A member of Chase Jarvis’ team writes up how they mounted iPads for an art installation:
The challenges: iPads are designed to be interactive, to move between apps. How do you keep people from messing with them, checking their email, pointing them at un-savory sites, or worse yet walking away with them entirely?
To do light painting well, it takes , planning, coordination and patience. Achieved with long exposures and a bright, glowing source of light moving in front of a camera, cool things can happen. But what if you could program your light source to emit patterns of light? That’s about what you get below.
Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
Random, assorted specification lists can’t prepare for possibilities like this. A family in California is finding that their son with severe autism may be benefiting from interactions with an iPad.
So when Leo took it in his small hands as if it were an old friend, and, with almost no training, whizzed through its apps like a technology virtuoso, his mother gasped in amazement.
Scientific studies are still new but promising.
So far, only one study is looking at the newer iPad. “Touch Technologies in the Classroom” is under way at Beverly Junior Public School in Toronto. Rhonda McEwen, an assistant professor at the iSchool at the University of Toronto who is running the study, introduced iPods and iPads into six classrooms of autistic students at the school in February.
McEwen is still gathering data, but she says the feedback from a initial round of teacher interviews has been largely positive. One teacher said students’ attention spans seemed to be lengthening. Another had tears in her eyes when she explained that she had been working with a boy for two years, unsure of whether he understood language. “With the iPod, for the first time, he was able to demonstrate that he did understand,” McEwen says.
Susan Orlean discusses, at length with Glenn Fleishman, her use of an iPad. She candidly describes her use with the insight of an anthropologist–observant not only on the physical, but the social and much broader social contexts:
And while you can do that with your phone, it is so much more visual, and almost tactile and alive doing through the window, the iPad. And that’s how I feel. I just feel like it’s a window. Literally, it even looks like a window.
Flipboard is a damn, clever iPad app. It takes streams of content such as Twitter, Facebook, various RSS news feeds and transforms the assortment of text, hypertext and pictures into an enjoyable experience. Flipboard uses a newspaper-like metaphor for pulling content together and users swipe to flip pages. Tweets are artfully rendered, and those that link to articles elsewhere, the articles are expanded. Logging into Facebook makes browsing the Newsfeed like you’re catching up on your friends with a digital late edition newspaper–minus the spam of quizzes and Farmville clones. Further, if logged in to Twitter or Facebook, you can comment and interact with the content. What’s interesting is that the web page fades away and content becomes forefront to the experience–which is how it should be.