Interactivity

For Bryan Duxbury and Adam Ellsworth, a shared interest in DIY Arduino projects and a conversation at a Christmas party led to a pretty bright idea and an unexpected side business.

The two San Francisco residents are the creators of the Interactive 8bit Question Block lamp--a Super Mario Bros.-inspired piece of home decor. For fans of the game, the lamp should instantly look familiar, as it resembles the blocks that Mario hits to earn coins and other loot. The design alone already makes it pretty cool, but that's not where the fun ends.

To turn the light on or off, you must punch (actually, a gentle tap is enough and recommended) the bottom of the block, and every time you do so, it makes a coin sound just like in the video game. On every eighth tap, you're rewarded with the 1-Up sound. It's a piece of Super Mario Bros. come to life.

This project may never have seen the light of day, however, had it not been for a chance meeting at a company Christmas party. … Read more

Like any self-respecting geek, I can quote just about any scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"--complete with a pretty spot-on English accent.

Needless to say, it ranks among my all-time favorite films--and that's why the new Monty Python: The Holy Book of Days app for iPad is such a treat. It's like a coffee-table book come to life, a mammoth interactive collection of cast-member goodies from the filming of the movie.… Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Looking out the window of my hotel this afternoon, just across from the convention center here where thousands of South by Southwest attendees have been swarming like ants for days, I saw something altogether new.

Very thin people in with long hair and tight black pants carrying musical instruments were, if not everywhere, then all over the place.

Welcome to the annual population changeover as SXSW Interactive ends and SXSW Music begins.

Technically, those two sides of the festival (there's also SXSW Film, which lasts for ten full days) don't overlap, as Interactive ends today and Music … Read more

BOSTON--Robot engineers would do well to play with video games and other well known machine interfaces to get their creations out of the labs and into the marketplace, according to robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks.

Speaking at the Human-Robotics Interaction (HRI) 2012 conference here, Brooks said that academics too often expect the users to adjust to robots and don't foresee how people will use the robots they design.

The former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brooks was a co-founder of iRobot, which sells the Roomba vacuum cleaner and robots to … Read more

In an effort to quickly and efficiently map the roughly 5,000 automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in public areas of Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine recently launched a contest to award $10,000 to the team or person who finds the most.

With the six-week contest, which kicked off in late January, nearing its March 13 deadline, researchers are already planning to conduct a similar, nationwide challenge.

AEDs can save the lives of those suffering cardiac arrests via electric shocks, particularly if used in the first minutes following the onset of the attack. … Read more

It seemed like the perfect setup--give kids video games that would motivate them to get off the couch and start moving. Not only would they have fun, they would also get healthier.

However, these high hopes may have been wishful thinking. According to a new study by Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, kids given "active" video games showed no more overall physical exertion than kids who used only their thumbs to play.

"There was no evidence that children receiving the active video games were more active in general, or at anytime, than children receiving the … Read more

What does it feel like to chop down a tree? Or walk a narrow plank suspended above a deep pit? Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab can take you there.

Professor Jeremy Bailenson has created a thoroughly convincing virtual-reality environment at the Stanford lab. But what makes it feel so real? The lab uses technology to provide sensory feedback in a couple of different ways. There are devices called "butt-kickers" under the floor that make it shake, 22 speakers provide audio input, and, lastly, there's the head-mounted display that offers a stereoscopic view of the virtual … Read more

Sometimes a painting is so beautiful you just want to reach right into it.

Of course, if you happen to be in a museum, that impulse could get you tackled by a security guard.

But Greek multimedia artist Petros Vrellis seems determined to let people satisfy the urge. He's currently at work on a project that would let viewers stir the skies of one of the West's most iconic paintings: Vincent Van Gogh's "The Starry Night."… Read more

Web companies such as Google and Amazon won a closely watched patent-infringement lawsuit today when a jury ruled that a patent central to the complaint was invalid.

A federal jury in Tyler, Texas, deliberated for just a few hours this afternoon before concluding that all of Eolas Technologies' claims of ownership to a patent related to the "Interactive Web" were invalid, according to a Wired report. Also challenging the validity of the patents were Adobe Systems, CDW, JCPenney, Staples, and Yahoo.

Eolas and the University of California contended it was due $600 million in royalties from the Web … Read more