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.

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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.

Presented at SIG CHI 2010 by Ken Hinckley, Jenny Rodenhouse, Koji Yatani, Andy Wilson, Michel Pahud, Hrvoje Benko, Nicole Coddington, and Bill Buxton.

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.