A recent article in Slashdot about the new Apple Powerbook motion sensors reminds me of an old project of mine from 2001 called LiveWindow (check out the video I have there). My project embedded an earthquake sensor into a web browser so that when the computer felt any force in the room, it could sense its immediate environment and the text and images on the web-page would collapse. Its pretty exciting that Apple has included a motion sensor in its hardware – and opened up a lot of new possibilities for desiging software to interact with this device. Maybe if you shake your computer really hard now it will send off angry emails to spammers!
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Four years before the Apple Powerbook got “motion sensored” (and repurposed), Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s LiveWindow installation attempted to translate the physicality of the real world into the virtual. Any vibration on the floor around the computer was…