Just came across the weBlimp, a crowd controlled telepresence device.
The concepts behind it are really cool.
Collaborative learning: “positive results of collaborative learning may be the notion that peer interaction stimulates elaboration of conceptual knowledge. In a collaborative learning situation, students must negotiate goals, represent problems and understand the meaning of concepts and procedures. Collaborative students have to make their thoughts explicit.”
Ludic interaction: “Ludic activities are motivated by values of curiosity, exploration, surprise, wonder and reflection rather than by externally defined tasks. These values stimulate the intrinsic motiviation to interact with a design or to say it short feed the desire to play.”
Their results (and basic interface) remind me a lot of my piece Tangolumen. One thing though, I think that their results are a bit generous. In their video the narrator says “…participants were eager to interact with, not just the control space, but also with the blimp itself…” But of course the participants in the prototyping phase were friends, classmates, and colleagues. These are people that are eager to play with everything you make, which while a real blessing, doesn’t make it the best gauge for interactivity. I’ll be eager to see how the blimp fares when it is at the Surrey 2010 Celebration site in Holland Park during 2010 Winter Olympic Games from Feb. 17-21.