Chrome Web Lab has been sweeping the awards circuit this year.  This week, we have you to thank:  the exhibition just took home the People’s Voice award for Best Visual Design: Aesthetic at this year’s Webby’s. Thanks for the votes!

 http://winners.webbyawards.com/2013

Finally, from the pages of this week’s Wall Street Journal: check out “The Science of Serendipity in the Workplace,” a feature profiling the many ways that companies are using technology to encourage innovation and collaboration among employees who might not otherwise see each other. In the article, our upcoming work with Gensler and David Rose for Salesforce’s new HQ in Portland is called out–in fact, those are Tellarters David and James in the lead image.

Read the full feature here.

The Sketchbots started simply:  a paper, stop-motion mockup with table salt was created to communicate the idea.  Data in and data out is represented by streams of light. This clip is one of many stop-motion sketches that displayed various ideas for Web Lab experiments:

(Thanks to our friend Timo Arnall for co-directing these with Matt Cottam)

Eventually, fully-functional prototypes of the Sketchbots were made at our headquarters in Providence:

At the same time, a full-scale functional prototype of the Universal Orchestra was built in Providence and linked to control systems in London:

We’re excited to share more “Making of Web Lab” pieces in the coming weeks- stay tuned!

The Teleporter:

The Data Tracer:

Sketchbots:

The Universal Orchestra:

The Lab Tag Explorer:

The Crown Sky Garden is an interior space meant to bring patients and families as close to the outdoors as possible. Surrounded by a tall bamboo grove, the garden is filled with natural light and contains flowing water and organic forms that give the space a feeling of soothing movement.

Tellart’s main contribution is a large-scale “light wall” made up of thousands of controllable LED’s and semi-transparent colored panels. It displays abstracted animations of a flowing stream, which respond to activity in its vicinity by “springing to life,” changing colors and vivacity.

Tellart and MYKD collaborated closely with hospital personnel to ensure that the lighting and interactive effects were accessible and safe for the children in the hospital’s care. Design constraints ranged from the neural effects of interactive lighting to the special electrical requirements involved with hospital architecture.

We have just wrapped our work onsite in Chicago and are looking forward to the public opening in early June. Stay tuned for more videos of the wall in action.

In addition to designing and building innovative technology experiences with our clients, Tellart has always worked to make today’s palette of experience design materials (web connectivity, physical computing, multi-touch devices, etc.) more accessible to designers themselves. Through workshops with clients, academic courses, and our Sketchtools hardware/software toolkit, since our company was formed we’ve been working to make the digital palette as natural to design with as the pencil and paper we’re used to.

This week we’re happy to update that list of toolkits with a suite of materials focused on connecting any Android device (mobile or tablet) with the Arduino ADK microcontroller, with the Processing language to tie them together. The materials – a combination of “how-to” installation guides, working Arduino and Processing sample code, and educational exercises – walk through the set-up process and provide some basic starters for making a functional application or game. The 25 samples include modules such as the code you need to create a “color picker” on the Android and have it drive the color of an LED attached to the Arduino, or to send an RFID number from a scanner to the phone, or to create a basic oscilloscope by graphing the output of a potentiometer on the Android screen. It’s tailored to get beginners going, or to give more experienced coders a quick leg up in using the three (Android, Processing, and Arduino) together.

At the end of last year, Adam and David taught a 5-day workshop with these tools for interaction design students as part of the ongoing Experience Prototyping Course at the Umeå Institute of Design. The combination of tools allowed students the opportunity to focus on the design and usability of ubiquitous computing experiences, rather than being stuck debugging technology. With an Android device connected to whatever sensors and actuators you can imagine, they were given the final brief of designing and implementing a multi-player game that had to incorporate a graphic interface (on the Android) and a physical, analog component (attached to the Arduino). The final projects ranged from a very frantic PacMan race, to a more peaceful exploration of holding hands and human conductivity.

All of the materials are open source and available here.
We’re glad to continue our mobile hacking / sketchtools tradition, and feedback is welcome (we’re always looking to improve). We look forward to hearing and seeing what you do with the materials.

The project is the second collaboration of Tellart and mono (concept creation) following up the award-winning Real Good Chair Experiment. This time the client was Parsons The New School for Design, and the goal was to encourage engagement with the city environment.

The music, and the corresponding visuals and video, are available in near real-time through the browser or on your phone. The composition is navigable using the timeline, which is marked with the “experiments” scheduled throughout the week.

The project was completed using HTML5, JavaScript, Max/MSP/Jitter, Ableton Live, and various other software tools. On the hardware side, Tellart rigged industrial sensors to an Arduino micro-controller and captured live video throughout the ten days.

The bells are played by a series of solenoids, which are controlled by an Arduino micro-controller. The notes that you submit are processed on our web servers and then sent to the Arduino, while we load up live video and audio so that you can watch your song play. If there are users ahead of you in line, the queuing system will let you know how long you’ve got before you can watch your song.

The bell machine will only be available for a limited time, so start composing!

The final projects from the course were great and we look forward to following these students as they progress through the program.

They found a few parts online that would help bring Dave’s idea to fruition, and used this online morse code translator to translate the Pledge of Allegiance into morse code.  The dots and dashes became individual functions in the Arduino code that would control the antique morse code machine. The final machine — made up of a transistor, a solenoid, a lamp switch, and the antique parts and lightbulb — was then able to repeatedly tap the message, and blink the light on and off with every “beep”.

The work, titled Vox(Pledge of Allegiance) was on view at the Dodge Gallery from October 2 to November 7, 2010.