. A little googling took me to Golan's home page at the MIT Media Lab (note that he's moved on to Flong now).

There is a lot of great stuff there presented in a very appealing way, but here's the link to AVES, the AudioVisual Environment Suite. There are numerous samples there of how the environment works but a good starting point to understanding what's going on here is the Yellowtail movie.

For a live performance, check out the Scibble Concert. Now they are not Devo or the Blue Man Group (I had a vision of a group of Steve Jobs clones) but it was interesting. This feels like a new medium that people are just experimenting with. There are no audiovisual classics using this yet (at least not that I found or recognized), but a lot of potential for a new art form.

[Technorati Tag: Visualization]

[Technorati Tag: Graphics]

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( Jul 14 2004, 09:18:47 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]