We have a lot of passion for that point of connection between people and technology. Interface design is an exciting field these days. The multi-touch display Jeff Han presented at TED a few years back sparked a lot of ideas on our team. When Apple took the iPhone to market, there was equal excitement. If the hand can express more, what else is possible?

What about the face? We experimented with simple motion capture to allow the movement of the head or hands to create an action. If you move about and the computer responds to this action, wow, think of the possibilities.

Our clients have given us the opportunity to explore the freedoms mobile devices afford the individual. If the cell phone is a sort of portable interface device to interact with others through text messaging, video and audio, why do we confine ourselves to what seems an increasingly rudimentary device, the mouse? Increasingly, our interaction with the internet will move away from the computer and on to these devices. What new capabilities does that allow?

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Presentation advances allow for a deeper level of engagement with content. Augmented Reality is a relatively simple technology that allows for the real time manipulation of 3D objects on screen through the physical manipulation of real objects. In many ways, it is just a hack, but some of the best paradigm shifts in interface design involve simply rethinking the interface in novel new ways. Immersion has been the dream of interface technology from the days of Tron through Minority Report and into our daily reality.

Artists have explored this line in a variety of ways to create more expressive relationships with the image.

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At various conferences and events over the past couple years, People Design team members have each had the opportunity to see interactive displays that get our juices flowing. We wanted to do our own for our launch party at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. So, we wanted to explore the use of image capture to create a fun way for people to see the emerging impact of this very sort of interaction. Ryan Lee and myself put our heads together and came up with a means of capturing peoples faces, passing them up to a web server, optimizing on the fly and presenting them through another computer on the big beautiful presentation screen at the museum. The results looked like this.

Ryan went on to take the artifacts from the party and put together this favor for party attendees. Give it a shot.