I am happy to announce a project that I have been working on for a while now.

The Abduction Lamp is not meant to be a toy. It is supposed to be made in high quality from metal and glass. It is my hope that someone with a playful mind like yourself would want to have a lamp like this in their home.

How does it work?

A light source inside the UFO body lights up the windows and the cone shaped glass beam. The beam glass is frosted to diffuse the light enough to spread it in all directions.

A true UFO Lamp

I got the idea for the abduction lamp as I was driving past a lamp store one late evening and saw how the light fell from one of the lamps in the window. The idea stuck in my head, and I returned the day after and saw that it was a quite common lamp.

I have spent a while building and rendering it in Maya, and I will return with some of my experiences with the visualisation process in a future post.

A new theory on abduction

Visit abductionlamp.com for more images. You will also find my new theory on why aliens are busy abducting cows and people..

Update

The Alien Abduction Lamp is moving from concept to prototype.

I am attending this years Siggraph in San Diego in the beginning of August. It feels like ages since I last attended Siggraph in Los Angeles in 2005. I am especially looking forward to the papers, panels, emerging technologies and the exhibitions.

Last years focus was much on optimizing the technical platforms of the 3D packages and integration on 64 bit systems. I believe that this year will bring some exciting news in the 3D industry, building on the foundation that has been laid. I also believe that Maya 9.0 will be presented at Siggraph, with the full implementation of Nucleus for dynamic systems.

I have also signed up for Autodesk’s Siggraph MasterClasses to brush up on my Maya skills. If anyone reading this is interested, I have an extra copy of the 2005 Maya MasterClasses DVD to give away. It contains lots of great information and sample projects. The first to comment and ask for it gets it.

Eirik Solheim has posted some videos from the art gallery and emerging technologies from last year’s Siggraph in Boston at eirikso.com.

I have now departed with my ten year old Gaggia Paros espresso machine and bought a new ISOMAC Venus (recommended!). And buying the new machine has sparked my interest in making the best possible coffee. The image on the right shows a double espresso in the making.

One important parameter when making a good espresso is how much you make. When I bought the machine at Cortado in Oslo (hereby highly recommended), we had a little discussion about the volume of a single espresso.

The salesman claimed that a single Italian espresso is about 35-40 ml, which I found to be too much. But I didn’t have any idea of how much less it should be. (I am referring to Italian espresso here, not northern European which is larger - especially at restaurants, or American espresso which is even larger still).

I recently had the opportunity to measure it myself during a three weeks stay at a vineyard in Tuscany (also highly recommended and possibly the subject of a future post). The answer is that an Italian espresso (or “caffée normale”) ranges from about 10ml to about 25ml, where somewhere around 25ml seems to be the normal. The measurements were made in Siena and at Chianti Autogrill on Autostrada A1.

And did I get some strange looks as I did my measurements?

You bet

If you have a laptop and a desktop mac, Teleport is the tool to work on both at the same time.

This great tool makes your second mac work just almost like connecting a second display. When you move your mouse off the main screen where you set the other mac up to be, the control of the keyboard and mouse goes over to the other machine. It works smoothly and without noticeable lag.

It obviously doesn’t let you drag windows between the two machines, but files can be dragged and dropped (tip: just wait for one transfer to finish before you start a new one). And best of all: it’s free!

Designing Interactions is a must read for anyone designing interactive objects or services.

And I do not mean just interaction designers.

Graphical designers, gui coders, industrial designers, project managers and many others will gather valuable insight or build up an understanding for the importance of good interface design.

I could not help noticing something familiar about Viasat Norway’s new home page…

Update:

Another slight similarity:

My company has been using a custom built web application for storing and sharing marketing material for a few years. The application was probably good at the time it was made, but as with so much other custom made software, it has never been updated. And like most other web based tools from a few years back it was not very user friendly. It used hierarchical sorting, single item upload and download, and there was no search function.

Web 2.0 + good interface design

As the web is growing up, the browser based applications finally start resembling professional desktop application. We have now started using a web based digital asset management system called Fluxiom. It boasts a range of features such as instant thumbnail scaling, search, tagging, filtering, multi-item upload, multi-item select and download, sharing, preview with metadata, and an rss-feed. Many of these features are not unique to this program, and free sites like flickr gives you much of this plus community services. What makes Fluxiom different is the way the elegant and user friendly interface gives you a great overview of all your assets.