ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), created by George Lucas to create the special effects for Star Wars, has maintained a lead role since pioneering computer graphics in Hollywood movies. This Encore Special, covers ILM’s story from the first Star Wars film to its role in movies like Iron Man and Transformers. One of the more interesting aspects covered in this documentary is seeing how the company transitioned from analog to digital effects.

National Geographic goes behind the scenes with this Megafactories special in HD. Get a complete end-to-end view at the detailed, hand crafted, and highly specialized manufacturing process of this one-of-a-kind machine. Part car, part aircraft, jaw-dropping facts abound, including the fact that only 17 titanium bolts hold the front and rear sections fo the car together, each of which costs $100 to create.

This short documentary, created by Hira Verick and Gary Hustwit tours the Sony Ericsson design house. The documentary focuses on extracting the design philosophy from the designers that goes into the entire user experience including the hardware, the software, and even the soundscape. The documentary interviews the entire design team including George Arriola, head of Human Interface Design, Rei Fukuda, Marten Jonsson, Hanne-Marte Holmoy, and many others.

Bonnier R&D and BERG created a conceptual video about how the magazine experience would translate to touchscreen devices. The video was made back in 2008, before the iPad was on the scene. With magazines like Wired and Project, it is easy to still long for an experience envisioned in this two year old video. To date, perhaps the best interactive reading experience is that of “Our Choice” from Push Pop Press which incorporates several of these ideas but takes interactivity to a whole new level.

Tan Le, head of Emotiv Systems talks at TED about their creation of the EPOC, a brainwave reading headset. The EPOC has won a 2010 Red Dot Award for design, and uses new algorithms to read the brainwaves of any individual. Unlike previous brainwave reading headsets which take a long time to set up and cost on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, the EPOC is available now for $299 on the Emotiv website. The applications for the device are incredibly diverse and endless as it provides the ability to control any digital device with one’s mind. Emotiv is currently seeking developers and researchers to expand upon the platform and come up with new applications for the device to usher in all new and exciting human computer interactions.

Microsoft Research presents its case for the inclusion of pen input along side of touch input on Tablet PCs and other touch-enabled computers. While Microsoft and Apple have taken opposing views on the need for pen input on computing devices, there are indeed good arguments on both sides. Unfortunately the more obvious and useful cases for pen input, such as sketching, are slightly less academic, making researchers strive to come up with more novel uses. In any case, several intriguing use-cases are presented and perhaps they will inspire more practical applications down the road. It seemed like only yesterday when every multi-touch computer simply demonstrated rotating and zooming photos.

John Underkoffler’s demo at TED 2010 just scratches the surface of the gestural interface work being done by him and his team. Oblong, the company founded to commercialize the work has put out this demo video demonstrating the many interactions possible with the system they designed. The system utilizes the gestural language ‘G-Speak’ designed originally for the movie Minority Report, but with the full intention of being a robust language for real-world gestural interfaces.

John Underkoffler, MIT researcher and inventor of the user interface from the movie Minority Report, demonstrates the real technology at TED 2010. Having been working on tangible user interfaces over 15 years ago, his team was consulted to create a 3D gestural interaction language called G-Speak specifically for the movie Minority Report. The research as since been used to further gestural UI by other teams and is now making its way into the real world by industries which process large amounts of information. John predicts it could be as little as 5 years before the technology is integrated into consumer displays, with no special gloves or extra equipment needed. Perhaps it will be even sooner, given the launch of Project Natal for the Xbox this Fall.

Bsquare, the embedded systems firm behind the new Coca-Cola Freestyle soda fountain talks up their role in providing the brains for the device. The concept is brilliant, but clearly from the video, the embedded computer is quite underpowered and the touch-screen experience is more akin to an old ATM than the experience found on the latest smart phones. Nonetheless, the new fountain serves over 100 different flavors of soda, water, and juice. Also, check out the brief history of the Coca-Cola soda fountain too.

Stepping up to the plate is Patrick Baudisch, now with the Human-Computer Interaction group at Hasso Plattner Institut. He and his students have kicked multi-touch up a notch demonstrating multi-toe recognition. Their research has enabled them to recognize individuals by the heat signatures of their shoes, as well as recognize various interactions such as pointing, leaning, head tracking, and more. It may be early, but it looks like a step in the right direction.

The Puyocon mouse is shown off at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 by students at the University of Tsukuba. Unlike other mid-air input devices, the Puyocon is meant to be thrown either as an input gesture, or for passing from one to another. With 14 pressure sensors in it, it is able to capture with reasonable detail the movement of the ball. It is a bit difficult to imagine it working well with Powerpoint, it may prove very fun in combination with party games in which people toss it to each other. For more visit the Puyocon website.

Luke Wroblewski speaks at Mix ’09 about the best practices of web form design. Covering everything from flow, layout, error handling, help, buttons, and more… Luke covers everything you need to know to design great web forms. And of course at the end he encourages people to not use forms at all. Overall, Luke presents a great practical guide backed up with lots of research and maintains the audience’s attention with the use of lots of great visual examples of both good and bad form design. Check out his book Web Form Design at Amazon.com.

Doubling up on its bet on tablet PCs, Microsoft is working on the dual-screen Courier booklet. Using both pen and gesture based interaction methods, the technology incorporates many of the interaction models we’ve seen developed over the past 10 years. Most interestingly is the fact that it is the first piece of technology to emphasize the light-weight notebook form factor while utilizing two displays. The potential is imaginative as usual and it will be fun to see where this leads.

Waving hands about to try on clothing at a store? This is how Cisco ushers out their vision for the future of shopping. Overall it just seems pretty far fetched that the main innovation in the experience shown is that of their new business router. On the other hand, Microsoft Xbox’s Project Natal may in fact be the technology that leads to such a customer experience. All in all, such an experience would be much better suited for home shopping. The primary benefit of in-store shopping really is the hands on touchy feely aspects… not the fact that they have mirrors.

Aaron Forth, VP of Product at Mint.com, speaks at UX Week 2009 about the importance of user experience as it applies to managing personal finances with Mint.com. Aaron talks about tying the user experience to business objectives and how it influences everything from the people they hire hiring, creating their business model, and all aspects of Mint.com. Through several anecdotes Aaron talks about building the brand, building trust, and how the emotion of personal finances has a large impact on how Mint approaches design. A few of the most important factors have included the name, the light color tones, and framing the topic of finance in the light of ‘hope’. One of the most interesting insights was hearing how Mint.com chose to no longer support Internet Explorer 6.0 after discovering they were spending nearly 20% of their time working specifically to support it.

Noah Zerkin, Augmented Reality Enthusiast, designed and developed the Zerkin Glove, a retrofitted paintball glove to enable computer input of the body’s motions. The sub-$300 DIY project incorporates flex sensors into the glove and arm band to enable control of augmented reality environments. Noah is currently working to develop kits to sell them commercially. Check out more videos of Noah here.

Blending the old with the new, the Chameleon Guitar uses a swappable soundboards to pick up the resonant qualities of various woods, metals, plastics, and well, pretty much anything to produce desired sounds. The boards can be built to mimic guitar sounds from classical guitars to electric guitars, and more. Designed by Amit Zoran under guidance from Pattie Maes and Marco Coppiardi, he is now working on the project as part of his Masters. Amit one day hopes to take the product to market.

Eric Giler, CEO of MIT-inspired WiTricity, demonstrates at TED how wireless electricity works and inspires a vision of the future where devices no longer need to be plugged-in. First explored by Nicola Tesla in the 1890s, in recent years the technology has made great strides and there are many wireless charging pads on the market. The Palm Pre has even made it a showcase feature when marketing its new phone. While the technology has been around for a while, it is taking great strides in efficiency with both increases in the amount of power that can be transmitted, as well as the distance it can be transmitted. WiTricity is attempting to charge everything from electric cars to cell phones.

Slovenian inventor Aleksander Polutnik demonstrates the Enicycle, a motorized unicycle. With two in existance, the unicycle is currently patent-pending and funding is being raised to go into production. Astonishingly the Enicycle manages to pull off a much less nerdy look than the Segway.

Project Natal, a gestural input device, is being promoted by Microsoft this year at E3 is attempting to promote their ubiquitous computing platform. Hot off the heals of several other videos promoting Microsoft’s vision for the future, Project Natal focuses on the video game arena. Nonetheless, the vision is illuminating and enticing.