Links: Inventions
- The NYT ran a good profile of the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, inventor of Nintendo-as-we-know-it. Most interesting fact from the article: Miyamoto, who may be best known for his signature characters (Mario, Zelda, etc.), considers characters an afterthought in his creative procedure. He prioritizes gameplay, and thinks that people fall in love with his characters because they enjoy playing as them. It would be interesting to know how many “new media” artists consider Miyamoto/NES a major influence–certainly Cory Arcangel must. (Above, an installation view of Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds,” from new folder’s flickr.)
- MIT researchers are exploring how the human mind intuitively translates very little visual information into a confident guess as to what an object is. As always, context is key. In this case, experimenters have placed the same blurry muddle of pixels into four different blurred pictures, convincingly rendering a bottle, a cell phone, a person, a shoe, and a car–all with the same muddied mass! Count this as evidence that designing visual search engines will be harder than you’d think.
- Philips has applied for a patent on a shopping window that notices where consumers are looking, then displays further information about the eye-catching product on adjacent screens. They also think the window might be useful in museums, where visitors could learn more about specific details in an artwork or diorama simply by looking at them.
