As a festive entry on eightbar this year, let’s talk about Christmas lights. Twitter-controlled ones! :-)
Andy Stanford-Clark hooked up a set of lights to Twitter. As reported in Computer Weekly:
Using some clever IBM middeware, The microcontroller sets the illumination colour based on a signal from the internet or via SMS over a GSM network – [...]

[A guest post by Hursley’s Ben Fletcher. This was originally written as an internal blog post – Ben recently received the award for External Honours at the IBM Corporate Technical Recognition Event. Here, he reflects on his experiences]
I believe it is important to leave it entirely up to the individual to recognise the positives [...]

I’m very excited to be welcoming another Hursley innovator as a guest here on eightbar – Benjamin Hardill (you can find him on Twitter as @hardillb). Here’s some insight into what he’s been up to lately! More home automation, hardware hacking, and MQTT messaging adventures follow :-)

I got a new TV around Christmas last year [...]

Today is a day of mixed emotions. Today I resigned from IBM having been there for 18 years, 19 if you count my year out from university.
In all that time I have worked with some great people, and felt a tremendous sense of belonging.
Its been quite a journey, both in technical education and in personal [...]

This trailer has just hit youtube. I am sure more will become clear as this project moves on, for now just enjoy.

Thankyou to AnnieOk for pointing me towards the video and articles here on the MIT Fluid interfaces that got such a good reception at TED 2009. This is brilliant work. You have to see this and go to wired to read the rest of the article.

Projection, mixed with gesture and finger tracking, whilst looking a [...]

Ann Marie Shillito from Anarkik 3D visited the eightbar crowd in Hursley (thanks to epred for inviting a bunch of us hangers-on along!).
Anarkik are involved with haptic input devices and have developed some really nice software which enables users to interact with virtual worlds and 3D modelling tools using a consumer-priced haptic controller which can [...]

Over at Redmonk, James Governor has written a very interesting piece on what has happened to the Microsoft ESP platform. Mirror worlds, accurate representations of real things, ideally instrumented by a raft of sensors from the real world are a very specific, and obvious, use of virtual worlds. After all pilots already spend a large [...]

I moved offices today and having a bright new whiteboard I could not leave it clean for long.
Its not really a mindmap, just some association of thoughts and bits of linkages. I am sure it will alter, but right now this is what was in my head in a mad flurry. The underlying red part [...]

I mentioned in my 2009 predictions that there were some exciting things I had seen going on with both social media/web 2.0 and virtual worlds and specific applications to deal with something as a whole.
One such business currently in development, that got my interest, is around the sports coaching profession. Sports coaches all around the [...]