Tag Archives: physical to digital

The nostalgic tale of C60 Redux reminds us about the physicality of music, or lack thereof

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From a melancholic loss to a tangible idea the C60 Redux was made.

In the book I Miss My Pencil, co-authors Martin Bone and Kara Johnson of design firm IDEO conceived twelve design experiments through collaboration, sketching, and prototyping.  One of these concept designs is called the C60 Redux and it begs the question, “Does the mix tape still exist in a digital world?”  Bone shares his thoughts: “I feel strangely melancholic that in this shift from analog to digital we somehow lost something; we traded connection for convenience.”  And he gloomily concludes: “Ultimately this experiment won’t change anything; technology marches on, teenagers in love today play out their courtship online in their Facebook pages, not browsing record stacks. But I feel much better for having done it.”

This particular experiment inspired a group at IDEO to make a real working model of the C60 Redux and their efforts are revealed in the video above.  Something was “somehow lost” in the technological shift from analog to digital, thought Bone.  That something is physicality, and so the designers marched on to create a working model with this question in mind: “What if we could touch our music again?”  Using Arduino Pro Mini boards and RFID tags the concept came to life.  The designers constructed a small box that takes design cues from a record player, and built inside are Arduino boards that can read RFID (or radio-frequency identification) cards. Embedded inside custom-made cards are two RFID tags, each tag representing a song.  When you place a card on top of the box, the circuitry inside the box instantly reads the RFID tag and plays the song stored on it.  Flip a card over to play Side B.  Place multiple cards on the surface to create a playlist (the cards are read in a clockwise order).

And just like that a mere concept born out of a need to bring back the physicality of music was made into a real product.  Beyond the final product, what’s important to glean from this story is the tale of technology and how it can bring exciting advances and at the same time disregard staples of the past.  In the move from vinyl to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s, the convenience of throwing a couple hundred songs on an iPod has managed to make most forget about the materiality of music and what that brought with it.  The days of collecting piles of vinyl and what Bone calls the “joy and love” of creating personal mix tapes are way behind us, but something like the C60 Redux might just have the power to bring it all back to our digital world.

[Via Engadget; IMissMyPencil]

Pictionaire touchscreen surface merges the physical with the digital world

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Out of Microsoft and University of California Berkeley comes the Pictionaire touchscreen table.  It uses integrated overhead cameras to capture physical objects and convert them into digital ones to be manipulated.  The Microft Surface-esque table is almost six feet long, begging for an intuitive collaborative experience.  Creating digital copies of “physical artifacts” couldn’t be simpler.  You place an object (say, a notebook with doodles) onto the surface, the table recognizes its presence, the overhead camera snaps a picture of it, and all you have to do is drag and drop the corner edge of the object to a new area on the table.  Viola–now you have a digital copy of the notebook that can be manipulated in a variety of ways.  You can drag the digital copy onto paper-sized whiteboards and use a marker to add annotations.  The surface can even act as a light table to create hand-drawn copies of things.  Wireless keyboards and mice are supported for text imput and image search.  Though Pictionaire remains a research project, it’s good to see Microsoft and company working towards a more practical experience with the Microsoft Surface table.

[Via New Scientist; Gizmodo]