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Virtual Moleskine

This is where I keep my notes for various posts. If you see something in here that interests you, or if you have something to add, please post it in the comments.

Ethics of Simplicity: The AK-47
This is a presentation I’ve been cooking for awhile. I want to talk about the simplicity of design, and when that can be a bad thing. A perfect example is the AK-47. Thanks to Brad Nunnally for a link to this article on the subject: 5 Things You Didn’t Know About the AK-47.

Mobile Augmented Reality
Worked with Jake Dunagan, Stuart Candy, Matthew Jensen and Eliot Frick on a project in Hawaii in early 2008. During that trip we brainstormed some concepts for mobile augmented reality. Eventually I’ll get off my ass and post the concepts.

iPhone App: Nature Browser
Here’s the problem I want to solve: I’m on a hike, see a purple flower, and I have no clue what it is. But I want to find out, and that’s hard. So in this case the interface works like this. IPhone > Nature Browser > Plants > By Color > Purple. Pretty simple right? Here’s the real power: the result set is already filtered by what the phone knows: location, season and time of day. So the huge database of animal and plant life is already wittled down based on my context - automatically. Once I arrive at the matching flower, I can click to learn more, I can report an observation (which is reported back to a nature survey database, for a crowd-sourced nature survey), take a photo, tick it off on my scavenger hunt, etc.

© 2009 Nathan Verrill.