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Seen On The Streets of Taipei, Taiwan

(Via Wooster Collective / A Celebration of Street Art.)

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art, design, street art, graffiti

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Originally by SteamSHIFT from SteamSHIFT on July 21, 2006, 5:12am

What can I say; Robots made of Styrofoam; where can I get one?!

Styrofoam robots by Michael Salter.

Via notcot and ghost school.

(Via we make money not art.)

ati Tags:
art, robot

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Originally by SteamSHIFT from SteamSHIFT on July 21, 2006, 6:19am

Video-Freaker
Video-Freaker (Mac screen saver) (ZIP) [knowuh]

Former labmate Noah Paessel has made a split-screen video screen saver for Mac OS X. It takes your video files in a specified directory and creates a real-time video collage, using portions of the imagery within constantly changing layouts. Fun and arresting.

Thanks to Noah.

Originally from Split Screen on December 5, 2005, 2:22pm

Volte-face (QuickTime) [Reynald Drouhin]

Volte-face represents one type of videomosaic: each frame of the video clip is composed of smaller images within a grid that come together to resemble a larger image. Here, two rotating faces and heads are represented using a mosaic of clouds. See Nuages-Visages for photos and information on an installation version of Volte-face.

Composing a macro image out of many micro images over time is a fairly straightforward time-based application of the photomosaic technique. However, I find this work notable in the way it departs from most photomosaics that I’ve seen. In Volte-face, there is less focus on reconstructing the original macro image as accurately as possible, which seems to be the goal for most photomosaics. Instead, the recreated macro images are blurry, vague and low-resolution, an effect achieved largely by restricting the number and types of source micro images. The end result feels soft and nebulous. It’s a deliciously fitting representation of watching clouds float by and seeing fleeting, formless faces among them.

Check out Reynald Drouhin’s works. You can see his other videomosaics as well as web-based mosaics such as Des Frags and Timescape.

Thanks to Reynald Drouhin.

Originally from Split Screen on January 9, 2006, 11:42am

It used to be, if someone held an architectural competition, that it was a great opportunity for entries out of left field from young unknowns to win, and to change the face of architecture. It also used to be that there was a dichotomy between green architecture (often derided as crunchy granola and far more interested in the way you build than what you build) and good cutting edge modern architecture that we all look at in the magazines and on Inhabitat and Mocoloco. We thought this was history- after all, TreeHugger exists to promote good green design and you don’t get in unless you are both, but in two major competitions the tilt has been to status quo, “lets just concentrate on the green and ignore the design”. In the recent Archetype competition, they just picked the boring, because, well, it had great green credentials and they had to sell it to developers. At least they are building the winner.

Far more obnoxious is the C2C competition, where they gave the prize to a marvelous, modern and innovative project that ran on spinach, but when it came to building……

Originally from Treehugger on August 2, 2006, 7:39am

[This is a guest post by Janet Larsen writing for the Earth Policy Institute. It's not as upbeat as what we usually publish, but it sets the record straight on an important event and contains a warning for the future. -Ed.]

Following a string of high heat days and meteorologists’ warnings that this summer could be another scorcher, European public health officials and politicians are revisiting the devastating heat wave of 2003. The severely hot weather that withered crops, dried up rivers, and fueled fires that summer took a massive human toll. The full magnitude of this quiet catastrophe still remains largely an untold story, as data revealing the continent-wide scale have only slowly become available in the years since. All in all, more than 52,000 Europeans died from heat in the summer of 2003, making the heat wave one of the deadliest climate-related disasters in Western history.

Originally from Treehugger on August 2, 2006, 7:39am

Folding bicycles seem to be gaining popularity of late. The added versatility of putting your bike in the trunk of your car, carrying it on the train during rush hour, or just storing it in your ultra-efficient apartment seems to be more appealing than ever. The technology and aesthetics too seem to have leaped forward. I remember the Dahon my father had when I was a kid. He bought it to stash in the hold of his sailboat so he could have something to pedal around when he went ashore on new and exotic islands in Boston Harbor. Folding bikes seem to have come a long way in a short time yielding a panoply of choices for different functions, budgts, and styles.

Originally from Treehugger on August 2, 2006, 9:00am

If you’re in the Bay area (CA, USA) - the kinetic installations by Kal Spelletich go on display this week… @ the LAB…

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Originally from MAKE Magazine at August 1, 2006, 23:34, published by Marisa S. Olson

Originally from Rhizome.org on August 1, 2006, 2:26pm

Originally from Tinselman on July 26, 2006, 6:45pm

We’re accustomed to seeing interactive digital media projected on walls, and sometimes ceilings, but what about floors? Developed by iO, Sensitive Floor is an interactive video projection designed specifically for walking surfaces. Conventional touch-screen panels and kiosks don’t actually entice much interaction, but a floor projection placed in a well-trafficked area is nearly unavoidable.

The Sensitive Floor system utilizes a ceiling mounted projector which displays a variety of pre-programmed visual effects when a moving presence is detected within the field of projection. Installations may be temporary or permanent, and applications include retail, entertainment, and exhibition environments, or anywhere that interactive art, information, or advertising may be featured.

According to iO, “We devised Sensitive Floor to be the first interactive media that makes you smile.” [via the Sensitive Floor website; suggested by Clayton Whitman, Seattle and Shawn Gehle, Los Angeles.]

Originally from Transmaterial on July 21, 2006, 8:25pm

Fur, creators of the Painstation and Furminator (among others) have just released information on their project Earworm Assault Devices. From the website:

“Sound is unavoidable (the ear can’t be shut like the eye) and evolutionary hardwired into our cognition apparatus, it can reach into the subconscious and arouse emotions. A well made sound can get stuck in the head of the hearer and loop for a varying time span. The infected person oftentimes repeats the sound involuntarily by singing, humming or whistling, eventually spreading the earworm like a virus. Messages can be modulated onto earworms like radiowaves on a carrier frequency, as a result earworms can be used to distribute messages or manipulate the individual. This fact is recognized and commercially exploited in various fields of modern life - like pop music, cellphone ringtones, audiobranding or elevator music to name a few.
Global brands are using huge budgets to propagate their earworms by means of multiple costly channels, the respectable citizen remains defence- and powerless. Until now:

The Earworm Assault Devices (EAD) enable individuals or small groups to distribute their own earworms. Small pieces of highly infectious sound or music can be recorded onto the devices and fired at single or multiple persons, eventually spreading your message out into the world.

They come in different shapes and sizes and are affordable for small budgets. Currently, the following models are available:”

The military themed devices allow you to record sound on to them, and then distribute by shooting sound, sound grenades, triggered mines etc.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on August 2, 2006, 12:27pm

Ok my last multi-touch post for a while. Jens Wunderling, a student of digital media class UDK Berlin, had also been creating a multi-touch surface for a community noticeboard project.

Jens began his project quite some time ago, but has had to put it on hold to complete other university work. The whole process has been documented on his blog, from buying the right cameras, hooking up the infrared LEDs and vision tracking software.

Whilst there are no examples of interaction techniques, the technology works and Jens has provided all Processing source code, Eyesweb and VVVV patches. If anyone else out there is working on multi-touch interaction, let me know.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on July 11, 2006, 7:20am

More examples of multi-touch surface interaction, this time in the form of Tangent, created by students Christian Iten and Daniel Lüthi.

Also using the FTIR technique camera tracking technique. The videos show a variety of interaction model demos, whilst not as complex as some of Jefs’ work, its a great diploma project. They have however documented everything from software and hardware set-ups. Good work.

Videos:
1. Interaction techniques.
2. Navigating with a phycon.
3. Pointing tool for small elements.

More multi-touch research.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on July 11, 2006, 7:11am

Created by Stefano Baraldi (at Natural Interaction), tabulaTouch is a multi-touch sensing platform for tabletop interaction. The first application tabulaMaps allows gestural zooming and navigation over maps. Watch a video.

Although using Frustrated Total Internal Reflection as premiered by Jef Han, Stefano was developing a similar technique for this Lightable when Jefs paper on the subject was published. Its good to see a host of people building upon this research so that the technology becomes accessible for us to use and making prototyping of interfaces easier to build. It will be interesting to see what applicaitons Stefano creates next.

Links
Flickr Photos
Blog Research documentation

Related posts
Multi-Touch Interaction Roundup
Jeff Han Multi-touch

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on July 11, 2006, 6:55am

Takashi’s Seasons, by Takashi Kawashima, a grad student of UCLA, is a sequential live shadow puppet / video performance in which various scenes interpreting the four seasons are performed by a modern Utsushi-e artist.

“In the spring children are seen walking back to school with their school bags (the academic year begins in April in Japan). The proud performance of cicadas can be heard on a hot summer evening. Dragonflies smoothly glide in the cool air of a fall afternoon. On New Year’s Eve the chimes of temple bells are heard in the freezing winter night”.

Its a beautifully simple piece, with one performer controlling the puppets and the other controlling the animations and sound. The scene is rear projected, augmenting visuals over the puppets, like leaves falling, flying butterflies or flowers growing.

Watch video.

Related Post: Shadow Monsters, Shadow Story.

(also on WMMNA)

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on July 12, 2006, 4:55am

Daniel Shiffman has been hacking a Color Kinetics LED tile and documenting the process.

By packet sniffing the data from Color Kinetics software to the tile enabled Daniel to figure out how it worked. He has now created a Processing library that reads the pixels of the display window, converts them to a 12×12 matrix, and writes them out as UDP packets to the data/power supply for the LEDs.

I imagine that the Color Kinetics software and hardware is closed source, so I hope that if they see this work they will encourage such use of their products.

Video 1, Video 2, Video 3 (requires latest Quicktime player). Photos on Flickr.

Related posts: Lightspace Corporation, DIY disco dancefloor, Kabarets Prophecy.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on July 11, 2006, 7:31am

In Looperdooper, Tiago Borges da Silva took apart a childs toy keyboard and wired each key to an external circuit board containing a microphone and speaker. You can then record sounds on to each individual board. When using the keyboard the corresponding boards are triggered and the recorded sounds are played back.

Other instruments by Tiago include ‘music instruments for closed mouths’ and ‘music instruments for touch typists’.

Video (4.8mb Zip)

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on July 13, 2006, 6:06am

As a young child I remember playing superhero, running around with my arms extended, or flying like a plane with my arms to the side (well maybe not). Interaction designers can learn alot from child’s play, so its interesting to see a few projects using the arms extended technique.

The appropriately titled I Am More Than My Thumb is the thesis project of Kellee Santiago (founder of thatgamecompany), is a body-based interface experiment seeking to engage the entire body, using the game Cloud. For anyone not aware of the Cloud game, it was developed by university students in the Interactive Media Division at USC, and you should really have a play.

This project allows you to control the character using your body. Tilt your arms to turn and raise them to go faster or lower to slow down. It uses the PhaseSpace motion capture set-up, essentially cameras tracking LEDs on the wearers body. It’s great that the player in the photos is wearing a pijama outfit (like the boy in the game) and I think this system would work best in the free flight mode (which is lots of fun). In Cloud though there are many actions, such as pulling the clouds around or absorbing/releasing them, which is hard to build into a motion capture. This game would work perfectly on Wii though, so get in touch Nintendo!

Watch this video then read the thesis pdf.

This reminded me of a project I heard of in 2003 called Fly (shown above). Fly was created by Simon Oliver, with design by Duncan Bone, sound by Owen Lloyd and support from Mickey Stretton (now Design Director at AllofUs) (created whilst all at Randommedia).

Using the same control method, the player holds two coloured balls, which are tracked by the camera. The position of the balls in hand control the rotation and flying height of the player, whilst the distance between the two alter the players speed. Simon goes on to explain:

“The game environment was laid out to avoid disorientation and to provide constant challenges and fun things to fly around. There were no areas where there was nothing to fly over, around, or through. In order to add challenges, and encourage repeat plays, tests of accuracy were placed around the environment in the form of 8 collectibles. Each collectible “coloured in” a section of the environment, and raised the accompanying music to a crescendo. The game could be completed if all 8 were collected. A time limit also raised the importance of flying at speed”.

Video & concept art | Higher res video.

Also worth a mention is Antigrav for the Playstation 2 (shown below), created by Cybersonica keynote Harmonix Music. Antigrav used the Eyetoy in a futuristic hover board game, allowing the player to move their body controlling the border, reaching out there hands to grab powerups.

Videos here.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on July 14, 2006, 8:57am

BoingBoing have just posted a link to a video demonstration & explanation of Jeff Han multi-touch interaction. Watch video at TED Talks. The interaction demos have been seen before, but good to hear a rapid explanation from Jeff.

Previous posts on multi-touch interaction:
Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection
Multi-Touch Interaction Roundup
tabulaTouch
Tangent
Jens Wunderling

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on August 2, 2006, 5:58am

Commissioned for the Cybersonica 06 Sonic Art Exhibition.

Freq2, by Squidsoup, uses your whole body to control the precise nature of a sound – a form of musical instrument. The mechanism used is to trace the outline of a person’s shadow, using a webcam, and transform this line into an audible sound. Any sound can be described as a waveform – essentially a line – and so these lines can be derived from one’s shadow. What you see is literally what you hear, as the drawn wave is immediately audible as a realtime dynamic drone.

Freq2 adds to this experience by adding a temporal component to the mix; a sonic composition in which to frame the instrument. The visuals, an abstract 3-dimensional landscape, extrudes in realtime into the distance, leaving a trail of the interactions that have occurred. This ‘memory’ of what has gone before is reflected in the sounds, with long loops echoing passed interactions. The sounds, all generated in realtime from the live waveform, have also been built into more of a compositional soundscape, with the waveform being played at a range of pitches and with a rhythmic component.

Watch video.

Freq2 was commissioned for Cybersonica 06 and shown, as part of Cybersonica 06, at various venues across the UK including Tate Britain, Dana Centre, Phonica and b-tween (National Museum of Photography, Film and Television).

More from Squidsoup: Altzero, Come Closer, Doodle.

More from Cybersonica 06.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on July 31, 2006, 7:59am