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It is not every day that a concept car re-writes the rules of more than 100 years of motoring. In development for four years by a team of architects and engineers led by William Mitchell, former head of the school of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as part of his Smart Cities research group, a new MIT car is borne of a complete rethink of people’s relationship with their cars in the ever-expanding cities of the future.

Prof Mitchell expects we will share cars that will be easier to drive in congested cities, will be pollution-free and can be customised at will.

The city car concept, with styling input by architect Frank Gehry, will be completed and delivered by MIT to General Motors early next year.

“Primarily we’re interested in urban living,” says Ryan Chin, an architect and engineer at MIT’s media lab and a member of Prof Mitchell’s research group. “Everything scales down from what we think the city of the future is.”

The Smart Cities group focused on how cars could be better adapted to get round familiar problems of city life, namely congestion, pollution and parking. Motor companies are well aware of the issue. But the group felt the companies had missed the point, even with city cars such as the Smart, the iconic two-passenger cars introduced by Swatch and Mercedes in 1998.

“We have to think of city cars as not just small-footprint vehicles that can squeeze into tight spaces but ones that can work in unison and also be almost like a parasite that leeches on to mass-transit systems,” says Mr Chin. While Smart changed the way people think about parking and size, the MIT engineers felt that, as it had not been widely adopted and congestion and pollution problems had got no better, its success had been limited.

So the MIT team started from scratch to come up with their own concept: a stackable, shareable, electric, two-passenger car. “Imagine a shopping cart – a vehicle that can stack – you can take the first vehicle out of a stack and off you go,” says Mr Chin. “These stacks would be placed throughout the city. A good place would be outside a subway station or a bus line or an airport, places where there’s a convergence of transportation lines and people.”

The precedent for this type of shared personal transport is demonstrated with bicycle-sharing schemes in European towns and the ZipCar and FlexCar projects on the east and west coasts of the US respectively.

The MIT concept car is a complete re-think of vehicle technology. For a start, there is no engine, at least in the traditional sense. The power comes from devices called wheel robots. “These are self-contained wheel units that have electric motors inside,” says Mr Chin. “The interesting thing is that the wheel can turn a full 360 degrees so you can have omni-directional wheel movements. You can rotate the car while you’re moving, any direction can be front or back and you can do things like crabbing or translate sideways. It’s almost like you imagine yourself driving a computer chair.”

The wheel robots, complete with their own suspension, remove the need for a drive shaft and even the engine block, freeing up designers to make new use of the space in the car.

“Essentially the car will comprise four wheel-robots plus a customisable chassis,” says Chin. “The frame can be built specifically for each customer.”

Add wafer-thin, programmable displays that cover the interior and exterior of the car like a layer of paint, and you have a vehicle that can be customised at will. “You can imagine signalling being not just a static signal light but something more dynamic,” says Mr Chin, who suggests the words “reversing” or “turning left” could roll across the car’s body to declare the driver’s intentions. “From a heating and cooling point of view, you might want your car to be darker or lighter depending on weather. On the interior, you can customise your dashboard for each person. If I’m an elderly person, I probably want a very large speedometer so I can see it; if I’m a race-car driver, maybe all I want is a tachometer.”

The close proximity of cars in cities increases the risk of accidents, and the MIT car has a host of radical ideas to deal with this problem. Chief safety features include responsive seats that do away with the need for seat belts and air bags: these are based around a spine at the back of the seat with a number of “fingers” to embrace a passenger and hold them in place if the car detects that it is involved in an accident. And the cabin would absorb the impacts of crashes using new materials. “There is a new development in fluids that can be magnetised so that they move from liquid to solid state within a nanosecond. You can imagine using these fluids as a way of absorbing energy in an impact.”

Over the next few months the MIT team will complete the final design and present their results to General Motors, which will build the first prototype. Beyond that, Mr Chin is already trying to arrange a public test in the Far East. “We might do this in Hong Kong or in Singapore,” he says. “The interest in those places is that they are very dense, have mass transit and limited range. An island like Hong Kong would be a perfect place to test this because you have all those conditions.”

Whether the city car concept appears on garage forecourts as designed by the Smart Cities group or whether the technologies are taken forward individually remains to be seen. Chin says the group would be happy with either outcome.

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1. The big city and Interview

TileToy is a modular, electronic game prototype for tangible LED game tiles. TileToy brings the flexibility inherent in digital software to a physical tile that people can touch and interact with. By arranging the electronic tiles, players can engage themselves in various kinds of game play, ranging from fast-paced arcade style games to puzzle an learning games.

TILETOY
Modular electronic game prototype

TileToy is a modular, electronic game prototype for tangible LED game tiles. TileToy brings the flexibility inherent in digital software to a physical tile that people can touch and interact with. By arranging the electronic tiles, players can engage themselves in various kinds of game play, ranging from fast-paced arcade style games to puzzle an learning games.

The tiles are plastic cases approximately 2″ square. The main inspiration for the look and feel comes from the heyday of the LED, when plastic hand-held games ruled the gaming world. This retro-look is fused with a more modern minimal design. The minimalism enhances the magic of cordless boxes that simply communicate with each other. In TileToy, technology is sealed within the design. The interaction is based on tactile experience where no user manual is needed.

The flexible architecture of the tiles makes TileToy a versatile platform for development of various applications from several genres. Compared with traditional tile games TileToy can take advantage of such things as changing state, animations and games where the tiles can effect the state of adjoining tiles. Simple word games can be created where each tile displays a random letter and the players organize the letters into the longest word possible. Numbers and arithmetic characters can be displayed with the player having to arrange the tiles into a sum to give a specified result. Matching games are yet another way the tiles could be programmed to act as a learning aid. Applications can be developed also to utilize the tiles purely for display purposes to show patterns, animations or even live information.

The re-programmable and constantly updated graphical information on each tile is displayed with a LED matrix system. The screen displaying the information is an endlessly versatile surface for updated visual communication. Each tile is controlled individually and can be used to transmit information on its own or in groups of several tiles. The assembled tiles transmit wirelessly their individual position in relation to each other and based on that changing information, a central computer, or a dedicated tile runs the different applications.

TileToy is an open project. Both the source code and the hardware will be made available via open licenses. This will allow anyone interested to create their own applications and games and feed these back into the community hopefully to spark innovation further. It may even lead to new projects that branch off to make new version of TileToy based on the original hardware. The TileToy process is available from the blog: http://tiletoy.blogspot.com

Tuomo Tammenpää, media artist, Creative Director, Mindworks Ltd

Tammenpää works as an active media artist and designer in Finland, just outside Helsinki. During the last ten years he has participated in several exhibitions in Scandinavia, Central Europe, Asia and North America presenting video and media installations. Besides his career as a media artist, Tammenpää works as the Creative Director of Mindworks Ltd., a Helsinki-based digital design and engineering company, where he has been a leading designer and concept developer for several international digital media productions from screen based to spatial media design.
Curriculum Vitae, Tuomo Tammenpää

Daniel Blackburn, Managing Director, Carbon Based Games Ltd.

During 10 years working in the games industry Daniel has worked on a number of new and innovative computer games. From traditional ‘boxed’ games on a variety of formats to web games to Java games for mobile phones. Daniel currently shares his time between running his mobile phone games studio and collaborations in the field of new media artwork.

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1. 哇。。猛料

开学了第五周，我们这些可怜的大四人才有机会在教室里上课，而第一门课我就没有去上，因为我醒来已经十点多了。早下课了。下午的课不能不去上吧。听说是讲营销。

记的去年我有了精彩的王师傅的产品设计原理课，今年一周的课基本上听下来了，最有魅力的老师还是刘师傅的课。刘师傅何人？

第一次上课，以前的老师都是把三节课压成两节，他是把三节扩成三节。说，我没有时间保证你们的课，上一次就多上点儿了。然后就开始讲课了，营销对于我们来说很陌生，但是刘师傅讲的很精彩。三个小时的课竟然没有觉的有一点儿的烦。

在我们人生的路上，知识我们可以从书本上学的来，但是文化我们从书中学不来，经验更不可能是一蹴而就的事。我很喜欢分享他们自己经验的人。也很乐意分享自己在各个方面已有人生经验。

而读书，阅人，做事我把它们总结为刘师傅给我们的一些人生经验。

刘师傅从胡雪岩的“读万卷书不如行万里路，行万里路不如阅人无数”开始一点点儿向我们渗透营销学，以及他自己的人生经验。道理说的明白，决然不象喇姐姐那样，只会外国的优秀中国的不好，却说不得问题要点在那儿，解决的方法又是什么，让人听起来语句里只有报怨。

１、挣大钱一定要守法。

２、什么叫竞争力，就是别人没有东西你却有。

３、不喜欢便宜是喜欢占便宜。

４、系统化你的知识。

５、进化式的企业发展模式。

６、营销类的读物：

报纸类：中国经济报，21世纪经济报道，经济观察报

杂志类：中国企业家，营销与市场，商界

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Introduction

NWP E-ZINE is a two-month editorial online issue for those who love digital art from all over the world, It includes about: New Media Art / Digital Art / 3D Project / Computer Illustration / Media Creation / Web Design / Graphic Design/ Photography…etc modern artistical styles. We hope that it could be advanced for design idea and we also will collect more information about design news . Of course it’s free for download.
We have 2,000,000 downloads and 1,200,000 global readers.

今天在看自己以前的ＢＬＯＧ的时候，看到这个杂志的第一期，然后去了一下网站，不知道竟然出了第二期.

哇哈哈．．真的是猛料。。

前几天的时候看到一个新新的网络杂志．

Xplus．．

也是很不错的．．

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1. TILETOY PRESS MATERIAL

别的不写了,有空多看看这些好的作品吧,

http://www.newwebpick.com

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1. 哇。。猛料