A painting is no longer something always keeping still: Scott Garner’s “Still Life” is rightly a painting that can respond to real-world activity. Whenever you rotate the painting, you’ll see that the fruits and vases begin to tumble and finally change their positions. Why? Because the painting is actually made using the game developing program unity 3D, and inside the painting there is a flat-screen television screen with a spatial sensor built behind it to detect the tilt. So whenever somebody rotate its frame, the unity 3D scene can then respond and interact with the users.

Designer: Scott Garner

Jayne Vidheecharoen from the Art Center College of Design, California has invented a machine that converts your physical hands into virtual ones, so as to help you control the virtual world directly. Just as shown in the video, the prototype of the technology uses Google Streetview as its background, with various objects of the Streetview that are controlled by people’s hand. Though quite amazing, the prototype model is actually constructed with really cheap components such as a duct tape, a desk lamp, an end table, fabric scrap, a borrowed monitor and a cheapest possible webcam, as the designer listed on her blog.

Designer: Jayne Vidheecharoen

Stuffed animals used to be inanimate toys that can only get moved by the humans; but now they can successfully move on their own, with the aid of the Pinoky—a small, ring-like device that wirelessly brings stuffed animals to “life”. It uses a micro controller, a Zigbee input device and a servo motor system to move an animal’s hands and legs, also with a set of photo sensors designed to measure the angle at which it bends. Thus simply pin the Pinoky onto your stuffed animals, and you will then see them move and dance automatically. Really funny, huh? You can get it as a Christmas gift for your kids.

Designer: Snuggleberry, Cuddlekins & Puddles

Made of nanoscale ferromagnetic and fluid (usually an organic solvent or water), this is an interactive liquid toy that invites you to build beautifully-patterned sculptures. Just as shown in the video below, you can construct as delicate sculptures as you could ever imagine using a magnet or two magnets or more. So would you like a try too? Choose your favorite style, Ferrite or Ferro, and then move!

Selling Price: $100-$125

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Draw with the included UV Laser pen to create your special T-shirt that glows in the dark! The shirt is made of glowy material, which will get charged as the pen go through it and then light up to show unique patterns. Of course the tee only works without too much light, so you’d better wear it for a party rather than a picnic.

Selling Price: $24.99

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Rest on a bench and play seesaw. The “Swingers” chair, an awesome piece of furniture designed for two people, allows people to move and play while they’re taking a break. By doing that, the designer aims to make people smile more and get closer to each other as much as possible. So will that really work? We believe it would. Still, if you meet such a bench one day, we hope you could sit down and play it with the others.

Designer: Neulhae Cho

Cleverly combining light and shadow together, the giant OLED mirror collaborated by rAndom International and Chris O’Shea would feel the human’s movement and thus to interact in the term of either light or mirrors. Stand still, and the panels act like mirrors, but when you’re on the move, the OLED pixels then light up. The other interacting type is totally different, as wherever you go would become mirrors with the left parts still act as light. It’s very magical, and now the You Fade to Light has been produced in a limited edition of just eight units, each is selling for €140,000. So if you don’t think it’s exciting enough to watch them in the video, you may consider getting home one such piece.

Designer: rAndom International & Chris O’Shea

As the best thing we’ve ever met until now for us to use the Kinect, Microsoft’s “Code Space” is a smart system that combines the Kinect gaming controller with laptops and cellphones, in order to bring people a totally different experience of meeting. It allows people to actively participate in the meeting, to upload or download meeting data directly with their gestures or cellphone. Check out the video below and you’ll know how wonderful the “Code Space” is.

Disney is a wonderful place full of imaginations, in my mind, thus it’s quite amazing to see its research labs come up with the SideBySide handheld projectors for multiplayer games. Each unit combines a camera with a modified DLP projector that outputs a single color of visible light and also an invisible infrared image. The IR image can be detected by the camera built with second projector, which would then know clearly where the image output by the first projector is and what it is doing, and thus create another image to interact with the first one. That may sound a little complicated, but you’ll soon find out how it works with the video after the jump.

Designer: Ivan Poupyrev and Karl D.D. Willis

Composed of gesture recognition software connected with a 3D depth sensor, a real time 3D video capture module using a 3D video camera and interactive graphic generation software based on a game engine, the 3D AR screen showcased by Aniframe can not only create 3D images but interact with the users. It can recognize and track the gesture of users, allowing them to “draw” images in 3D space. After showing the visual contents via a 3D TV, the system can help the users to browse its 3D contents using their own hand gestures such as tapping and scrolling.

Designer: Aniframe

See What You Print (SWYP) is a sleek concept by Artefact, which is designed to give the printers a new great change. The SWYP combines with a simple stylish appearance and a fantastic user interface, which have made us think of products from Apple. Once wirelessly connected to your cameras or computers, the printer will then allow you to choose and edit your photos with its multi-touch screen. The image on the screen is exactly the photo you will finally get, and that’s also why the printer is named “See What You Print”.

Designer: Artefact

On the Good Design Expo in Tokyo, Japan-based Docomo company built a giant screen to introduce their latest Palette UI interface, something that would improve the navigation between each app on your cellphones by assorting your softwares. Still, the Palette UI is really fantastic, because it would attract butterflies, numbers, and other elements into a cellphone and changes then into colorful stripes. To understand how great the Palette UI is, please check out the video below for more information.

Via：Docomo

Zapparel Augmented Reality Clothes, which was launched at the International Fashion Expo, Magic in Las Vegas on August 22-24, is an amazing design that allows people to interact with it based on Augmented Reality technology. The following video shows how people can play games with the T-shirt: a space man with robot arms will appear and shoot UFOs soon after one person takes photos of the T-shirt, and then the users can touch the UFOs to play the game. There are 20 different T-shirts in the series, and we really couldn’t wait to see how surprising other 19 ones would be.

What will you do if you have a magic mirror as those you see in books or films? There maybe many answers to that question, but there’s at least one thing we’ll all want to do: to illustrate what we desire on it. Romy van den Broek’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’ is rightly an interactive mirror that features motion sensor technology to let users run into a different world.

In other words, when kids are going on with a story, they may become main characters and see themselves surrounded by the elements of the story if they have one such mirror.

Designer: Romy van den Broek

The great development of technology has made everything possible. After we come with typewriters, cellphones, computers, etc, we now meet this Kiss Transmission Device.

Still under development at the Kajimoto Laboratory, at the University of Electro-Communications, the device is designed to transmit the feeling of a kiss over long distances. At present, the researchers have made it possible for the device to replicate the movement of the tongue. As you have one device in mouth and turn it with your tongue, you’ll find the other device do the same thing too. In the future you’ll get a better device, something that can duplicate and transmit a kiss including the sense of taste, manner of breathing and the moistness of the tongue.

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Now Sam Buxton’s Luminous Anatomy Lounger proves cloning could be really simple. As you come closer to the chair, it will interact with you-its electroluminescent display lights up, with its every detail clear to the user. But when you leave it, the chair’s light then gets dim and finally disappears.

Designer: Sam Buxton

How to quickly and conveniently find your car among the hundreds and even thousands ones? The camera-based ‘Find Your Car’ system installed in Santa Monica Place may help you quite much.

As you punch your license plate number into the kiosk touch screen, and then you’ll be guided to its location via a photo displayed on the screen. The technology seems really practical, even though there’re some privacy concerns that will be further discussed.

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Wanna to have some fun when you’re waiting for a bus? That’s no longer a joke as some Interactive Bus Stations were already built in some districts of San Francisco.

The project was made for a special game contest, during which the players need to take in part with a touch-screen machine built at a bus station. These interactive designs seem really attractive, as they have drawn great interest of both the players and the local citizens.

What would tables be like in the next few years? Recently the Media Computing Group from Germany offered a possible answer with their BendDesk. It is a clever combination of common tables and computers, featuring a vertical display and a horizontal larger one. Frequently used devices like mouse, keyboard, paper-based documents and others are all built within the two areas, which promise an effective interaction with the users based on multi-touch technology.

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Colorful LED lights have given the US map a new look and actually they’re used to highlight your travels within America. Beautifully framed, the Lighted LED US can effectively interact with the users, allowing them to easily find out how many cities they’ve been to. Really intuitive but pity that we don’t have a LED world map at the present.

Selling Price: $149.99

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So almost nothing SPECIAL appears in the picture? Then continue to check out more pics below…

Here you’ll see a USB flash drive, which is one of the five flash drives “injected” by Aram Bartholl into walls to achieve the “Dead Drops” project. The designer aims to call for more and more people to share their files and data with others, so you can easily have your information shared when plugging your laptop to the USB flash drive built on walls.

If you’d like to know where the five flash drives are located, we suggest you go around the New York City or check them out on Aram’s website.

Designer: Aram Bartholl

Designed for Vanerum, an educational design consultancy, Bram Boo’s Salsa is a creative table set embedded with four iPad interactive systems that allow the users to share information and ideas when sit separately. Therefore you can just communicate via the screens if you do not want a talk in the public places.

Designer: Bram Boo

No doubt the Wii players have influenced many people, and everyday there’re new players getting crazy with the fascinating interactive game. And maybe that’s why more and more designers have come to develop new interactive games, just as it did in the case of Zachery Shivers and Anne Flinchbaugh who have created a motion-controlled version of Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots. Its key ingredient is TI’s accelerometer-equipped Chronos watch, which can translate the players’ actual punches into rock ‘em sock ‘em punches.For more details, you can hit up the source link and the video after the jump.

Designer: Zachery Shivers & Anne Flinchbaugh

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If you don’t have enough money to spend on racing cars but still want to experience high speed, you should at least possess certain wisdom. Because with the power of invention and imagination, everyone can make an awesome interactive race course, just as the sputnic guys have done. Using old paper board, these guys created a RACER Interactive Video Game Installation that allows the players to drive from a first perspective as the small RC car that’s equipped with a wireless video camera is running on the track. So even if you’re simply sitting on a chair, you can still feel like that you’re driving a real car! Really cool!

Everyone has a secret, and so do the kids. They’re growing up, learning something new from their parents and teachers every day, and at the same time they’re experiencing the growing pains. To help children aged between 6 and 9 effectively cope with stress and fears, Emi Schenkelbach has designed the cute toy named as Echo. It has an acoustic pipe running from its ear to the belly, so as to record and repeat the words that the kids have said to it. Since the voice will be modified in the belly, no one else would know clearly what Echo is saying so that the kids can keep their secrets. Besides, the voice from Echo will also create unique sound effects to make the children laugh heartily.

Designer: Emi Schenkelbach

The Jing Hua here refers not to “the flowers in the mirrors”, but to an interactive light system designed by Jifei Ou. Showcased during the light festival LUMINALE 2010, the Jing Hua Light has gained much attention for its changing colors, forms and sizes. The interactive installation includes two parts—a bowl and a projection system. So when you move, shake or tilt the bowl, you can then create various kinds of virtual flowers. Fantastic!

Designer: Jifei Ou

Natan Linder and his LuminAR make us love MIT more and love lamps more. The MIT student integrated a small scale digital projector with a robotic arm, creating an innovative interactive system that can help the users to check out images and emails directly on the table top. Its articulated robotic arm can also be used in combination with a laptop or a mobile phone. For a demonstration, continue with the video after the break.

Designer: Natan Linder

Microsoft, who has long enjoyed a high reputation both at home and abroad, attracted people all around the world again last month, with its new research project “Pinch-the-Sky”. It is a dome that is equipped with an omni-directional camera, a projector and a 3D model of the solar system. The project is also based on the multi-touch technology, which enables the visitors to navigate and manipulate the 360 degree image presented on the roof using freehand gestures or voice commands.

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Infectious Light is a modular lighting system made up of several battery-run light bulbs that could sense and react to each other. These bulbs gotta light up one by one when you bring the “mother” light closer to the “baby” lights, and the project takes the very name “Infectious Light” simply from that act.

The designer has also created a kind of luminous tree for these soft spheres, to solve the problem of charging.

Too bad this thing doesn’t come with any price details, but we’ve already seen that these stylish and cute lights would give your homes a refreshing look.

Designer: Julien Bergignat

Even if your lover is in someplace far away, you’ll no longer feel lonely any more, because you have the Pillow Talk! It is an innovative project that aims to connect long distance lovers.

Each set includes two pillows, which separately has a sensor fitted in a wearable chest strap that one has to wear during the night. Thanks to the sensors, lovers in two different places can get much closer, feeling their presence (the pillow glows softly if one of them goes to bed) and hearing their real-time heartbeats. Far more important, the intimate interaction between two lovers can always be ensured, no matter how far away they are from each other.

Designer: Joanna Montgomery

Considering that most parents nowadays are shuttling back and forth between various workplaces, it’s really difficult for them to spare time to accompany their kids, not to say giving them a warm hug each night. But luckily, the distance between kids and parents may be effectively shortened, since the Mixed Reality Lab has come up with the Huggy Pajama, a device that enables the parents and children to embrace each other remotely.

The Huggy Pajama system includes a mobile doll that comes with an embedded pressure sensing circuit to sense varying range of human force produced by real touch, as well as a wearable pajama that simulates the hug to the wearer. So when connected to the Internet, the doll will feel and deliver the hug produced by the mom to the pajama, which would then ‘hug’ the kids wearing it. Featuring embedded air pockets and heating elements, the pajama also makes the wearers feel warm and comfortable, as if the parents are rightly here with them.

Using software made with the openFrameworks library by YesYesNo, four creative agencies and the public have collaborated to display several colorful and amazing scenes on the facade of the Auckland’s Ferry Building. Named as ‘Night Lights’,  the project was created for the re-branding of Telecom New Zealand.

More Pictures Here

Like most conventional lamps, the Airswitch1 here is still controlled by your hands, but in a totally different way. It could sense your hands, changing its light intensity when you raise your hand vertically and switching on/off if you move your hand horizontally above the lamp. Cool!

Selling Price:￡49

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If you think only certain instruments like the guitars and pianos could clearly show us how music is played, then let me correct you because the Noteput Music Table can perform that task as well as the instruments, or even better. It is an interactive musical device, allowing you to see, to hear and to feel the music simultaneously. The musical table employs the camera-based marker tracking, which could identify each note and their positions. So music (or sound) would then be created and heard as you place the musical notes onto the table. The notes could be played by using the sound of different instruments.

Hit the jump for the video…

More Information Here

Do you need a notepad to write down your thoughts and messages, or to communicate with your friends when you’re enjoying the coffee? Here’s one that could not only record your mindless thoughts but convey them to others in quite an interesting way. And the product we’re to argue is the ‘Communicative Coffee Table’ by Di Wu. The table features eight slide boards for adorning the table and a chalkboard for you to write on. One of the slide boards also conceals a duster to clean the chalkboard.

Designer: Di Wu

Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Ontario has developed these interactive OLED gaming tiles, which are surely to challenge current toys on the market. By connecting different tiles to each other, you can easily change the gaming background and participant members. And for extra fun, you can flip the tiles to create some unique effects: for example, when you flip the tile full with water to another tile, the water will flow into that tile, just as you can see from the picture on the right side.

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Based on the Holographic Laser Projection technology, Light Touch is an interactive projector that can create bright images on flat surfaces like the wall, the table and therefore allow the users to enjoy movies or play the game all the time. And the device takes the very name from that act. But why could the user interact with the machine? That largely attributes to the built-in infrared sensors, which can detect the users’ motion and change the projected image into a virtual touch screen.

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These clothes are so ordinary. But, the thing the new product is about is the interface on the front, which allows two guys to have some interactive gaming fun. It also comes with an accelerometer at the back, providing you certain control during the game. How to play? Well, actually, what you have to do is to keep rocking back and forth to have the game paddle move.

31 girls are apologizing on the web…That’s not a shocking piece of news but a new service provided by an interactive website ‘Ayamari Bijin’. You can find out the girls’ blood types, choose one, and ‘hire’ her to apologize to your friends, your boss or any other people. But do we really need such a service? As in my mind, nothing is better to comfort others than your personal actions. Nevertheless, that’s still a perfect idea!

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Firstly adopted by Tom Caudell in the early 1990s, ‘augmented reality’ has finally reached the December edition of men’s magazine Esquire. After experimenting with things like origami (May edition) and e-ink (October 2008 edition), this time, Esquire will invite the readers to interact with the magazine via a PC. A C++ application is needed to recognize a black and white patterned marker on the printed page and then translate it into a video sequence enhanced by 3D animation on the computer screen. For more details, you’ll have to check them out for yourself.

Video after the break.

Made up of only multi-colored blocks, the interactive Hi-Fi system doubles a speaker and a player. Easily controlled by moving hands on its surface, the interactive interface also impresses the users with a soft touch.

Interactive projector is not so weird these days. It can help you pick up some virtual object from the whiteboard, but I bet your interactive projector cannot distinguish your finger, palm or even fist. This new intelligent whiteboard from SmartTech comes with this kind of capability. Actually, you can write with a pen and move objects with fingers then erase it with your palm. Wow, it’s magic hah? Previously, interactive projector itself is magic too.

Video after the break

Unlike conventional mirrors, this one comes with interactive features and so you can get many extra functions beyond merely get your own image from it.

Video after the break

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Waterfalls and fountains are common decoration for public places. But they are not anything but decoration without amusing. But interactive technology will implement this shortage.

It seems like a normal board at first glance, but the interactive technology allows you to add any virtual objects to change the direction of the flow, or just with your body. Therefore, you can enjoy the water in public places and do not have to worry about being wet through.

Video after the break

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The shelf speaker we mentioned in daily life is a speaker which could directly fit for your shelf, but this shelf speaker we are introducing is a speaker in the shape of a shelf. What’s more, it can play music in an interactive manner which allows you to gain more happiness from it.

Video demonstration after the break

Designer: NoDesign

All the numbers of this clock are combined by visual ocean creatures. When not in using, the creatures can move randomly to make your room full of smooth atmosphere. Moreover, it can also act as speaker of iPod.

Video after the break

Price: $199

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Dogs express happiness by wagging tails. But you can’t read their expression exactly. By attaching a unique LED communicator on your puppy’s tail, it will tell you its meaning with different wigging speed.

[source]