Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Living Memory

Living Memory, a very cool project developed by Phillips, "intends to provide the members of a locality with a means to capture, share and explore their collective memory and experience and to help them interpret and preserve the richness and complexity of their local culture. It aims to achieve these goals in a natural, intuitive and unobtrusive manner." It does this by providing an interconnected set of related technologies to enable people to do just that using user friendly tech to make it happen as seen by the image below. (Click image to see a video showing how the table works.) Looking at this shows, in a tangential way, indirect references to Microsoft's Surface, an always connected multi user environment that will allow people to interactively work together on the same computer (Jeff Han anyone?), Xerox Parc's pioneering research on Ubiquitous Computing. and Apple's upcoming iPhone the one piece of hardware that EVERYONE'S WAITING FOR.

Soft machines and the move away from the stiff 2D Window metaphor is finally taking hold after 30 years. It's about time.

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