Life as an Artificial Lifeform

The search for midi/osc controllers knows no limits around the world as everybody is struggling to get some manual control to the thousands of virtuals knobs and sliders and buttons. There are lots of wild tries to cram as many buttons in as portable rigs as possible. I think that most people would agree that there is nothing out there that is perfect. A step closer (until Apple frees us from the controller nightmare with a fully dual multitouch display or such) come the designers Young-Shin Lee & Hae-Jin Jung. They simply made a whole new computer that is just designed to be a musical instrument. I actually think they have something - if it would be ultra cheap and could be used as just a controller. I know that VJs would probably love it - imaging having a second screen with you loops and some nifty controller and some multitouch action and a keyboard in addition to your usual setup.

More info here.
More pics here.

Posted by fALk at 8:02 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

These guys at MIT have hacked together a device that acts as a multitouchtouch interface screen on anything - and its almost wearable. You can go into a bookstore an have a camera scan the face of the book and display amazon star rating on the real life book. Then you can have it read stuff to you. Or you can make temporary graffity in the UBahn while you are bored. Or see how green a product is in the supermarket. Reality to virtual interfaces in all forms are the next big thing - the wii was just the tiny beginning.
Full article on wired.

Posted by fALk at 20:06 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You know I get quite the heat in the comments for daring to criticize Apple over their lack of innovation in the Pro sector lately. Yes I was wishing for a widespread adoption of multitouch - you know something radical. I know multitouch works great not only for pros or live artists but for everyone and the conservative stand by Apple to not include it yet.
Now Axiotron comes back to the scene after already converting the plastic MacBooks into tablets they are now converting MacBookPros into finger multitouch tablets as well. For $5000 its yours. Gosh that would actually be a nice thing for VJing. Except for the glossy screen that then is not only glossy but also smeary. Now why apple aint doing it is beyond me - it cant be the smeary screen as they have no problem with glossy which is about as bad as smeary.

Read more about it over at Boy Genius. Thanks Tom for the headups.

Posted by fALk at 16:50 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes you come across an idea that is so intriguing that it changes the world around you and your perception of things of the future. The interface in Minority Report was such a thing. Now I stumbled across Fluid Tunes and I think that goes even further then the interface in Minority Report as it lets you control your screen without touching it and without wearing goofy gloves. The demo program is just that - a demo - you can flip through your iTunes library - but the interaction model is astonishing - you can even push buttons by tapping in the air - the possibilities are AMAZING for a performer that is on the lookout for fast easy interaction with big buttons (VJs for example ;). I know this might be old hat and I have been sitting on it for a while but I am sure there are people out there who have not heard about it. Now imagine this together with Apples patent of a screen that acts as camera (two years ago) and a screen that can detect IR 20 cm away (about 2 month ago) and you might see that this is exactly where Apple might be going with their bigger computers.

Fluid Tunes

Posted by fALk at 16:06 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its design evolution day. Here is a very telling graphic that depicts the evolution of game controllers and the difference on how you pwn the enemy with an xbox vs. a wii vs. a ps3.
I guess you could make the company logos of the gaming consoles out of the hand gesture you use with their controllers.

Originally found here.

Posted by fALk at 12:12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have voiced a lot of disdain for the closed source proprietary slow resource wasting crap that is flash. Flash is not good for video playback (for a number of reasons everyone but google would admit too) its also quite dumb to jail images in flash containers - but both of those things are a common practice around the net (flickr, youtube) - both things will be a part of an ugly past once HTML5 hits the street and moves toward a 50% usage point. SVG, video, animation and audio tags are just too cool to pass up on as a developer - and its all open and standard and complient and such.
Yet there was one thing where flash was until recently considered the only viable option: browser based games and interaction projects. Well in the offline world there is a programming language called processing that is used to make games and physics simulations and interaction models and and and. Its a breed of its own when it comes to programming languages - quite easy to learn and follow and very powerfull in what you can create but unless you are a java fetishist there was no way to run processing stuff inside the browser.
Now with the new breed of browsers around the corner - those that will support HTML5 and have advanced Javascript engines that support the canvas element - its is possible to use the processing language inside javascript with the javascript processing library. Just check out the demos (you might have to use a nightly build of your favorite browser to see the demos working) and see the potential. I did test them with the latest WebKit nightly and all demos are extremely smooth fluid and amazing. With these there is absolutely no excuse to use flash anymore. I will be surprised to see one major website with any kind of flash content in three years - mark my word. Javascript and HTML5 and SVG are going to be the solution to all your pain very very soon - and as a good side note it has to be said that there will be so much kick ass content that people with internet explorer will want nothing more then to upgrade to a browserto something modern (and I do not think there is any way for MS to catch up to either the firefox or the safari or the chrome javascript engine and make HTML5 and SVG available in any amount of time).

Posted by fALk at 12:28 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)