Phew, so much has happened in the past few months. Team SociaLaser, 2010 Senior students at RIT, paired up with Sociable to extend our technology to the physical space…with lasers! Not only that, both teams presented at SIGGRAPH and won 2nd place! Amazing. Check out the Vimeo reel below, HT to Ayaka Ito for putting [...]

Hello all, Yes I know, it’s been a while since we’ve last updated the blog so our apologies if we’ve fallen off the face of the earth. Anywho, there’s some exciting news in the world of surface-top interactive installations. Reactable, a musical table-top instrument is now up for presale in Europe — pretty amazing stuff! [...]

Very, very exciting news! The Sociable Table is now a Finalist in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards competition in the “Non-Browser-Based Design” category. A special thanks to Ayaka for signing us up for the competition — we’re also sending her as a representative for our team at the award ceremony in Beijing on October 26th, 2009. [...]

Unreal! Our team won one of four $1,000 prizes that were to be given to the most creative exhibit in the festival. We also received the Marge Ruffing Memorial Award, a prize given to the exhibit that displays what RIT is all about — meshing the left and right sides of the brain, including the [...]

After switching gears back to AS3 (Flash) from Processing, we’ve made nice progress on the roulette. Here is a work-in-progress screen grab:

We went ahead and began some testing on the second prototype — special thanks to Jason for polishing this version off for us. The material we were testing with was a simple plastic overlay, which worked out pretty nicely. We will however continue to investigate other alternatives. My apologies for some blurriness and noise in [...]

Progress on the hardware side of things is slowly moving forward! As of this week, a nearly complete second prototype of our table has been produced (and will be detailed in the near future, I promise!). Physically speaking, it’s nearly complete. What’s left is the ancient tribal voodoo involved in making the projector and camera [...]

This was the final table dimensions we came up with. This way we could have a bartender at the end of the table and fit multiple users around it. Now we are onto talking to our extremely helpful industrial designer who will be helping us build the table itself. Updates soon to come!

Here are the latest round of comps from the design team… Luke’s comp: He went with Sam’s background with the boxes and played around a lot with the cup interface, trying to come up with other visually interesting solutions than just a button popping up. He also changed the roulette so it stood out from [...]

DESIGN COMPS: Luke’s comp geometric shapes to contrast circular motifs (remove outer boundaries) Alex’s comp our avatars are possibly too cartoony simple small avatars, swooshing lightning to resemble interactions menu choices should face user – so as not to be blocked by glass cup ornamentation gives a lot of personality Ayaka’s comp depth layers avatars [...]