interactive

SAN FRANCISCO--You are the blob. And you are the paint, too, if you let the art collective here known as Anticlockwise Arts have its way with you.

Last night at the Academy of Sciences' weekly NightLife event, the group debuted a new project called "Watercolor Walls" that mixes basic tech tools and audience participation to give new life to your stodgy old silhouette.

As one of the nearby DJs spun remixes of pop hits from the likes of Justin Timberlake, the crowd of more than a thousand walked, strutted, and shimmied between Watercolor Walls' camera and projector and a 15-foot-tall screen on its way from one end of the museum to the other. Using infrared light, the camera and projector would outline the silhouettes of people moving in front of the screen -- but there was more to it. … Read more

The Interactive Advertising Bureau ratcheted up its pressure on Mozilla's Firefox to reconsider its decision to block third-party advertising cookies by default.

The trade group, whose senior vice president tweeted last month that the policy was a "nuclear first strike against the ad industry," put out a statement from its president and CEO, Randall Rothenberg, detailing its concerns. He painted a bleak picture of the future of the Internet, saying that a vast array of Web sites would be shut down by the proposed change.

"If Mozilla follows through on its plan to block all third-party … Read more

What if you could "street view" the human body, navigating its interactive components all the way down to a metabolic level? An international group of scientists is working on that right now with a map of the human metabolism, which they call Recon 2.

Metabolism plays a key role in many diseases, and while scientists have already managed to reconstruct several models of it, each "represents only a subset of our knowledge" with "only partially overlapping content," the team writes in the journal Nature Biology.

"It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map," Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement. "Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Bridget checks out the tech side of Toy Fair NY.

- "Disney Infinity" receives new "Monsters University" images.

- Ubooly is soft, squishy and smart thanks to the iPhone.

- Barbie gets a digital makeover at Toy Fair.

- Buy Griff's "Back to the Future II" hoverboard for $13,000.

- Microsoft's Xbox Entertainment Studio working on interactive TV.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Home automation is all over CES 2013. Tucked away in a small booth is Ivee, a company known for its voice-controlled alarm clocks. The newest Ivee creation is the Sleek, a voice-controlled home automation gateway.

You can tell Sleek to turn down the temperature, report stock prices, and share the weather. A pleasant woman's voice communicates with you in turn. This really is like having a HAL for your home, only this particular device hasn't reached sentience yet. She doesn't seem to have Siri's snarky streak, but if you ask her, "Who is Siri?" Sleek will reply, "She is not important."

Sleek is already compatible with Belkin's smart plugs. Ivee also mentioned working with the Nest thermostat, but Nest says it hasn't opened up compatibilty with anyone. Sleek could potentially hook up with all sorts of home automation devices. Ivee is looking at a summer release at a price of $199. … Read more

Google is aiming to harness people's motivation to carry out their New Year's resolutions and then use that to help others achieve their goals. Be it lose weight, make more money, learn a new language, or travel more, users can see what people around the world are striving for on Google's new interactive resolution map.

"Research shows that you're more likely to achieve your resolutions if you write them down and have support," Google's Associate Product Marketing Manager Liz Wessel wrote in a blog post yesterday. "Try sharing your goals with communities … Read more

A freeware package for noncommercial use, EasyBCD is designed to help manage and control startup operations. It works with the later Windows operating systems, including Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, both 32-bit and 64-bit. It also works with Linux and Mac systems.

During installation, you can choose to put an EasyBCD quick-start icon on the desktop. Once the program has started, a window appears with pull-down menus for File, Tools, and Help. Buttons on the left side of the window are for tasks such as system backup, editing the boot menu, and general settings. In addition to its main … Read more

Carl Icahn's interest in Netflix hasn't stopped him from making strategic investments elsewhere.

Just yesterday, a host of Icahn organizations, including Icahn Partners and Icahn Master, bought up about 500,000 shares in Take-Two Interactive to increase his ownership to 9.57 percent. Icahn, who previously owned about 8.7 percent of Take-Two, has invested an aggregate total of $79.9 million in the company.

Icahn has been, at times, a thorn in Take-Two's side. In 2010, he had a spat with Take-Two's board of directors and eventually had three members ousted. In their place, Icahn … Read more

After researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine called on the general public to find as many of Philadelphia's estimated 5,000 automated external defibrillators as possible, more than 300 "citizen scientists" stepped up and located 1,429 of them in more than 525 buildings across the city.

The eight-week crowdsourcing contest, called MyHeartMap Challenge, is part of what the researchers hope will be a national effort to catalog as many AEDs as possible and develop an interactive app of the registry so that laypeople can act quickly in the event someone nearby … Read more