Global Graphica

Nissan’s NYC “taxi of the future” caught here in the wild at the corner of Houston and Crosby streets in downtown New York City. Nissan debuted these at the recent New York auto show and is being contracted to develop this as the prototype taxi of the future NYC fleet of cabs. A few are already in service in the city.

The Year of the Glitch is an art project website by Phillip Stearns that posts digital artifacts of the the various glitches generated by electronic devices and systems in the world around us.

[ Traduction française ci-dessous. | Traducción al español está por debajo de | 以下の日本語訳。]

L’Année de l’Glitch est un site web du projet d’art par Phillip Stearns que les artefacts numériques messages des pépins divers générés par les appareils électroniques et systèmes dans le monde qui nous entoure.

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El Año de la Glitch es un sitio web del proyecto de arte de Phillip Stearns que los artefactos mensajes digitales de los fallos de los diversos generados por los dispositivos electrónicos y sistemas en el mundo que nos rodea.

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グリッチの年はフィリップ·スターンズによるアートプロジェクトのウェブサイトであること私達のまわりの世界の電子機器およびシステムによって生成されるさまざまなグリッチの記事デジタルアーティファクト。

“Mojibakeru” at the Talk to Me design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

Toyota unveiled their vision for the “future of mobility” at the Tokyo Motor Week this week with an awesome video showing off “FunVii” concept car. Mind-blowing.

We were rummaging around the closet at Global Graphica HQ in New York a couple of weeks ago when we found an old box with a bunch of old electronics gear crammed into it: A tangle of USB and Firewire cords, old cellphones and their chargers, adaptors, earbuds, various keyboard mice (mouses), etc.

We also found a long, translucent plastic case by Japanese brand Muji. The case was designed specifically for containing MD’s, or Mini Discs. The case was full of these square storage devices. The Mini Disc player and its disc format were a huge hit in Japan in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s. But Mini Discs never took off in America, and eventually (and thankfully) the much better Apple iPod effectively killed off the all the competition in personal-audio technology product category, including the Mini Disc.

Before throwing all the old electronic junk out, we took a picture of some of the various discs. See below.

Awesome video of awesome animated infographics (infoporn). The clip is a beautiful, clever data visualization by Neo and Mitsue of stats on the way we access the internet now and in the year 2015. That’s just four years away.

Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.

Telling image of recently confiscated counterfeit “keep it real fake” goods in Los Angeles. The people behind this operation and line of fake iPhones, iPods and other electronic had reportedly already hauled in $7 million before being caught. As Engadget points out, pictured is part of $10 million worth of merch. Lovely visual. (Via Engadget)

Absolutely brilliant idea for an Apple Store display: Suspending a new MacBook Air laptop from a floating balloon.

Released a couple of months ago from Swedish interface and technology  design firm The The Astonishing Tribe (a.k.a, TAT, recently bought by Blackberry) …

Famed British painter David Hockney embraced first the Apple iPhone and then the iPad as medium for creating a collection of colorful impressionistic drawings which recently debuted in Paris at Fondation Pierre Berge – Yves Saint-Laurent. See still images below and check out the mini-documentary video on Artivi. Great stuff. More information in this article in the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph

We were on location in Santa Monica Beach on Saturday doing a day-long commercial shoot when these dudes arrived with  a small remote-controlled blimp. They spent the whole day flying it around the beach and testing it.

The aricraft has a camera mounted to it and the pilot on the ground uses a pair of sunglasses outfitted with video screens to see what the cam on the blimp sees .  The blimp is owned by a start-up called GoBlimps.com that is going to sell their services to production companies.

It’s pretty cool and they got some aerial shots of us doing our shoot nearby, though in the process the blimp almost crashed into a bunch of cars in a nearby parking lot. A little more testing required, perhaps.

Video teaser of Wii Spray, a technical experiment by grad students Martin Lihs and Frank Matuse at the Bauhaus University Media Department in Germany. The Nintendo Wii game platform and Adobe Flash have been employed as tools to develop the Wii Spray idea. It’s fascinating and fun. Now in its “second edition,” Wii Spray has implications beyond merely allowing graffiti to be expressed interactively and digitally or offering ideas for new Nintendo Wii games. It’s broader potential is for interface design and technology in general and how the essential hardware — game controllers and screens, etc. — will evolve for creating and consuming content. In this case, it’s glowing, electronic graffiiti created by a fake spray can with a Wii Remote embedded in the can’s form factor.

WiiSpray Teaser from Martin Lihs on Vimeo.