If you like the Alien Abduction Lamp, I am sure you will also like Pixar’s short Lifted. I had a good time watching it at Siggraph’s Electronic Theatre this summer.A high quality version is available from iTunes.

The response to The Alien Abduction Lamp has been overwhelming since I first posted it here two months ago. I have been very busy following up on it since then.

Thank you for your comments!

I have received more than a thousand emails from people wanting to buy the lamp. I am afraid there is no way that I will manage to personally reply to all the messages. So I wish to thank all of you who have posted a comment here and on abductionlamp.com for all your enthusiastic remarks and constructive feedback. You are in my database, so I will keep you informed of any major updates (and only that).

If you are interested in the lamp but have not sent me a message yet, please do so at abductionlamp.com to stay updated about the progress on getting the lamp produced. The more messages I get, the greater the chance of the lamp getting produced! You can rest assured that your email address will be kept safe, and that you will not receive any spam from me.

World press

The Alien Abduction Lamp appeared in hundreds of blogs in the first few days after I published it. I wish to thank all the bloggers who have written so many positive responses to the lamp!

The lamp has also been featured in printed press around the world, including La Repubblica in Italy, Il Mundo in Spain, WENN and Wizard in America, and Sydney Morning Herald, The Courier Mail and Penthouse in Australia. And FHM is featuring the lamp in their October issue, so make sure you grab a copy.

If you know of any other magazines or papers that have printed a story on the lamp, please let me know by commenting on this article.

The next step

I am currently doing my best to get the lamp produced, but it is still too early to say anything about the progress. Again – sign up at abductionlamp.com to stay informed!

I am happy to announce a project that I have been working on for a while now.

The Abduction Lamp is not meant to be a toy. It is supposed to be made in high quality from metal and glass. It is my hope that someone with a playful mind like yourself would want to have a lamp like this in their home.

How does it work?

A light source inside the UFO body lights up the windows and the cone shaped glass beam. The beam glass is frosted to diffuse the light enough to spread it in all directions.

A true UFO Lamp

I got the idea for the abduction lamp as I was driving past a lamp store one late evening and saw how the light fell from one of the lamps in the window. The idea stuck in my head, and I returned the day after and saw that it was a quite common lamp.

I have spent a while building and rendering it in Maya, and I will return with some of my experiences with the visualisation process in a future post.

A new theory on abduction

Visit abductionlamp.com for more images. You will also find my new theory on why aliens are busy abducting cows and people..

Update

The Alien Abduction Lamp is moving from concept to prototype.

I have now departed with my ten year old Gaggia Paros espresso machine and bought a new ISOMAC Venus (recommended!). And buying the new machine has sparked my interest in making the best possible coffee. The image on the right shows a double espresso in the making.

One important parameter when making a good espresso is how much you make. When I bought the machine at Cortado in Oslo (hereby highly recommended), we had a little discussion about the volume of a single espresso.

The salesman claimed that a single Italian espresso is about 35-40 ml, which I found to be too much. But I didn’t have any idea of how much less it should be. (I am referring to Italian espresso here, not northern European which is larger – especially at restaurants, or American espresso which is even larger still).

I recently had the opportunity to measure it myself during a three weeks stay at a vineyard in Tuscany (also highly recommended and possibly the subject of a future post). The answer is that an Italian espresso (or “caffée normale”) ranges from about 10ml to about 25ml, where somewhere around 25ml seems to be the normal. The measurements were made in Siena and at Chianti Autogrill on Autostrada A1.

And did I get some strange looks as I did my measurements?

You bet

Designing Interactions is a must read for anyone designing interactive objects or services.

And I do not mean just interaction designers.

Graphical designers, gui coders, industrial designers, project managers and many others will gather valuable insight or build up an understanding for the importance of good interface design.

My company has been using a custom built web application for storing and sharing marketing material for a few years. The application was probably good at the time it was made, but as with so much other custom made software, it has never been updated. And like most other web based tools from a few years back it was not very user friendly. It used hierarchical sorting, single item upload and download, and there was no search function.

Web 2.0 + good interface design

As the web is growing up, the browser based applications finally start resembling professional desktop application. We have now started using a web based digital asset management system called Fluxiom. It boasts a range of features such as instant thumbnail scaling, search, tagging, filtering, multi-item upload, multi-item select and download, sharing, preview with metadata, and an rss-feed. Many of these features are not unique to this program, and free sites like flickr gives you much of this plus community services. What makes Fluxiom different is the way the elegant and user friendly interface gives you a great overview of all your assets.

To publish or to protect

Like many others, I have a few ideas that I am constantly playing around with. And like many others I even think that some of these ideas may one day be materialized into releasable products. It appears that one should worry more about waiting too long before publishing an idea than about having the idea “stolen”.

My Concept Watch

Below is the first quick sketch that I made of watch concept back in 2002. It is hardly a beauty in this first rendering, but the point here is the concept itself. I have not done anything with it since then, so I guess I deserved what I had coming…

Research

A little research told me that the idea of presenting time in this fashion is nothing new. I found Mark Newson’s ingenious version of the same general concept. This is a wall mounted clock where tiny magnetic balls indicate the time.

Newson’s watch put me off the idea a little at first, but I still felt that my own concept added something to this because it was a wrist watch without any glass. The idea was that it should be made entirely out of metal. But I did not give up on the watch entirely, and I was planning on pursuing the idea after finishing a couple of other projects I am working on in my spare time.

Recent Events

I was quite disappointed to find this post the other day. It is basically the same thing, but obviously taken a lot further in the visualization process:

Preparing for the Future

Fortunately, this was not my favorite among my three concept watches. But this certainly makes me think. Ideas are volatile entities that pop up where you least expect them, and it is just a question of time before someone else comes up with a similar thought.

I would be very happy to hear some thoughts on this. Is it best to publish the idea and hope that nobody grabs it from you? Should the idea be patented first? Is it better to try to sell it as soon as possible?

I guess the answer to the above is whether one is doing it for fun, fame or fortune. But who says you can’t have them all