I’ve been playing around with BitmapData and Webcams for the last few days for an Interactive Pool Table that I am working on. Today I got side tracked, after visiting Decode at London’s V&A museum I felt as though my programing is becoming more art orientated by the day. It’s not much and it’s very simple but here’s what I’ve been playing with today. Simple but fun!
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I was fortunate enough to have recently gone to the Victoria and Albert Museums conference Decoding the Digital. Decoding the digital was a conference that discussed new media’s place in the art based community and the issues and controversy of digital based art. Casey Reas was one of the great artists there and has work featured in the Decode exhibition at London’s V&A as well as around the world. Caseys work is about processing data to create beautiful pieces of work. In 2001 Casey and Ben Fry created a tool called Processing, this tool allowed them to create wonderful graphics such as the one seen above. Fortunately for you all I recorded Casey Reas’ talk on ‘Form+Code’. If you get the chance visit Decode and Digital Pioneers at London’s V&A.
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Thanks to the wonderfull world of Twitter I have stumbled uppon a great tool called Project Sikuli. Sikuli allows you to automate greate GUI based scripts by applying Python combined with screen shots. I have found this to be an exceptional tool as your delays can be set to when a visual element occurs rather than a static number. I have used Sikuli to open my Chaos based generative art instalation and close it when the UI gets too complicated, this process is repeated making sure that the canvas is kept clean and at a high frame rate. The reason I could not do this via AppleScript was because I wanted the installation to run for as long as possible and due to the nature of Chaos this varied from run to run. All I can say is what a great tool with many uses and beta testing user interface.
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Multi-touch is great when you want to enable complex features on a fairly intuitive and easy to read interface. But when deployed in a Windows or OSX environment common traditional elements such as screen orientation and workspace compatibility get in the way of development and are often more hassle than they are worth. The greatest thing about Multi-touch is collaboration and Pictionaire, a project by Andy Wilson and Björn Hartmann, really takes advantage of this and is an awesome tool for designers.
Although impractical at the moment due to costs and maintenance and complexity of the system we could well see this make its way on to the consumer based market in the future. This technology will allow designers to work both digitally and physically at the same time bridging an important gap in the design process and in turn reducing developing time through increasing productivity and allowing better access to information and through the digital interface.
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OnLive is a cloud gaming service that is currently in development, it aims to port games over to your TV, Mac, PC and iPhone. The way this will work is by the game rendering server-side, and any inputs being sent to the server. I first heard of this technology about a year ago and in terms of pure speed through optimization it has come a long way.
The best thing I’ve seen about the technology is how games can be played on multiple devices in real time. Although I don’t understand all the jargon about how they have optimized the network structure, I can’t help to be hugely impressed. The 48 minute video after the break is long, detailed but so worth it. All I can do now is hope the technology arrives here across the pond in the UK. However for you guys you can rock the beta here.
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A fourteen year old developer has created an N64 Emulator for the iPhone. With the 3GS’s new improved CPU and GPU it can just about handle some serious graphics. The N64 Emulator will only run on the 3GS model and due to the big apples law of endless iPhone developing restrictions, it will be exclusive to the wonderful Jailbreak community. From the looks of the video things are looking pretty smooth, looking forward to the release of this.
I went to London a few days back and tracked down a few interactive shop fronts, only one is worth showing though. The shop front to Phones4U on Oxford Street features an interactive phone, it wasn’t bad if anything limited in functionality but fun and easy to use and great use of advertising and multi-touch.
With the upcoming release of 1080p video on YouTube I couldn’t be happier to have a new GPU accelerated Flash Player! Flash Player 10.1 gives some significant improvement upon the previous builds. No mobile release as of yet but you can rock HD on your even on your Nvidia ION. If you kitted out for it you even now have native-multi-touch support! Although the player is in pre-release I would still highly recommend it as I have found it to be nothing but stable. Besides in this day in age of Web 2.0 doesn’t everything have a BETA label on it? Get it here!
The image you see above is a genarative diagram map of the internet, crated as part of the opte project. The internet is a huge part of all of our lives, especialy us web developers and in the UK we have a very poor network.
This animation blew me away, the high quality modeling of this animation was done by one guy Pantural. The animation is photo realistic and even kicks the ass of Crysis’s renders. Can’t wait until PaperVision3D gets this good, looking forward to 2075!
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