This week in design – 12 November 2010

The theme of this week’s update is one of cool stuff that we came across this week in the world of open source.

You’ll know from Christian’s blog post a while ago that we’re really interested in the idea of interacting with your computer physically. Christian experimented with the webcam in a laptop but imagine what could be done with a Stereoscopic box of tricks like that clever Kinect setup for the Xbox!

Well, wonder no more because as it transpires we can play with it on Linux right now. Both Engadget and OMG! have written up stories and it’s quite exciting to see that this is working so soon after its release. If you’re interested in how it actually works you can head over to Wired who wrote an interesting piece about it for those with a taste for popular science.

Staying with exciting interactive technology John Lea on our team came back from a conference in Germany this week, The ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces – no less. Some representatives from a company called Archimedes Solutions demonstrated a tabletop surface running games. You can see a video from April this year showing off a castle defence game amongst others on Youtube.

Away from the new hotness the reason we’re a bit quiet is that we’re cracking on with the Natty cycle and getting our ducks in a row. There’s a lot of activity on Launchpad and we’re engaging with the artwork community. More on all of this later!

Splendid weekends everyone!