AquaJelly, designed by Festo, is an artificial autonomous jellyfish. Like its sibling AirJelly, AquaJelly moves using its eight tentacles for propulsion and emulates the jellyfish in both its movement and behavior.

AirJelly, a remote-controlled air-bound jellyfish, uses eight tentacles to move around. The AirJelly is powered by two lithium-ion polymer batteries and maintains weightlessness via its helium-filled balloon.

A large scale interactive structure, Polygon Playground allows up to 40 people to explore its surfaces as they continually change. The surfaces are projected in 360 degrees and proximity sensors are used to convert people’s movements into changes in the surface projections.

Miami architect Chad Oppenheim talks about the design of the COR Tower in Miami. Chad shares his view on sustainability and how sustainable architecture is being brought to the forefront of building design.

Benjamin Mako Hill talks about Selectricity, a web platform which helps people make better decisions. Benjamin speaks of the advantages of using preferential voting and how Selectricity can be used for voting decisions being made in our every day lives.

Pranav Mistry and Pattie Maes, working in the MIT Media Lab, have developed the Sixth Sense prototype which allows users to interact with information on any flat surface without the need for a touch screen.

Will Evans, Principal User Experience Architect for Semantic Foundry, talks about designing for Social Media Networks. Will talks about using social psychology principals to create interfaces and influence social behavior through rewards and punishments. Two case studies include the failed Kayak.com and the success of Gather.com.

Dan Saffer, experience design director at Adaptive Path, has recently released his new book called Designing Gestural Interfaces. In this lecture, Dan discusses in idiosyncricies of designing for touch-based interfaces.

Nick Campbell, a motion designer at Digital Kitchen, shares his real world experience as a motion designer at MGFest 09. This is a must for anyone looking into getting into the field talking about skill requirements, tools needed, and also how to market one’s self.  Nick emphasizes learning storytelling, embracing critiques, do small projects on your own, and promote yourself via the web. Check out his latest work and portfolio at www.creamyorange.com

Mark Slee, lead product manager at Facebook, shares with Robert Scoble some of the design philosophy behind the latest Facebook UI design. Above all it is attention to details and loyalty to the users that lead the way.

Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University, shares Pixar’s appraoch to hiring.  Pixar looks for people who have mastered a skill, are interested in lots of things, can communicate in many different mediums and can amplify the output of other’s work.

Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, talks about his persuit of cost effective solar energy. Using new technology and applying genetic algorithms, Bill’s team has re-used old inventions to fit modern applications.

Chris Rogers, from the Tufts Center for Engineering Educational and Outreach speaks about the importance of teaching youth about Math, Science, and Engineering. Chris has pioneered many teaching program through the use of LEGOs and helped develop ROBOLAB, a LEGO teaching kit.  With many eaxmples and antidotes, Chris presents a compelling case for the importance and effectiveness of the teaching methods.

Located at the Comcast Center in Philledelphia, Barco has installed a 5xHD resolution display containing 10 million pixels.  The display is 83 feet wide and 25 feet tall.  The real genius is in the videos themselves which often blend into the architecture of the building and realistic 3D virtual actors dancing around on the wall pannels.

Brandon Taylor from the Object Based Media Group at MIT Media Lab talks about The Bar of Soap project.  He shares how they explored placing sensors in objects and speculates on a future where sensors are embedded in every day objects such as a smart phone and how it might function differently depending on how it is held.