Daniel Rozin has made some Wooden Mirrorsfrom various materials. Any person standing in front of one of these pieces is instantly reflected on its surface. The mechanical mirrors all have video cameras, motors and computers on board and produce a soothing sound as the viewer interacts with them.
Forbes.com writes about Charles Jorgensen who is working on what he calls subvocal speech recognition. He attaches a set of electrodes to the skin of his throat and his words are recognized by a computer even when he is not producing any sound.
Mark just pointed me to the web page of Spectra Symbol, a company making membrane switches and linear position sensors. I particularly like the circular position sensor!
d.tools is a hardware and software system that enables designers to rapidly prototype the bits (the form) and the atoms (the interaction model) of physical user interfaces in concert. d.tools was built to support design thinking rather than implementation tinkering. With d.tools, designers place physical controllers (e.g., buttons, sliders), sensors (e.g., accelerometers), and output devices (e.g., LEDs, LCD screens) directly onto form prototypes, and author their behavior visually in our software workbench.
Working with choreographer Mia Habib, I created the piece Laser Dance, which was shown on 30 November 1 December 2001 at the Norwegian Academy of Ballet and Dance in Oslo. The theme of the piece was “Light”, and the choreographer wanted to use direct light sources as the point of departure for the interaction. Mia had decided to work with laser beams, one along the backside of the stage and one on the diagonal, facing towards the audience. The idea was to get sound when the dancers went through the laser beams. This way the sound would be an aural representation of the “broken” light. My part was to help with the lasers and the interactive sound. ...